The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

American Indian studies is not purely literary in the sense that
the discipline is pursued in the west. We critics of Indian
literature must be cultural, historical, and political as well as
literary scholars because neither traditional peoples (and their
literatures) nor contemporary poets and writers can write
outside a cultural, historical, and political context. Factual
contextualization of the tribal and contemporary literary
materials of Indian people is central to the pursuit of literary
studies in the field, and when a critic such as myself—or a poet
and writer such as myself and scores of others—moves the focus
from male to female traditions, recontextualizing the materials on
and about American Indian life and thought, the huge changes I
have described necessarily must occur in the whole field.
• • Finally, the most important implication of the shift in focus
is the one with which I began these essays: the traditions of the
women have, since time immemorial, been centered on
continuance, just as those of the men have been centered on
transitoriness. The most frequently occurring male themes and
symbols from the oral tradition have been feathers, smoke,
lightning bolts (sheet lightning is female), risk, and wandering.
These symbols are all related in some way to the idea of the
transitoriness of life and its wonders. The Kiowa death song (a
male tradition that was widespread among Plains tribes) says, “I
die, but you live forever; beautiful Earth you alone remain;
wonderful Earth, you remain forever,” telling the difference in
the two traditions, male and female.
The male principle is transitory; it dies and is reconstituted.
The female principle, which is immanent in hard substances
(like the earth, minerals, crystals, and stones), wood, and water,
is permanent; it remains. Male is breath, air, wind, and
projectile point; female controls, creates, and “owns” breath, air
and wind, bird and feather, and the hard substance from which