The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

esult of the shift from male to female focus in tribal America.
This by itself will result in a net gain for the Indian people
because as long as they are seen as braves and warriors the
fiction that they were conquered in a fair and just war will be
upheld. It is in the interest of the United States—along with the
other political entities in the western hemisphere to maintain that
foolish and tragic deception, and thus the focus has long been on
Indian as noble or savage warrior who, as it happens, lost the
war to superior military competence. The truth is more
compelling: the tribes did not fight off the invaders to any great
extent. Generally they gave way to them; generally they fed and
clothed and doctored them; generally they shared their
knowledge about everything from how to plant corn and tobacco
to how to treat polio victims to how to cross the continent with
them. Generally Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the
rest are historical anomalies. Generally, according to D’Arcy
McNickle, the Indian historian, anthropologist, and novelist, at
least 70 percent of the tribes were pacifist, and the tribes that
lived in peacefulness as a way of life were always womancentered,
always gynecentric, always agricultural, always
“sedentary,” and always the children of egalitarian, peaceminded,
ritual, and dream/vision-centered female gods. The
people conquered in the invasion of the Americas by Europe
were woman-focused people.
• • All the interpretations and conclusions scholars in the
fields of folklore, ethnology, and contemporary literary studies
will have to be altered, all the evidence reexamined, and all the
materials chosen for exemplification of tribal life—which at
present reveal more about academic male bias than about the
traditions and peoples they purport to depict—will have to be
redone. This is because the shift in focus from a male to a female
axis recontextualizes the entire field.
For clarity here I must note that literary studies in the field of