The Sacred Hoop
Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions
For Native people everywhere: may our voices be strong, our hearts red and sweet. May we walk in Beauty. Ahô.
—Shimana
(Paula Gunn Allen)
Grandmother of the Sun: Ritual Gynocracy in Native America
I
There is a spirit that pervades everything, that is capable of powerful song and radiant movement, and that moves in and out of the mind. The colors of this spirit are multitudinous, a glowing, pulsing rainbow. Old Spider Woman is one name for this quintessential spirit, and Serpent Woman is another. Corn Woman is one aspect of her, and Earth Woman is another, and what they together have made is called Creation, Earth, creatures, plants, and light.
At the center of all is Woman, and no thing is sacred (cooked, ripe, as the Keres Indians of Laguna Pueblo say it) without her blessing, her thinking.
… In the beginning Tse che nako, Thought Woman finished everything, thoughts, and the names of all things. She finished also all the languages. And then our mothers, Uretsete and Naotsete said they would make names and they would make thoughts. Thus they said. Thus they did.1
This spirit, this power of intelligence, has many names and many emblems. She appears on the plains, in the forests, in the great canyons, on the mesas, beneath the seas. To her we owe our very breath, and to her our prayers are sent blown on pollen, on corn meal, planted into the earth on feather-sticks, spit onto the water, burned and sent to her on the wind. Her variety and multiplicity testify to her complexity: she is the true creatrix for she is thought itself, from which all else is born. She is the necessary precondition for material creation, and she, like all of her creation, is fundamentally female—potential and primary.
She is also the spirit that informs right balance, right harmony, and these in turn order all relationships in conformity with her law.
To assign to this great being the position of “fertility goddess” is exceedingly demeaning: it trivializes the tribes and it trivializes the power of woman. Woman bears, that is true. She also destroys. That is true. She also wars and hexes and mends and breaks. She creates the power of the seeds, and she plants them. As Anthony Purley, a Laguna writer, has translated a Keres ceremonial prayer, “She is mother of us all, after Her, mother earth follows, in fertility, in holding, and taking again us back to her breast.”2
The Hopi account of their genatrix, Hard Beings Woman, gives the most articulate rendering of the difference between simple fertility cultism and the creative prowess of the Creatrix. Hard Beings Woman (Huruing Wuhti) is of the earth. But she lives in the worlds above where she “owns” (empowers) the moon and stars. Hard Beings Woman has solidity and hardness as her major aspects. She, like Thought Woman, does not give birth to creation or to human beings but breathes life into male and female effigies that become the parents of the Hopi—in this way she “creates” them. The male is Muingwu, the god of crops, and his sister-consort is Sand Altar Woman who is also known as Childbirth Water Woman. In Sand Altar Woman the mystical relationship between water, worship, and woman is established; she is also said to be the mother of the katsinas, those powerful messengers who relate the spirit world to the world of humankind and vice versa.3
Like Thought Woman, Hard Beings Woman lived in the beginning on an island which was the only land there was. In this regard she resembles a number of Spirit Woman Beings; the Spirit genatrix of the Iroquois, Sky Woman, also lived on an island in the void which only later became the earth. On this island, Hard Beings Woman is identified with or, as they say, “owns” all hard substances—moon, stars, beads, coral, shell, and so forth. She is a sea goddess as well, the single inhabitant of the earth, that island that floats alone in the waters of space. From this meeting of woman and water, earth and her creatures were born.4
The waters of space are also crucial in the Sky Woman story of the Seneca. Sky Woman is catapulted into the void by her angry, jealous, and fearful husband, who tricks her into peering into the abyss he has revealed by uprooting the tree of light (which embodies the power of woman) that grows near his lodge. Her terrible fall is broken by the Water Fowl who live in that watery void, and they safely deposit Sky Woman on the back of Grandmother Turtle, who also inhabits the void. On the body of Grandmother Turtle earth-island is formed.5 Interestingly, the shell of the turtle is one of the Hard Substances connected to Hard Beings Woman.6
Contemporary Indian tales suggest that the creatures are born from the mating of sky father and earth mother, but that seems to be a recent interpolation of the original sacred texts. The revision may have occurred since the Christianizing influence on even the arcane traditions, or it may have predated Christianity. But the older, more secret texts suggest that it is a revision. It may be that the revision appears only in popular versions of the old mythic cycles on which ceremony and ritual are based; this would accord with the penchant in the old oral tradition for shaping tales to reflect present social realities, making the rearing and education of children possible even within the divergent worlds of the United States of America and the tribes.
According to the older texts (which are sacred, that is, power-engendering), Thought Woman is not a passive personage: her potentiality is dynamic and unimaginably powerful. She brought corn and agriculture, potting, weaving, social systems, religion, ceremony, ritual, building, memory, intuition, and their expressions in language, creativity, dance, human-to-animal relations, and she gave these offerings power and authority and blessed the people with the ability to provide for themselves and their progeny.
Thought Woman is not limited to a female role in the total theology of the Keres people. Since she is the supreme Spirit, she is both Mother and Father to all people and to all creatures. She is the only creator of thought, and thought precedes creation.7
Central to Keres theology is the basic idea of the Creatrix as She Who Thinks rather than She Who Bears, of woman as creation thinker and female thought as origin of material and nonmaterial reality. In this epistemology, the perception of female power as confined to maternity is a limit on the power inherent in femininity. But “she is the supreme Spirit, … both Mother and Father to all people and to all creatures.”8
In the nineteenth century, Fr. Noël Dumarest reported from another Keres Pueblo, Cochiti, on Spider Woman (Thought Woman, although he does not mention her by this name). In his account, when the “Indian sister” made stars, she could not get them to shine, so “she consulted Spider, the creator.” He characterized the goddess-sisters as living “with Spider Woman, their mother, at shipapu, under the waters of the lake, in the second world.” It should be mentioned that while she is here characterized as the sisters’ mother, the Cochiti, like the other Keres, are not so much referring to biological birth as to sacred or ritual birth. To address a person as “mother” is to pay the highest ritual respect.9
In Keres theology the creation does not take place through copulation. In the beginning existed Thought Woman and her dormant sisters, and Thought Woman thinks creation and sings her two sisters into life. After they are vital she instructs them to sing over the items in their baskets (medicine bundles) in such a way that those items will have life. After that crucial task is accomplished, the creatures thus vitalized take on the power to regenerate themselves—that is, they can reproduce others of their kind. But they are not in and of themselves self-sufficient; they depend for their being on the medicine power of the three great Witch creatrixes, Thought Woman, Uretsete, and Naotsete. The sisters are not related by virtue of having parents in common; that is, they are not alive because anyone bore them. Thought Woman turns up, so to speak, first as Creatrix and then as a personage who is acting out someone else’s “dream.” But there is no time when she did not exist. She has two bundles in her power, and these bundles contain Uretsete and Naotsete, who are not viewed as her daughters but as her sisters, her coequals who possess the medicine power to vitalize the creatures that will inhabit the earth. They also have the power to create the firmament, the skies, the galaxies, and the seas, which they do through the use of ritual magic.
The idea that Woman is possessed of great medicine power is elaborated in the Lakota myth of White Buffalo Woman. She brought the Sacred Pipe to the Lakota, and it is through the agency of this pipe that the ceremonies and rituals of the Lakota are empowered.10 Without the pipe, no ritual magic can occur. According to one story about White Buffalo Woman, she lives in a cave where she presides over the Four Winds.11 In Lakota ceremonies, the four wind directions are always acknowledged, usually by offering a pipe to them. The pipe is ceremonial, modeled after the Sacred Pipe given the people by the Sacred Woman. The Four Winds are very powerful beings themselves, but they can function only at the bidding of White Buffalo Woman. The Lakota are connected to her still, partly because some still keep to the ways she taught them and partly because her pipe still resides with them.
The pipe of the Sacred Woman is analogous in function to the ear of corn left with the people by Iyatiku, Corn Woman, the mother goddess of the Keres. Iyatiku, who is called the mother of the people, is in a ceremonial sense another aspect of Thought Woman. She presently resides in Shipap from whence she sends counsel to the people and greets them when they enter the spirit world of the dead. Her representative, Irriaku (Corn Mother), maintains the connection between individuals in the tribe as well as the connection between the nonhuman supernaturals and the tribe. It is through the agency of the Irriaku that the religious leaders of the tribe, called Yaya and Hotchin, or hochin in some spellings of the word, (Mother and leader or chief), are empowered to govern.
The Irriaku, like the Sacred Pipe, is the heart of the people as it is the heart of Iyatiku. In the form of the perfect ear of corn, Naiya Iyatiku (Mother, Chief) is present at every ceremony. Without the presence of her power, no ceremony can produce the power it is designed to create or release.12 These uses of the feminine testify that primary power—the power to make and to relate—belongs to the preponderantly feminine powers of the universe.
According to one story my great-grandmother told me, in time immemorial when the people lived in the White Village or Kush Katret, Iyatiku lived with them. There came a drought, and since many normal activities had to be suspended and since the people were hungry and worried because of the scarcity of food from the drought, Iyatiku gave them a gambling game to while away the time. It was meant to distract them from their troubles. But the men became obsessed and began to gamble everything away. When the women scolded them and demanded that they stop gambling and act responsibly toward their families, the men got mad and went into the kivas.
Now, since the kivas were the men’s space, the women didn’t go there except for ritual reasons. The men continued to gamble, neglecting their ritual duties and losing all their possessions of value. Because they didn’t do the dances or make the offerings as they were supposed to, the drought continued and serious famine ensued. Finally one old man who was also a priest, or cheani, became very concerned. He sought the advice of a shaman nearby, but it was too late. Iyatiku had left Kush Katret in anger at her foolish people. She went back to Shipap where she lives now and keeps an eye on the people. The people were forced to abandon the village, which was inundated by floods brought on by the angry lake spirits. So the beautiful village was destroyed and the people were forced to build a new one elsewhere and to live without the Mother of Corn. But she left with them her power, Irriaku, and told them that it was her heart she left in their keeping. She charged them always to share the fruits of her body with one another, for they were all related, and she told them that they must ever remain at peace in their hearts and their relationships.
The rains come only to peaceful people, or so the Keres say. As a result of this belief, the Keres abhor violence or hostility. They are very careful to contain their emotions and to put a smooth face on things, for rain is essential to the very life of their villages. Without it the crops can’t grow, the livestock will starve, there will be no water for drinking or bathing—in short, all life, physical and ceremonial, will come to a halt. For ceremonies depend on corn and corn pollen and birds and water; without these they are not likely to be efficacious, if they can be held at all.
II
There is an old tradition among numerous tribes of a two-sided, complementary social structure. In the American Southeast this tradition was worked out in terms of the red chief and the white chief, positions held by women and by men and corresponding to internal affairs and external affairs. They were both spiritual and ritualistic, but the white chief or internal chief functioned in harmony-effective ways. This chief maintained peace and harmony among the people of the band, village, or tribe and administered domestic affairs. The red chief, also known as the war chief, presided over relations with other tribes and officiated over events that took people away from the village. Among the Pueblo of the American Southwest are two notable traditional offices: that of the cacique (a Spanish term for the Tiamuni Hotchin or traditional leader), who was charged with maintaining internal harmony, and that of the hotchin or “war captain,” whose office was concerned with mediating between the tribe and outsiders, implementing foreign policy, and, if necessary, calling for defensive or retaliatory forays. This hotchin, whose title is usually translated “country chief” or “outside chief,” was first authorized by Iyatiku when she still lived among the people.13 At that time there was no “inside” chief other than the Mother herself and the clan mothers whom she instructed in the proper ritual ways as each clan came into being. Since Iyatiku was in residence, an inside chief or cacique was unnecessary. The present-day caciques continue even now to act as her representatives and gain their power directly from her.14
Thus the Pueblos are organized—as are most gynocratic tribes—into a moiety system (as anthropologists dub it) that reflects their understanding of ritual empowerment as dialogic. This dyadic structure, which emphasizes complementarity rather than opposition, is analogous to the external fire/internal fire relationship of sun and earth. That is, the core/womb of the earth is inward fire as the heart of heaven, the sun, is external fire. The Cherokee and their northern cousins the Iroquois acknowledge the femaleness of both fires: the sun is female to them both, as is the earth. Among the Keres, Shipap, which is in the earth, is white, as was the isolated house Iyatiku dwelt in before she left the mortal plane entirely for Shipap. The color of Shipap is white. The Hopi see Spider Woman as Grandmother of the sun and as the great Medicine Power who sang the people into this fourth world we live in now.
The understanding of universal functioning as relationship between the inner and the outer is reflected in the social systems of those tribal groups that are based on clan systems. It is reflected in ritual systems, as seen in the widespread incidence of legends about the Little War Twins among the Pueblos or the Sacred Twins among other tribes and Nations. The Sacred Twins embody the power of dual creative forces. The potency of their relationship is as strong as that of the negative and positive charges on magnetic fields. It is on their complementariness and their relationship that both destructive and creative ritual power rests.
Among the western Keres, the war captains are the analogues of the Little War Twins, Ma’sewe and O’yo’yo’we. Their prototype appears to be those puzzling twin sisters of the Keres pantheon, Uretsete and Naotsete, who were sung into life by Thought Woman before the creation of the world. These sisters appear and reappear in Pueblo stories in various guises and various names. One of them, Uretsete, becomes male at some point in the creation story of the Keres. Transformation of this kind is common in American Indian lore, and the transformation processes embedded in the tales about the spirit beings and their alternative aspects point to the regenerative powers embodied in their diversity.15
When the whites came, the tribes who were organized matrifocally resorted to their accustomed modes of dealing with outsiders; they relied on the red chief (or whatever that personage might be called) and on their tribal groups whose responsibility was external affairs. The Iroquois of the northern regions, the Five “Civilized” Tribes of the southern regions, and the Pueblo of the American Southwest—all among those earliest contacted by Anglo-European invaders—had some dual structure enabling them to maintain internal harmony while engaging in hostilities with invading or adversary groups. The Aztecs also had such complementary deities: the internal or domestic god was a goddess, Cihuacoatl, Coatlique, or some similar supernatural woman-being; their external god was Quetzalcoatl, the winged serpent, who was a god of amalgamation or expansion.16
Indian stories indicate that a dialogic construct based on complementary powers (an interpretation of polarity that focuses on the ritual uses of magnetism) was current among the Pueblos, particularly the Keres. To the Keres Naotsete was the figure associated with internal affairs, and Uretsete was concerned with maintaining tribal psychic and political boundaries.17
Essentially, the Keres story goes something like this (allowing for variations created by the informant, the collector-translator, or differences in clan-based variations): Naotsete and Uretsete were sung into life by Ts’its’tsi’nako Thought Woman. They carried bundles from which all the creatures came. The goddess Uretsete gave birth to twin boys, and one of these boys was raised by the other sister, who later married him. Of this union the Pueblo race was born. Some tales (probably of fairly recent origin) make Uretsete the alien sister and Naotsete the Indian sister. Other stories, as noted earlier, make Uretsete male at some undetermined point (but “he” always starts as female). The Indian sister Uretsete is later known as Iyatiku, or Ic’city, and is seen as essentially the same as her. But it is reasonable to 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 result of defeat as well as of victory. The point was to gain the attention of supernatural powers, who would then be prevailed upon to give certain powers to the hero.
The Navajo have a ceremonial and an accompanying myth that commemorate the gain of such a gift as the result of a battle with some Pueblos. The hero in that tale is a woman who journeys to the spirit world with Snake Man, where she is initiated by Snake Man’s mother. After she has passed the tests provided for her learning, she is given particular rites to take back to her people. Along with this ceremonial, which is called Beautyway, is a companion ceremonial, Mountainway. Its hero is a woman who accompanies Bear Man into the spirit world and is also taught and tested. Like the Beautyway hero, she returns with a chantway or healing ceremony to give her people. In a more contemporary version of these tales, the battle is World War II, and an even later tale might be about Vietnam. The exact war is not important. What is important is that from warfare comes certain powers that benefit the people and that are gained by a hero who encounters and transcends mortal danger.
So the hotchin is a medium for the regulation of external ritual events, and the cacique is the medium through whom Iyatiku guides, guards, and empowers her people and keeps them whole. Each is responsible for maintaining the harmonious working of the energies on which the entire existence of the people depends, and they are necessarily men who must be careful how they use the energies at their disposal.
III
As the power of woman is the center of the universe and is both heart (womb) and thought (creativity), the power of the Keres people is the corn that holds the thought of the All Power (deity) and connects the people to that power through the heart of Earth Woman, Iyatiku. She is the breath of life to the Keres because for them corn holds the essence of earth and conveys the power of earth to the people. Corn connects us to the heart of power, and that heart is Iyatiku, who under the guidance of Thought Woman directs the people in their affairs.
It is likely that the power embodied in the Irriaku (Corn Mother) is the power of dream, for dream connections play an important part in the ritual of life of the Pueblos as of other tribes of the Americas. As the frightening katsina, K’oo’ko, can haunt the dreams of uncleansed warriors and thus endanger everything, the power that moves between the material and nonmaterial worlds often does so in dreams. The place when certain dreams or ceremonies occur is said to be in “time immemorial.” And the point where the two meet is Shipap, where Earth Woman lives. Corn, like many of its power counterparts is responsible for maintaining linkage between the worlds, and Corn Mother, Irriaku, is the most powerful element in that link. John Gunn describes the Irriaku as “an ear of corn perfect in every grain, the plume is a feather from every known bird.”19
This representative of Iyatiku is an individual’s link and the ceremonial link to medicine power. Of similar power is the Sacred Pipe that White Buffalo Woman brought to the Lakota. This pipe is called wakan, which means “sacred” or possessing power.
The concept of power among tribal people is related to their understanding of the relationships that occur between the human and nonhuman worlds. They believe that all are linked within one vast, living sphere, that the linkage is not material but spiritual, and that its essence is the power that enables magical things to happen. Among these magical things are transformation of objects from one form to another, the movement of objects from one place to another by teleportation, the curing of the sick (and conversely creating sickness in people, animals, or plants), communication with animals, plants, and nonphysical beings (spirits, katsinas, goddesses, and gods), the compelling of the will of another, and the stealing or storing of souls. Mythical accounts from a number of sources illustrate the variety of forms the uses of ritual power can take.
According to the Abanaki, First Woman, who came to live with a spirit being named Kloskurbeh and his disciple, offered to share her strength and comfort with them. Her offer was accepted and she and the disciple of Kloskurbeh had many children. All was well until a famine came. Then the children were starving and First Woman was very sad. She went to her husband and asked him to kill her so she could be happy again. When he agreed, she instructed him to let two men lay hold of her corpse after she was dead and drag her body through a nearby field until all the flesh was worn away. Then, she said, they should bury her bones in the middle of the field and leave the field alone for seven months. After that time, they should return to the field and gather the food they would find there and eat all of it except for a portion that they should plant. The bones, she said, would not be edible; they should burn them, and the smoke would bring peace to them and their descendants.
As the tale is recorded in one source, the narrator continues.
Now have the first words of the first mother come to pass, for she said she was born of the leaf of the beautiful plant and that her power should be felt over the whole world, and that all should love her. And now that she is gone into this substance, take care that this, the second seed of the first mother, be always with you, for it is her flesh. Her bones also have been given for your good; burn them, and the smoke will bring freshness to the mind, and since these things came from the goodness of a woman’s heart, see that you hold her always in memory; remember her when you eat, remember her when the smoke of her bones rises before you. And because you are all [related], divide among you her flesh and her bones—let all shares be alike—for so will the love of the first mother have been fulfilled.20
Worth noting in this passage are the ideas of kinship that requires peacefulness and cooperation among people and of the centrality of the woman’s power, which is her gift to the disciple. Because she is sacred, her flesh and bones are capable of generating life; because she is embued with power, she can share it with human beings. When she came among them the first time, First Woman told Kloskurbeh and his disciple that she was “born of the beautiful plant of the earth; for the dew fell on the leaf, and the sun warmed the dew, and the warmth was life,” and she was that life.21
Another important point is that the love of the first mother carries several significances. The love of a mother is not, as is presently supposed, a reference to a sentimental attachment. Rather, it is a way of saying that a mother is bonded to her offspring through her womb. Heart often means “womb,” except when it means “vulva.” In its aspect of vulva, it signifies sexual connection or bonding. But this cannot be understood to mean sex as sex; rather, sexual connection with woman means connection with the womb, which is the container of power that women carry within their bodies. So when the teacher Kloskurbeh says that “these things come from the goodness of a woman’s heart,”22 he is saying that the seeds of her power are good—that is, they are alive, bearing, nourishing, and cooperative with the well-being of the people.
The tobacco that she leaves to them is connected also with her power, for it is the “beautiful plant” that was her own mother, and its property is clear thought. She was born of clear (harmonious) thought (for beauty and harmony are synonymous among Indians) that was empowered by water (dew) and heat (sun). (Dew is a reference to vaginal secretions during tumescence.) Tobacco smoke is connected to water, for it imitates clouds in appearance and behavior. It is used to evoke spirits as well as a sense of well-being and clearheadedness and is often a feature of religious ceremonies. That First Woman is connected to water is made clear in another passage of the same account: First Woman (who had referred to both Kloskurbeh the teacher and his nephew the disciple as “my children”) had said that she was born of the beautiful plant. The famine had made her very sad, and every day she left home and was gone for long periods. One day the disciple followed her and saw her wade into the river, singing. “And as long as her feet were in the water, she seemed glad, and the man saw something that trailed behind her right foot, like a long green blade.”23
Among medicine people it is well known that immersing oneself in water will enable one to ward off dissolution. Bodies of apprentices, sorcerers, and witches are subject to changes, including transformation from corporeal to spirit. Immersion also helps one resist the pull of supernatural forces unleashed by another sorcerer, though this does not seem to be what occurs in this story. But the connection of First Woman with water is clear: in the water she is happy, centered, powerful, for she is deeply connected to water, as is implied by her birth story. If she was born of the beautiful plant, then she is in some basic sense a vegetation spirit who has taken a human body (or something like it) to further the story of creation. Her “sacrifice” is the culmination of her earthly sojourn: by transferring the power she possesses to the corn and tobacco (her flesh and her bones), she makes certain that the life forms she has vitalized will remain vital. Thus, one aspect of her power is embodied in the children, while another aspect is embodied in the corn and tobacco. In their mutuality of energy transfer, all will live.
In Zia Pueblo version of the Supernatural Woman, Anazia Pueblo, Utset wanted to make certain that the people would have food when they came up from the lower world (previous world and underworld). As their mother (chief), Utset was responsible for their well-being, so she made fields north, west, south, and east of the village and planted in it bits of her heart (power). She made words over the seeds she had planted: “This corn is my heart and it shall be to my people as milk from my breasts.”24 In a Cherokee version of how food was given to the people to guarantee their provision and their connection to the goddess, Selu (Corn Woman) similarly made the first food from her own body-seed, as does Grandmother Spider in a Kiowa version.
According to Goetz and Morley’s rendering of the Popul Vuh, the sacred myth of the Quiché Mayans, the heart is related to the power of creation. In the beginning the makers (grandparents) were in the water (void) hidden under green and blue feathers. They were by nature great thinkers or sages. “In this manner the sky existed and also the Heart of Heaven, which is the name of God (the All Power).”25 The grandparents, called feathered beings (Gucumatz), meditated, and it became clear that creation of the earth that human beings inhabit was imminent. “Thus it was arranged in the darkness and in the night by the Heart of Heaven who is called Huracán.”26 The Gucumatz or Bird Grandparents were so called because the flashes of light around their thinking-place resembled the bright wings of the bird now known as quetzal but known to the ancient Mayans as gucumatz. In their appearance they resemble the Irriaku, and in their characterization as Water Winged Beings they resemble the Water Fowl who saved the Iroquois Sky Woman from her fall through the void (designated as water in some versions of that myth). They also resemble representations of Iyatiku as a bird being, as she appears on a Fire Society altar. In a drawing an informant made of her, Iyatiku appears as a bird woman, with the body of a bird and the head of a woman. Her body is spotted yellow “to represent the earth,” and centered on her breast is “a red, arrow-shaped heart” which “is the center of herself and the world. Around her is a blue circle to represent the sky, while an inner arc represents the milky way; above it are symbols for sun, moon and the stars.”27
One of the interesting features of this depiction of Earth Woman is her resemblance of Tinotzin, the goddess who appeared to the Indian Juan Diego in 1659 and who is known as Our Lady of Guadalupe today. The Virgin Morena (the dark virgin), as she is also called, wears a salmon-colored gown that is spotted yellow to represent the stars. She wears a cloak of blue, and her image is surrounded by fiery tongues—lightning or flames, presumably.
Certainly the Keres Fire Society’s goddess was made to represent, that is, to produce, medicine power, and the arrow-shaped heart she exhibited spoke to the relationship between the ideas of “heart” and “strength,” or power.
A Mayan prayer connected with Huracán, or the Heart of Heaven, that refers to her as “grandmother of the sun, grandmother of the light”:
Look at us, hear us! … Heart of Heaven, Heart of Earth! Give us our descendants, our succession, as long as the sun shall move … Let it dawn, let the day come! … May the people have peace … may they be happy … give us good life … grandmother of the sun, grandmother of the light, let there be dawn … let the light come!28
Certainly, there is reason to believe that many American Indian tribes thought that the primary potency in the universe was female, and that understanding authorizes all tribal activities, religious or social. That power inevitably carries with it the requirement that the people live in cooperative harmony with each other and with the beings and powers that surround them. For without peacefulness and harmony, which are the powers of a woman’s heart, the power of the light and of the corn, of generativity and of ritual magic, cannot function. Thus, when Corn Woman, Iyatiku, was about to leave the people and return to Shipap, she told the cacique how to guide and counsel the people:
I will soon leave you. I will return to the home whence I came. You will be to my people as myself; you will pass with them over the straight road; I will remain in my house below and will hear all that you say to me. I give you all my wisdom, my thoughts, my heart, and all. I fill your head with my mind.29
The goddess Ixchel whose shrine was in the Yucatán on Cozumel Island, twenty miles offshore, was goddess of the moon, water childbirth, weaving, and love. The combination of attributes signifies the importance of childbirth, and women go to Ixchel’s shrine to gain or increase their share of these powers as well as to reinforce their sense of them.
Ixchel possesses the power of fruitfulness, a power associated with both water and weaving and concerned with bringing to life or vitalization. Also connected with Ixchel is the power to end life or to take life away, an aspect of female ritual power that is not as often discussed as birth and nurturing powers are.30 These twin powers of primacy, life and death, are aspects of Ixchel as moon-woman in which she waxes and wanes, sometimes visible and sometimes invisible. Similarly, her power to weave includes the power to unravel, so the weaver, like the moon, signifies the power of patterning and its converse, the power of disruption. It is no small matter to worship the goddess Ixchel, as it is no small matter to venerate Iyatiku, Thought Woman, or White Buffalo Woman. Their connection with death and with life makes them the preponderant powers of the universe, and this connection is made through the agency of water.
Pre-Conquest American Indian women valued their role as vitalizers. Through their own bodies they could bring vital beings into the world—a miraculous power whose potency does not diminish with industrial sophistication or time. They were mothers, and that word did not imply slaves, drudges, drones who are required to live only for others rather than for themselves as it does so tragically for many modern women. The ancient ones were empowered by their certain knowledge that the power to make life is the source of all power and that no other power can gainsay it. Nor is that power simply of biology, as modernists tendentiously believe. When Thought Woman brought to life the twin sisters, she did not give birth to them in the biological sense. She sang over the medicine bundles that contained their potentials. With her singing and shaking she infused them with vitality. She gathered the power that she controlled and focused it on those bundles, and thus they were “born.” Similarly, when the sister goddesses Naotsete and Uretsete wished to bring forth some plant or creature they reached into the basket (bundle) that Thought Woman had given them, took out the effigy of the creature, and thought it into life. Usually they then instructed it in its proper role. They also meted out consequences to creatures (this included plants, spirits, and katsinas) who disobeyed them.
The water of life, menstrual or postpartum blood, was held sacred. Sacred often means taboo; that is, what is empowered in a ritual sense is not to be touched or approached by any who are weaker than the power itself, lest they suffer negative consequences from contact. The blood of woman was in and of itself infused with the power of Supreme Mind, and so women were held in awe and respect. The term sacred, which is connected with power, is similar in meaning to the term sacrifice, which means “to make sacred.” What is made sacred is empowered. Thus, in the old way, sacrificing meant empowering, which is exactly what it still means to American Indians who adhere to traditional practice. Blood was and is used in sacrifice because it possesses the power to make something else powerful or, conversely, to weaken or kill it.
Pre-contact American Indian women valued their role as vitalizers because they understood that bearing, like bleeding, was a transformative ritual act. Through their own bodies they could bring vital beings into the world—a miraculous power unrivaled by mere shamanic displays. They were mothers, and that word implied the highest degree of status in ritual cultures. The status of mother was so high, in fact, that in some cultures Mother or its analogue, Matron, was the highest office to which a man or woman could aspire.
The old ones were empowered by their certain knowledge that the power to make life is the source and model for all ritual magic and that no other power can gainsay it. Nor is that power really biological at base; it is the power of ritual magic, the power of Thought, of Mind, that gives rise to biological organisms as it gives rise to social organizations, material culture, and transformations of all kinds—including hunting, war, healing, spirit communication, rain-making, and all the rest.
At Laguna, all entities, human or supernatural, who are functioning in a ritual manner at a high level are called Mother. The story “Arrow Youth, the Witches and the K’a·’ts’ina” is filled with addresses of this sort.31
The cacique is addressed as mother by the war captain as well as by Arrow Youth. The Turkey-Buzzard Spirit is greeted as mother by the shaman who goes to consult him. When the cacique goes to consult with the k’apina shamans, he greets them saying, “How are things, mothers of everyone, chiefs of everyone.” After he has made his ritual offering of corn pollen to them, he says, “Enough … mothers, chiefs.”32 He greets them this way to acknowledge their power, a power that includes everything: long life, growth, old age, and life during the daytime. Not all the entities involved in the story are addressed in this fashion. Only those who command great respect are so titled. Yellow Woman herself is acknowledged “the mother of all of us” by the katsina chief or spokesman when he pledges the katsina’s aid in her rescue.33 Many more examples of the practice exist among tribes, and all underscore that motherness is a highly valued characteristic.
But its value signifies something other than the kind of sentimental respect for motherhood that is reflected in Americans’ Mother’s Day observances. It is ritually powerful, a condition of being that confers the highest adeptship on whoever bears the title. So central to ritual activities is it in Indian cultures that men are honored by the name mother, recognizing and paying respect to their spiritual and occult competence. That competence derives entirely from Mother Iyatiku, and, through her, from Thought Woman herself.
A strong attitude integrally connects the power of Original Thinking or Creation Thinking to the power of mothering. That power is not so much the power to give birth, as we have noted, but the power to make, to create, to transform. Ritual, as noted elsewhere, means transforming something from one state or condition to another, and that ability is inherent in the action of mothering. It is the ability that is sought and treasured by adepts, and it is the ability that male seekers devote years of study and discipline to acquire. Without it, no practice of the sacred is possible, at least not within the Great Mother societies.
And as the cultures that are woman-centered and Mother-ritual based are also cultures that value peacefulness, harmony, cooperation, health, and general prosperity, they are systems of thought and practice that would bear deeper study in our troubled, conflict-ridden time.
When Women Throw Down Bundles: Strong Women Make Strong Nations
Not until recently have American Indian women chosen to define themselves politically as Indian women—a category that retains American Indian women’s basic racial and cultural identity but distinguishes women as a separate political force in a tribal, racial, and cultural context—but only recently has this political insistence been necessary. In other times, in other circumstances more congenial to womanhood and more cognizant of the proper place of Woman as creatrix and shaper of existence in the tribe and on the earth, everyone knew that women played a separate and significant role in tribal reality.
This self-redefinition among Indian women who intend that their former stature be restored has resulted from several political factors. The status of tribal women has seriously declined over the centuries of white dominance, as they have been all but voiceless in tribal decision-making bodies since reconstitution of the tribes through colonial fiat and U.S. law. But over the last thirty years women’s sense of ourselves as a group with a stake in the distribution of power on the reservations, in jobs, and within the intertribal urban Indian communities has grown.
As writer Stan Steiner observes in The New Indians, the breakdown of women’s status in tribal communities as a result of colonization led to their migration in large numbers into the cities, where they regained the self-sufficiency and positions of influence they had held in earlier centuries. He writes, “In the cities the power of women has been recognized by the extra-tribal communities. Election of tribal women to the leadership of these urban Indian centers has been a phenomenon in modern Indian life.”1
Since the 1960s when Steiner wrote, the number of women in tribal leadership has grown immensely. Women function as council members and tribal chairs for at least one-fourth of the federally recognized tribes. In February 1981, the Albuquerque Journal reported that sixty-seven American Indian tribes had women heads of state. In large measure, the urbanization of large numbers of American Indians has resulted in their reclaiming their traditions (though it was meant to work the other way when in the 1950s the Eisenhower administration developed “Relocation” and “Termination” policies for Indians).
The coming of the white man created chaos in all the old systems, which were for the most part superbly healthy, simultaneously cooperative and autonomous, peace-centered, and ritual-oriented. The success of their systems depended on complementary institutions and organized relationships among all sectors of their world. The significance of each part was seen as necessary to the balanced and harmonious functioning of the whole, and both private and public aspects of life were viewed as valuable and necessary components of society. The private (“inside”) was shared by all, though certain rites and knowledge were shared only by clan members or by initiates into ritual societies, some of which were gender-specific and some of which were open to members of both sexes. Most were male-dominated or female-dominated with helping roles assigned to members of the opposite gender. One category of inside societies was exclusive to “berdaches”—males only—and “berdaches”*—female only. All categories of ritual societies function in present-day American Indian communities, though the exclusively male societies are best recorded in ethnographic literature.
The “outside” was characterized by various social institutions, all of which had bearing on the external welfare of the group. Hunting, gathering, building, ditch cleaning, horticulture, seasonal and permanent moves, intertribal relationships, law and policy decisions affecting the whole, crafts, and childrearing are some of the areas governed by outside institutions. These were most directly affected by white government policies; the inside institutions were most directly affected by Christianization. Destruction of the institutions rested on the overthrow or subversion of the gynocratic nature of the tribal system, as documents and offhand comments by white interveners attest.
Consider, for example, John Adair’s remark about the Cherokee, as reported by Carolyn Foreman: “The Cherokee had been for a considerable while under petticoat government and they were just emerging, like all of the Iroquoian Indians from the matriarchal period.”2 Adair’s idea of “petticoat government” included the power of the Women’s Council of the Cherokee. The head of the Council was the Beloved Woman of the Nation, “whose voice was considered that of the Great Spirit, speaking through her.”3 The Iroquoian peoples, including the Cherokee, had another custom that bespoke the existence of their “petticoat government,” their gynocracy. They set the penalty for killing a woman of the tribe at double that for killing a man. This regulation was in force at least among the Susquehanna, the Hurons, and the Iroquois; but given the high regard in which the tribes held women and given that in killing a woman one killed the children she might have borne, I imagine the practice of doubling the penalty was widespread.4
The Iroquois story is currently one of the best chronicles of the overthrow of the gynocracy. Material about the status of women in North American groups such as the Montagnais-Naskapi, Keres, Navajo, Crow, Hopi, Pomo, Turok, Kiowa, and Natchez and in South American groups such as the Bari and Mapuche, to name just a few, is lacking. Any original documentation that exists is buried under the flood of readily available, published material written from the colonizer’s patriarchal perspective, almost all of which is based on the white man’s belief in universal male dominance. Male dominance may have characterized a number of tribes, but it was by no means as universal (or even as preponderant) as colonialist propaganda has led us to believe.
The Seneca prophet Handsome Lake did not appreciate “petticoat government” any more than did John Adair. When his code became the standard for Iroquoian practice in the early nineteenth century, power shifted from the hands of the “meddling old women,” as he characterized them, to men. Under the old laws, the Iroquois were a mother-centered, mother-right people whose political organization was based on the central authority of the Matrons, the Mothers of the Longhouses (clans). Handsome Lake advocated that young women cleave to their husbands rather than to their mothers and abandon the clan-mother–controlled longhouse in favor of a patriarchal, nuclear family arrangement. Until Handsome Lake’s time, the sachems were chosen from certain families by the Matrons of their clans and were subject to impeachment by the Matrons should they prove inadequate or derelict in carrying out their duties as envisioned by the Matrons and set forth in the Law of the Great Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy. By provision in the Law, the women were to be considered the progenitors of the nation, owning the land and the soil.5