The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary
Perspective
Literature is one facet of a culture. The significance of a
literature can be best understood in terms of the culture from
which it springs, and the purpose of literature is clear only when
the reader understands and accepts the assumptions on which the
literature is based. A person who was raised in a given culture
has no problem seeing the relevance, the level of complexity, or
the symbolic significance of that culture’s literature. We are all
from early childhood familiar with the assumptions that underlie
our own culture and its literature and art. Intelligent analysis
becomes a matter of identifying smaller assumptions peculiar to
the locale, idiom, and psyche of the writer.
The study of non-Western literature poses a problem for
Western readers, who naturally tend to see alien literature in
terms that are familiar to them, however irrelevant those terms
may be to the literature under consideration. Because of this,
students of traditional American Indian literatures have applied
the terms “primitive,” “savage,” “childlike,” and “pagan” to
these literatures. Perceiving only the most superficial aspects of
American Indian literary traditions, western scholars have
labeled the whole body of these literatures “folklore,” even
though the term specifically applies only to those parts of the
literatures that are the province of the general populace.
The great mythic 1 and ceremonial cycles of the American
Indian peoples are neither primitive, in any meaningful sense of
the word, nor necessarily the province of the folk; much of the