The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

nonauthoritarian social system wherein women wield power by
making social life easy and gentle with one based on child
terrorization, male dominance, and submission of women to
male authority.
Montagnais men who would not subscribe to the Jesuit
program (and there were many) were not given authority backed
up by the patriarchy’s churchly or political institutions. Under
patriarchy men are given power only if they use it in ways that
are congruent with the authoritarian, punitive model. The records
attest, in contrast, that gynecentric systems distribute power
evenly among men, women, and berdaches as well as among all
age groups. Economic distribution follows a similar pattern;
reciprocal exchange of goods and services among individuals
and between groups is ensured because women are in charge at
all points along the distribution network.
Effecting the social transformation from egalitarian,
gynecentric systems to hierarchical, patriarchal systems requires
meeting four objectives. The first is accomplished when the
primacy of female as creator is displaced and replaced by malegendered
creators (generally generic, as the Great Spirit concept
overtakes the multiplicitous tribal designation of deity). This
objective has largely been met across North America. The Hopi
goddess Spider Woman has become the masculine Maseo or
Tawa, referred to in the masculine, and the Zuñi goddess is on
her way to malehood. Changing Woman of the Navajo has
contenders for her position, while the Keres Thought Woman
trembles on the brink of displacement by her sister-goddesscum-god
Utset. Among the Cherokee, the goddess of the river
foam is easily replaced by Thunder in many tales, and the
Iroquois divinity Sky Woman now gets her ideas and powers
from her dead father or her monstrous grandson.
The second objective is achieved when tribal governing
institutions and the philosophies that are their foundation are