The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

Yet even this concept falls short of the American Indian
understanding, for Einsteinian energy is believed to be
unintelligent, while energy according to the Indian view is
intelligence manifested in yet another way.
Many non-Indians believe that human beings possess the only
intelligence in phenomenal existence (often in any form of
existence). The more abstractionist and less intellectually vain
Indian sees human intelligence as rising out of the very nature of
being, which is of necessity intelligent in and of itself, as an
attribute of being. Again, this idea probably stems from the
Indian concept of a circular, dynamic universe in which all
things are related and are of one family. It follows that those
attributes possessed by human beings are natural attributes of all
being. The Indian does not regard awareness of being as an
abnormality peculiar to one species, but, because of a sense of
relatedness to (instead of isolation from) what exists, the Indian
assumes that this awareness is a natural by-product of existence
itself.
In English, one can divide the universe into two parts: the
natural and the supernatural. Humanity has no real part in either,
being neither animal nor spirit—that is, the supernatural is
discussed as though it were apart from people, and the natural as
though people were apart from it. This necessarily forces
English-speaking people into a position of alienation from the
world they live in. Such isolation is entirely foreign to American
Indian thought. At base, every story, every song, every ceremony
tells the Indian that each creature is part of a living whole and
that all parts of that whole are related to one another by virtue of
their participation in the whole of being.
In American Indian thought, God is known as the All Spirit,
and other beings are also spirit—more spirit than body, more
spirit than intellect, more spirit than mind. The natural state of
existence is whole. Thus healing chants and ceremonies