The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

power, all the life ways and values of the Native Americans
from the northern barrens to Tierra del Fuego, are womaninspired
and woman-maintained. Let us imagine this truth and
see how it affects our understanding of American Indian
literature. Enabling Americans to imagine, to recognize, and to
acknowledge that truth is what my scholarly and creative work
has been about for almost fifteen years, and the implications of
that shift in perception are at least as exciting as the second
coming would be.
What I have done, am doing—putting women at the center of
the tribal universe—is not particularly revolutionary, though it
has entailed groping around in a false dark created by the
massive revisionism of tribal life and thought that characterizes
American literary scholarship in the field, a revisionism that has
trickled down into tribal attitudes and thought and therefore into
what the tribes have preserved in their oral traditions. But I am
from a gynocratic tribal society, and so I have been aided by my
background in locating material that points to the truth about the
nature of the tribes prior to Anglo-European invasion and
conquest.
My tribe, the Keres Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, put
women at the center of their society long ago. Of course, they
don’t say they did it, they say She did it. That She is Thought,
Memory, Instinct, Tradition, and Medicine or Sacred Power; that
She is ritual, ceremony, food, and shelter; that She is the ways by
which these are developed—the bringer of them and the teacher
of them and the creator of them. Where I come from, the people
believe traditionally that nothing can happen that She does not
think into being, and because they believe this they say that the
Woman is the Supreme Being, the Great Spirit, the Great
Mystery, the All-Being. This WomanGod, Thought/Thinking
Woman they call Spider Grandmother, acknowledging her
potency as creator, as Dream/Vision being, as She Who Weaves