The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

are not possible in English. Language embodies the unspoken
assumptions and orientations of the culture it belongs to. So
while the problem is one of translation, it is not simply one of
word equivalence. The differences are perceptual and contextual
as much as verbal.
Sometimes the shifts are contextual; indeed, both the context
and content usually are shifted, sometimes subtly, sometimes
blatantly. The net effect is a shifting of the whole axis of the
culture. When shifts of language and context are coupled with the
almost infinite changes occasioned by Christianization,
secularization, economic dislocation from subsistence to
industrial modes, destruction of the wilderness and associated
damage to the biota, much that is changed goes unnoticed or
unremarked by the people being changed. This is not to suggest
that Native Americans are unaware of the enormity of the change
they have been forced to undergo by the several centuries of
white presence, but much of that change is at deep and subtle
levels that are not easily noted or resisted.
John Gunn received the story I am using here from a Keresspeaking
informant and translated it himself. The story, which he
titles “Sh-ah-cock and Miochin or the Battle of the Seasons,” is
in reality a narrative version of a ritual. The ritual brings about
the change of season and of moiety among the Keres. Gunn
doesn’t mention this, perhaps because he was interested in
stories and not in religion or perhaps because his informant did
not mention the connection to him.
What is interesting about his rendering is his use of European,
classist, conflict-centered patriarchal assumptions as plotting
devices. These interpolations dislocate the significance of the
tale and subtly alter the ideational context of woman-centered,
largely pacifist people whose ritual story this is. I have
developed three critiques of the tale as it appears in his book,
using feminist and tribal understandings to discuss the various