The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

males as one of them in order to buttress their position of
relative power. After all, this figure is dressed in yellow and
green, the colors of corn, a plant always associated with
Woman. Kochinnenako and her sisters are all Corn Women and
her mother is, presumably, the head of the Corn Clan; and the
Earth Mother of the Keres, Iyatiku, is Corn Woman herself. Alas,
I haven’t yet found evidence to support such a wishful notion,
except that the mask dancer who impersonates Kochinnenako is
male, dressed female, which is sort of the obverse side of the
wish.
A Feminist-Tribal Interpretation
The feminist interpretation I have sketched—which is a fair
representation of one of my early readings from what I took to be
a feminist perspective—proceeds from two unspoken
assumptions: that women are essentially powerless and that
conflict is basic to human existence. The first is a fundamental
feminist position, while the second is basic to Anglo-European
thought; neither, however, is characteristic of Keres thought. To
a modern feminist, marriage is an institution developed to
establish and maintain male supremacy; because she is the
ruler’s daughter, Kochinnenako’s choice of a husband
determines which male will hold power over the people and
who will inherit the throne. 7
When Western assumptions are applied to tribal narratives,
they become mildly confusing and moderately annoying from any
perspective. 8 Western assumptions about the nature of human
society (and thus of literature) when contextualizing a tribal
story or ritual must necessarily leave certain elements unclear. If
the battle between Summer Spirit and Winter Spirit is about the
triumph of warmth, generosity, and kindness over coldness,