The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

the manly hearted woman divorces her wife and returns to
woman’s garb and occupation, discarding the spirit stone that
has determined her life to that point. It seems that heterosexual
love conquers all—even ritual tradition, custom, and spirit
command.
Direct references to lesbians or lesbianism among American
Indians are even more sparse than those about homosexual men
(usually called hermaphrodites or berdache or, less often,
transvestites), occurring almost outside the body of information
about tribal life or included in ways that underscore white
attitudes about tribes, Indians, and homosexuality. Consequently,
much of my discussion of lesbians is necessarily conjectural,
based on secure knowledge of American Indian social systems
and customs that I have gathered from formal study, personal
experience, and personally communicated information from
other Indians as well as from my own knowledge of lesbian
culture and practice.
My idea in this essay is to explore lesbianism within a larger
social and spiritual tribal context as contrasted with its
occurrence as an individual aberration that might show up on
occasion but that has nothing to do with tribal life in general.
Because tribal civilizations (like all others) function in entire
gestalts and because they are based on the life-enhancing
interconnectedness of all things, it is my contention that gayness,
whether female or male, traditionally functions positively within
tribal groups.
Certainly, the chances that aboriginal American women
formed affectional alliances are enormous. Many tribes had
marked tendency to encourage virginity or some version of
chastity among pubescent women; this tendency rarely affected
the sexual habits of married women, however, and it referred to
intercourse with males. Nothing is said, to my knowledge, about
sexual liaisons between women, except indirectly. It is equally