The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

Something of the vastness of the changes in concepts which
have taken place can be seen if we recall a statement quoted
earlier. There a man of our generation mentions that the roads
to the village are closed “to clear the spiritual highway which
leads from there to the rising sun. This is a road over which
they walk to offer their prayers to the Great Spirit.” It will be
recalled that the closing of the roads was in actuality part of
an All Souls ceremony for the dead, and in it, Masau’u [the
major supernatural of this fourth world and of death, but in no
way a creator-god] who has now become the Great Spirit,
was most certainly connected with the dead and the
underworld, rather than with the sun. The new arrangement is
not made out of the whole cloth, however, as the idea is old,
but it belonged to the initiation of a new village chieftain.
Since the town chief was supposed to be on good terms with
the cloud-people, or spirits of the dead, a Kwan man closes
the ceremony with these words: “Now I make you a chief and
now I give you a good path to lead us to the Sun. Now you are
our father.”
From now on we will hear very little of death, or even of
fertility, and much of a sky god who is a supreme being. In the
Hopi Hearings …, old and new attitudes are combined.
Simon Scott, whose name hides a Hopi, at one point says:
“This supreme being who is over all of us is here with us and
listening to all of us in this meeting and will be with us until
this meeting is adjourned.” Despite the Christian tone, the
statement is not far removed conceptually from the remark
Stephen quoted, but some days later the same Hopi leader
added a few ideas: “It is the Executive Supreme Being who
created the world and created a human for a holy purpose. It
is this Executive Supreme who made two humans. One has a
white flesh and the other is red.” Since he was referring to
Masau’u, the latter statement contains something quite new: as