The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

existence on all material and supermaterial planes into being.
This is not extraliterary material I am discussing; it is the
heart of the literary impulse. For literature comes out of
tradition, and traditionally in the gynocratic tribal world, woman
is at the center of existence. That means that for writers such as
Leslie Marmon Silko, Carol Lee Sanchez, Paula Gunn Allen,
Simon J. Ortiz, N. Scott Momaday, Janet Campbell Hale,
D’Arcy McNickle, James Welch, Beth Brant, Joy Harjo, Linda
Hogan, Wendy Rose, Maurice Kenny, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn,
Diane Burns, Gerald Vizenor, Geary Hobsen, nila northSun,
Mary TallMountain, Ray Young Bear, and many more, the
centrality of the feminine power of universal being is crucial to
their work and to the study and teaching of it.
These writers are not all Keres, though the first four named
are, but they are all Indians. Many of them come from clearly
woman-centered or gynocratic tribal societies and others, those
who hail from northern or southern Plains tribes or northern
Algonkian tribes, have powerful female deities and femalecentered
social and spiritual structures. As we move into the
1990s and my lone voice is joined by the growing multitude of
women’s voices across the country and within the profession of
writing and of literary scholarship, the facts of tribal gynocracy
or powerful woman-focused traditions will impact more and
more decisively on the study and teaching of American Indian
literature as well as on other areas of American Indian life.
The impact will develop along the following lines:
• • Women writers will have more and more accessibility to
female traditions from which to write and think and will be more
greatly empowered to use these resources. In turn this increase
in woman-focused literature will generate growing
understanding of the real nature of pre-Columbian tribal life. The
idea of Indian in the contemporary public mind will shift from
warrior/brave/hunter/chief
to