The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

Stealing the Thunder: Future
Visions for American Indian
Women, Tribes, and Literary
Studies
Strange things begin to happen when the focus in American
Indian literary studies is shifted from a male to a female axis.
One of the major results of the shift is that the materials become
centered on continuance rather than on extinction. This is true for
both traditional tribal literatures and contemporary poetry,
fiction, and other writings such as autobiography, journals, “astold-to”
narratives and mixed-genre works. The shift from
pessimism to optimism, from despair to hope is so dramatic that
one wonders if the focus on male traditions and history that has
characterized the whole field of American Indian literature and
lore was not part of the plot to exterminate Native American
tribal peoples and cultures and to extinguish their aboriginal title
to land, resources, and moral primacy of the Americas.
Of course, plots or conspiracies do not characterize American
politics or scholarship, as we all know. But popular ideas about
American Indians—warriors, chiefs, colorful befeathered
veterans of the wars of progress, colonialism, imperialism, or
whatever one wants to call it, brave noble, dying but brave
braves—hauntingly pervade the American mind, and behind
them lurks the image of the hostile, bloodthirsty savage, the
redskin who howls out of the wilderness intent on the total
destruction of innocent Christian families trying to build a nation