The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

features of the forest. When a woman goes after maple syrup, she
is aware of the other plant forms that are also present.
In the same way, a story that is intended to convey the
importance of the Grandmother Spirits will focus on
grandmothers in their interaction with grandchildren and will
convey little information about uncles. Traditional tales will
make a number of points, and a number of elements will be
present, all of which will bear some relationship to the subject
of the story. Within the time the storyteller has alloted to the
story, and depending on the interests and needs of her audience
at the time of the storytelling, each of these elements will receive
its proper due.
Traditional American Indian stories work dynamically among
clusters of loosely interconnected circles. The focus of the
action shifts from one character to another as the story unfolds.
There is no “point of view” as the term is generally understood,
unless the action itself, the story’s purpose, can be termed “point
of view.” But as the old tales are translated and rendered in
English, the western notion of proper fictional form takes over
the tribal narrative. Soon there appear to be heroes, point of
view, conflict, crisis, and resolution, and as western tastes in
story crafting are imposed on the narrative structure of the ritual
story, the result is a western story with Indian characters.
Mournfully, the new form often becomes confused with the
archaic form by the very people whose tradition has been reformed.
The story Gunn calls “Sh-ah-cock and Mi-o-chin or The
Battle of the Seasons” might be better termed “How
Kochinnenako Balanced the World,” though even then the title
would be misleading to American readers, for they would see
Kochinnenako as the heroine, the foreground of the story. They
would see her as the central figure of the action, and of course
that would be wrong. There is no central figure in the tale,