The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

8. N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York:
Harper and Row, 1968; New York: Signet, 1969). All
references are to the Signet edition.
9. Killing the albino was “the most natural thing in the world
… They must know that he would kill the white man again, if he
had the chance … For he would know what the white man was,
and he would kill him if he could” (p. 95). Cf. pages 76–79, in
which the albino is described in ways that allude to his
snakelike qualities. Among the Pueblos, witches often transform
themselves into snakes and are known as witches because of that
ability.
10. James Welch, Winter in the Blood (New York: Harper
and Row, 1979).
11. William Thackery, “Crying for Pity in Winter in the
Blood” MELUS, vol. 1, no. 7 (1980), pp. 61–78.
12. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York, 1977);
Gerald Vizenor, The Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (Saint
Paul, Minn.: Truck Press, 1978).
13. Paula Gunn Allen, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows
(San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1983).
14. Based on Keres uses of the number four in its esoteric
relation to women and its universal use as a sacred number
among Native Americans, I believe that four is a categorical
symbol-statement about the primacy of female power in tribal
ritual life.
Something Sacred Going on Out There: Myth
and Vision in American Indian Literature
1. Random House Dictionary of the English Language,
unabridged (New York: Random House, 1966).
2. Walter W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the
English Language, 4th rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University