The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

founded in liberty, justice, and moral truth.
However he is viewed—sympathetically or with suspicion
and terror—the Indian is always he. Certainly she never rides
tall and noble in the saddle, face framed in savage splendor with
plundered feathers of great fighting birds. She never parlays in
powwow council with the white man, offering the peace
pipe/calumet to the gods, asking that the proceedings be blessed
by heathen powers. She never dies at Sand Creek or Wounded
Knee. She is not the old shaman who gives advice to the young
and sends them to the mountains to find their vision; she does not
have the visions that tell of a nation’s destruction. She does not
stand on the top of a bluff weeping for the broken hoop of the
nation. She is not revered in the memory of Americans as
shaman, warrior-chief, peacemaker.
In the annals of American Indian literary lore there has been
no female Red Cloud, Sealth, Logan, Black Elk, Lame Deer, or
Rolling Thunder to bear literary witness to the shamanistic
traditions of American Indians; there has been no female Sitting
Bull, no Crazy Horse, no Handsome Lake, no Wovoka, no Sweet
Medicine. And because there have been no great and noble
women in that essentially literary cultural memory called
tradition, there is no sense of the part that women have played in
tribal life either in the past or today.
But let us suppose that among the true heroes were and are
many women. Suppose the names of Molly Brant, Magnus,
Pocahontas, Sacagawea, Malinalli, Nancy Ward, Sara
Winnemucca, and scores of others were the names that came to
mind when we thought of the noble and sacred past of the tribes.
Suppose that when we heard the tribal deities referred to we
thought of Thought Woman, Sky Woman, Cihuacoatl, Selu—that
theirs was the name of god, the Great Spirit. Let us for a moment
imagine that all the great deeds and noble philosophies, all the
earth-centeredness, egalitarianism, medicine systems of sacred