The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

every Hopi knows, the world was created by Huruing Wuhti,
Hard Beings Woman, and in all the accounts we have heard
there is no suggestion that Masau’u was the creator, either of
the world or of mankind. Furthermore, the god has been
changed by the competition of white politics as well as white
religion. Our Chief Executive must have been an appealing
idea, both in phrasing and thought content (p. 82).
4. Tyler, Pueblo Gods, p. 93.
5. For one version of this myth, see “The Woman Who Fell
from the Sky: A Seneca Account,” Literature of the American
Indian, ed. Thomas E. Sanders and Walter W. Peek (New York:
Glencoe, 1973), pp. 41–43. Cf. “Creation Story: A Mohawk
Account,” in the 1982 Akwesasne Notes Calendar (Mohawk via
Roosevelt, N.Y.: Akwesasne Notes, 1982).
6. Tyler, Pueblo Gods, p. 93.
7. Purley, “Keres Pueblo Concepts,” p. 31.
8. Purley, “Keres Pueblo Concepts,” p. 31.
9. Fr. Noël Dumarest, Memoirs: Notes of Cochiti, New
Mexico, vol. 6, no. 3 (Lancaster: American Anthropological
Association, 1919), p. 227. Cited in Tyler, Pueblo Gods, p. 91.
10. John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1961), and Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred
Pipe (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971), p. 44.
11. Alice Baldeagle, personal correspondence, May 8, 1978.
12. See Franz Boas, Keresan Texts (New York: Publications
of the American Ethnological Society, 1928), especially
“P’acaya’Nyi,” vol. 8, pt. 1, pp. 13–16. According to Elsie
Clews Parsons, who gives an account of a healing done by one
of the katsina organizations, the she’kine, the healer, sets up at
the altar, color-coded for the ritual and graced with Irriaku, and
uses a crystal to locate the heart of the patient, which has been
stolen by someone wishing evil on the patient. Holding a bear’s