The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

I think he was doing the translations himself, and his renderings
of words (and contexts) was likely influenced by the way
Lagunas themselves rendered local terms into English. I doubt,
however, that he was conscious of the extent to which his
renderings reflected European traditions and simultaneously
distorted Laguna-Acoma ones.
Gunn was deeply aware of the importance and intelligence of
the Keresan tradition, but he was also unable to grant it
independent existence. His major impulse was to link the
western Keres with the Sumerians, to in some strange way
demonstrate the justice of his assessment of their intelligence.
An unpublished manuscript in my possession written by John
Gunn after Schat Chen is devoted to his researches and
speculations into this idea.
3. Gunn, Schat Chen, pp. 217–222.
4. Franz Boas, Keresan Texts , Publications of the American
Ethnological Society, vol. 8, pt. 1 (New York: American
Ethnological Society, 1928), writes, “The second and the fourth
of the shiwana appear in the tale of summer and winter …
Summer wears a shirt of buckskin with squash ornaments, shoes
like moss to which parrot feathers are tied. His face is painted
with red mica and flowers are tied on to it … Winter wears a
shirt of icicles and his shoes are like ice. His shirt is shiny and
to its end are tied turkey feathers and eagle feathers” (p. 284).
5. Boas, Keresan Texts , p. 288. Boas says he made the same
mistake at first, having misheard the word they used.
6. When my sister Carol Lee Sanchez spoke to her university
Women’s Studies class about the position of centrality women
hold in our Keres tradition, one young woman, a self-identified
radical feminist, was outraged. She insisted that Sanchez and
other Laguna women had been brainwashed into believing that
we had power over our lives. After all, she knew that no woman
anywhere has ever had that kind of power; her feminist studies