The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

engendering), Thought Woman is not a passive personage: her
potentiality is dynamic and unimaginably powerful. She brought
corn and agriculture, potting, weaving, social systems, religion,
ceremony, ritual, building, memory, intuition, and their
expressions in language, creativity, dance, human-to-animal
relations, and she gave these offerings power and authority and
blessed the people with the ability to provide for themselves and
their progeny.
Thought Woman is not limited to a female role in the total
theology of the Keres people. Since she is the supreme Spirit,
she is both Mother and Father to all people and to all creatures.
She is the only creator of thought, and thought precedes
creation. 7
Central to Keres theology is the basic idea of the Creatrix as
She Who Thinks rather than She Who Bears, of woman as
creation thinker and female thought as origin of material and
nonmaterial reality. In this epistemology, the perception of
female power as confined to maternity is a limit on the power
inherent in femininity. But “she is the supreme Spirit, … both
Mother and Father to all people and to all creatures.” 8
In the nineteenth century, Fr. Noël Dumarest reported from
another Keres Pueblo, Cochiti, on Spider Woman (Thought
Woman, although he does not mention her by this name). In his
account, when the “Indian sister” made stars, she could not get
them to shine, so “she consulted Spider, the creator.” He
characterized the goddess-sisters as living “with Spider Woman,
their mother, at shipapu, under the waters of the lake, in the
second world.” It should be mentioned that while she is here
characterized as the sisters’ mother, the Cochiti, like the other
Keres, are not so much referring to biological birth as to sacred
or ritual birth. To address a person as “mother” is to pay the
highest ritual respect. 9
In Keres theology the creation does not take place through