The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

materials selected and erected to hide the centrality of women in
tribal society, tribal literature, and tribal hearts and minds. The
data has been studiously recorded, then filed. Sometimes it
surfaces in print, distorted almost out of recognition by the
wholesale revision of the context in which it occurs. In the Keres
way, context is female and it is God, because it is the source and
generator of meaning. A vanished context is the same as a
meaningless pile of data, and it is the same as a vanished source
of meaning, a vanished God. Destroying the context parallels the
destruction of women; in this case it also parallels the
destruction of a race. It amounts to Deicide.
In this way the hearts of the women have been forced to the
ground because the power of imagination, of image, which is the
fundamental power of literature, is the power to determine a
people’s fate. By the simple expedient of shifting the view back
to its original and rightful position, the whole picture changes,
and it becomes clear that our heart is in the sky. We understand
that woman is the sun and the earth: she is grandmother; she is
mother; she is Thought, Wisdom, Dream, Reason, Tradition,
Memory, Deity, and Life itself. Nos Vemos.