The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

meanings of the story when it is read from three different
perspectives.
In the first reading, I apply tribal understanding to the story. In
the second, I apply the sort of feminist perspective I applied to
traditional stories, historical events, traditional culture, and
contemporary literature when I began developing a feminist
perspective. The third reading applies what I call a feministtribal
perspective. Each analysis is somewhat less detailed than
it might be; but as I am interested in describing modes of
perception and their impact on our understanding of cultural
artifacts (and by extension our understanding of people who
come from different cultural contexts than our own) rather than
critiquing a story, they are adequate.
Yellow Woman Stories
The Keres of Laguna and Acoma Pueblos in New Mexico
have stories that are called Yellow Woman stories. The themes
and to a large extent the motifs of these stories are always
female-centered, always told from Yellow Woman’s point of
view. Some older recorded versions of Yellow Woman tales (as
in Gunn) make Yellow Woman the daughter of the hocheni. Gunn
translates hocheni as “ruler.” But Keres notions of the hocheni’s
function and position are as cacique or Mother Chief, which
differ greatly from Anglo-European ideas of rulership.
However, for Gunn to render hocheni as “ruler” is congruent
with the European folktale tradition. 2
Kochinnenako, Yellow Woman, is in some sense a name that
means Woman-Woman because among the Keres, yellow is the
color for women (as pink and red are among Anglo-European
Americans), and it is the color ascribed to the Northwest. Keres
women paint their faces yellow on certain ceremonial occasions