The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

e able to see how the interpolations of patriarchal thinking
distort all the relationships in the story and, by extension, how
such impositions of patriarchy on gynocracy disorder
harmonious social and spiritual relationships.
A careful feminist-tribal analysis of Gunn’s rendition of a
story that would be better titled “The Transfer of Ianyi (ritual
power, sacred power) from Winter to Summer” will provide a
tribally conscious feminist with an interesting example of how
colonization works, however consciously or unconsciously to
misinform both the colonized and the colonizer. She will be able
to note the process by which the victim of the translation
process, the Keres woman who reads the tale, is misinformed
because she reads Gunn’s book. Even though she knows that
something odd is happening in the tale, she is not likely to apply
sophisticated feminist analysis to the rendition; in the absence of
real knowledge of the colonizing process of story-changing, she
is all too likely to find bits of the Gunn tale sticking in her mind
and subtly altering her perception of herself, her role in her
society, and her relationship to the larger world.
The hazard to male Keres readers is, of course, equally great.
They are likely to imagine that the proper relationship of women
to men is subservience. And it is because of such a shockingly
untraditional modern interpretation, brought on as much by
reading Gunn as by other, perhaps more obvious societal
mechanisms, that the relationships between men and women are
so severely disordered at Laguna that wife-abuse, rape, and
battery of women there has reached frightening levels in recent
years.
Political Implications of Narrative
Structure