The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

The Chief of Mountains, and beyond it,
Yea, seated at home behold me;
In Life Unending, and beyond it,
Yea, seated at home behold me;
In Joy Unchanging, and beyond it,
Yea, seated at home behold me. 13
Some critics have said that this device results from the oral
nature of American Indian literature, that repetition ensures
attention and makes the works easy to remember. If this is a
factor at all, however, it is a peripheral one, for nonliterate
people have more finely developed memories than do literate
people. The child learns early to remember complicated
instructions, long stories—often verbatim—multitudes of details
about plants, animals, kinship and other social relationships,
privileges, and responsibilities, all “by heart.” For a person who
can’t run to a bookshelf or a notebook to look up either vital or
trivial information, reliance on memory becomes very important
in everyday life. This highly developed everyday memory is not
likely to fail on ceremonial occasions, so the use of repetition
for ease of memorization is not significant.
Astrov, in her discussion of the “psychic” basis of the device,
touches on another reason folklorists give for the widespread
use of repetition in oral ceremonial literature:
A child repeats a statement over and over for two
reasons. First, in order to make himself familiar with
something that appears to him to be threateningly unknown
and thus to organize it into his system of familiar
phenomena; and, second, to get something he wants badly. 14
Astrov implies that repetition is childish on two counts: that it
(rather than rational thought) familiarizes and defuses threat and
that the person, irrationally, believes that oral repetition of a