The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

copulation. In the beginning existed Thought Woman and her
dormant sisters, and Thought Woman thinks creation and sings
her two sisters into life. After they are vital she instructs them to
sing over the items in their baskets (medicine bundles) in such a
way that those items will have life. After that crucial task is
accomplished, the creatures thus vitalized take on the power to
regenerate themselves—that is, they can reproduce others of
their kind. But they are not in and of themselves self-sufficient;
they depend for their being on the medicine power of the three
great Witch creatrixes, Thought Woman, Uretsete, and Naotsete.
The sisters are not related by virtue of having parents in
common; that is, they are not alive because anyone bore them.
Thought Woman turns up, so to speak, first as Creatrix and then
as a personage who is acting out someone else’s “dream.” But
there is no time when she did not exist. She has two bundles in
her power, and these bundles contain Uretsete and Naotsete,
who are not viewed as her daughters but as her sisters, her
coequals who possess the medicine power to vitalize the
creatures that will inhabit the earth. They also have the power to
create the firmament, the skies, the galaxies, and the seas, which
they do through the use of ritual magic.
The idea that Woman is possessed of great medicine power is
elaborated in the Lakota myth of White Buffalo Woman. She
brought the Sacred Pipe to the Lakota, and it is through the
agency of this pipe that the ceremonies and rituals of the Lakota
are empowered. 10 Without the pipe, no ritual magic can occur.
According to one story about White Buffalo Woman, she lives in
a cave where she presides over the Four Winds. 11 In Lakota
ceremonies, the four wind directions are always acknowledged,
usually by offering a pipe to them. The pipe is ceremonial,
modeled after the Sacred Pipe given the people by the Sacred
Woman. The Four Winds are very powerful beings themselves,
but they can function only at the bidding of White Buffalo