The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

American Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 214, for
more detail. Also see “Red Roots of White Feminism” in Part 3
of this volume.
6. The terms gynecentric and egalitarianism are not mutually
exclusive; in fact, I doubt that egalitarianism is possible without
gynecentrism at its base.
7. See Elisa-Buenaventura-Posso and Susan E. Brown,
“Forced Transition from Egalitarianism to Male Dominance:
The Bari of Colombia,” in Women and Colonization:
Anthropological Perspectives, eds. Mona Etienne and Eleanor
Leacock (New York: Praeger, 1980), pp. 109–134, for an
informative discussion of contemporary attempts to force the last
remaining traditional group of Bari to shift their social structure
to authoritarian male dominance.
8. Foreman, Indian Women Chiefs, p. 32. Squaw is not a
derogatory word in its own language. Like the Anglo-Saxon
“forbidden” word cunt, which is mostly used as an insult to
women, squaw means “queen” or “lady,” as will be seen in the
following discussion. The fact that it has been taken to mean
something less is only another example of patriarchal
dominance, under which the proudest names come to be seen as
the most degrading epithets, which the conquered and the
conquerer alike are forbidden to use without the risk of sounding
racist.
9. Robert Steven Grumet, “Sunksquaws, Shamans, and
Tradeswomen: Middle Atlantic Coastal Algonkian Women
During the 17th and 18th Centuries,” in Etienne and Leacock,
Women and Colonization, p. 49. In his note to this passage,
Grumet comments that Regina Flannery (“An Analysis of Coastal
Algonquian Culture,” Catholic University Anthropological
Series, no. 7 [1939], p. 145) “listed women’s inheritance of
chiefly rank among the Massachusett, Natick, Caconnet,
Martha’s Vineyard (Wampanoag), Narragansett, Western