The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

conjecture that Uretsete is the prototype for the hotchin, while
the cacique (town chief) is derived from the figure of Naotsete.
Certainly the office of hotchin is authorized by Iyatiku, who
counsels the Tiamuni hotchin, Chief Remembering Prayer Sticks,
to keep the people ever in peace and harmony and to remember
that they are all her children and thus are all entitled to the
harvest of her body/thought. 18 She in turn is empowered by
Thought Woman, who sits on her shoulder and advises her.
While the tribal heads are known as cacique and hotchin—or
town chief and country chief, respectively—the Keres do not
like fighting. War is so distasteful to them that they long ago
devised ritual institutions to deal with antagonism between
persons and groups such as medicine societies. They also
developed rituals that would purify those who had participated
in warfare. If a person had actually killed someone, the ritual
purification was doubly imperative, for without it a sickness
would come among the people and would infect the land and the
animals and prevent the rainfall. The Warrior Priest was and is
responsible for seeing to the orderly running of Pueblo life, and
to some extent he mediates between strangers and the people. In
this sense he functions as the outside chief. The inside chief
maintains an internal conscious awareness of Shipap and the
Mother, and he advises, counsels, and exhorts the people to the
ways of peace.
Traditional war was not practiced as a matter of conquest or
opposition to enemies in the same way it has been practiced by
western peoples; it is not a matter of battling enemies into a
defeat in which they surrender and come to terms dictated by the
conqueror. Warfare among most traditional American Indian
tribes who practiced it (went on the war path) was a ritual, an
exercise in the practice of shamanism, and it is still practiced
that way by the few “longhairs” left. Its outcome was the seizure
of a certain sacred power, and that outcome could be as the