The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

the projectile point is shaped. Female is earth, sun, moon, sky,
water in its multitudinous forms and its ever-generating cycle,
corn, mother of the deer, mother of the gods, bringer of fire and
light, and fire itself (which is why the women are its keepers
among many if not most groups). He is what comes and goes, she
is what continues, what stays.
When we shift our attention from the male, the transitory, to
the female, the enduring, we realize that the Indians are not
doomed to extinction but rather are fated to endure. What a
redemptive, empowering realization that is! As the Cheyenne
long have insisted, no people is broken until the heart of its
women is on the ground. Then they are broken. Then will they
die.
The plot that we all know doesn’t exist has been contrived to
convince Indians and everyone else that Indians are doomed to
extinction, to throw to the ground every woman’s heart. It has
been carried out by the simple process of subjecting our
cultures, lives, traditions, rituals, philosophies, and customs to
Christian patriarchal scrutiny, seeing only the male in them,
putting male bias into systems that never had it, interpreting
rituals, customs, philosophies, and attitudes in male-biased
terms, and generally creating out of whole cloth the present
male-dominating view about the tribes and their significance.
Women’s rituals, ceremonies, traditions, customs, attitudes,
values, activities, philosophies, ceremonial and social positions,
histories, medicine societies, and shamanistic identities—that is,
all the oral tradition that is in every sense and on every level the
literature of the tribes—have been largely ignored by folklorists,
ethnographers, and literary critics in the field of American
Indian studies. These traditions have never been described or
examined in terms of their proper, that is, woman-focused,
context. Actually, it is primarily the context that has been ignored
—vanished, disappeared, buried under tons of scholarly