The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

together women tilled their fields, harvested wild foods and
herbs, ground grains, prepared skins, smoked or dried
foodstuffs, and just visited. Women spent long periods together
in their homes and lodges while the men stayed in men’s houses
or in the woods or were out on hunting or fishing expeditions.
Young women were often separated from the larger groups for
periods of months or years, as were young men. In such
circumstances, lesbianism and homosexuality were probably
commonplace. Indeed, same-sex relationships may have been the
norm for primary pair-bonding. Families did not consist of
nuclear units in any sense. There were clans and bands or
villages, but the primary personal unit tended to include
members of one’s own sex rather than members of the opposite
sex. It is questionable whether these practices would be
identified as Lesbian by the politically radical lesbian
community of today; for while sex between women probably
occurred regularly, women also regularly married and raised
children, often adopting children if they did not have any.
We should not see relationships among Indian women as
being motivated primarily by opportunity. Lesbianism must be
viewed in the context of the spiritual orientation of tribal life. It
may be possible to distinguish between those women who took
advantage of the abundant opportunities to form erotic bonds
with other women and those women whose relationships with
women were as much a matter of Spirit-direction as of personal
preference (though the two were one in some senses).
It might be that some American Indian women could be seen
as “dykes,” while some could be seen as “lesbians,” if one
thinks of “dyke” as one who bonds with women to further some
Spirit and supernatural directive and “lesbian” as a woman who
is emotionally and physically intimate with other women. (The
two groups would not have been mutually exclusive.)
The dyke (we might also call her a “ceremonial lesbian”) was