The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

is inward fire as the heart of heaven, the sun, is external fire. The
Cherokee and their northern cousins the Iroquois acknowledge
the femaleness of both fires: the sun is female to them both, as is
the earth. Among the Keres, Shipap, which is in the earth, is
white, as was the isolated house Iyatiku dwelt in before she left
the mortal plane entirely for Shipap. The color of Shipap is
white. The Hopi see Spider Woman as Grandmother of the sun
and as the great Medicine Power who sang the people into this
fourth world we live in now.
The understanding of universal functioning as relationship
between the inner and the outer is reflected in the social systems
of those tribal groups that are based on clan systems. It is
reflected in ritual systems, as seen in the widespread incidence
of legends about the Little War Twins among the Pueblos or the
Sacred Twins among other tribes and Nations. The Sacred
Twins embody the power of dual creative forces. The potency of
their relationship is as strong as that of the negative and positive
charges on magnetic fields. It is on their complementariness and
their relationship that both destructive and creative ritual power
rests.
Among the western Keres, the war captains are the analogues
of the Little War Twins, Ma’sewe and O’yo’yo’we. Their
prototype appears to be those puzzling twin sisters of the Keres
pantheon, Uretsete and Naotsete, who were sung into life by
Thought Woman before the creation of the world. These sisters
appear and reappear in Pueblo stories in various guises and
various names. One of them, Uretsete, becomes male at some
point in the creation story of the Keres. Transformation of this
kind is common in American Indian lore, and the transformation
processes embedded in the tales about the spirit beings and their
alternative aspects point to the regenerative powers embodied in
their diversity. 15
When the whites came, the tribes who were organized