The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

egard she resembles a number of Spirit Woman Beings; the
Spirit genatrix of the Iroquois, Sky Woman, also lived on an
island in the void which only later became the earth. On this
island, Hard Beings Woman is identified with or, as they say,
“owns” all hard substances—moon, stars, beads, coral, shell,
and so forth. She is a sea goddess as well, the single inhabitant
of the earth, that island that floats alone in the waters of space.
From this meeting of woman and water, earth and her creatures
were born. 4
The waters of space are also crucial in the Sky Woman story
of the Seneca. Sky Woman is catapulted into the void by her
angry, jealous, and fearful husband, who tricks her into peering
into the abyss he has revealed by uprooting the tree of light
(which embodies the power of woman) that grows near his
lodge. Her terrible fall is broken by the Water Fowl who live in
that watery void, and they safely deposit Sky Woman on the back
of Grandmother Turtle, who also inhabits the void. On the body
of Grandmother Turtle earth-island is formed. 5 Interestingly, the
shell of the turtle is one of the Hard Substances connected to
Hard Beings Woman. 6
Contemporary Indian tales suggest that the creatures are born
from the mating of sky father and earth mother, but that seems to
be a recent interpolation of the original sacred texts. The
revision may have occurred since the Christianizing influence on
even the arcane traditions, or it may have predated Christianity.
But the older, more secret texts suggest that it is a revision. It
may be that the revision appears only in popular versions of the
old mythic cycles on which ceremony and ritual are based; this
would accord with the penchant in the old oral tradition for
shaping tales to reflect present social realities, making the
rearing and education of children possible even within the
divergent worlds of the United States of America and the tribes.
According to the older texts (which are sacred, that is, power-