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![The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions by [Paula Gunn Allen]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51T82QdoE2L._SY346_.jpg)
The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions Kindle Edition
by
Paula Gunn Allen
(Author)
Format: Kindle Edition
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Almost thirty years after its initial publication, Paula Gunn Allen’s celebrated study of women’s roles in Native American culture, history, and traditions continues to influence writers and scholars in Native American studies, women’s studies, queer studies, religion and spirituality, and beyond
This groundbreaking collection of seventeen essays investigates and celebrates Native American traditions, with special focus on the position of the American Indian woman within those customs. Divided into three sections, the book discusses literature and authors, history and historians, sovereignty and revolution, and social welfare and public policy, especially as those subjects interact with the topic of Native American women.
Poet, academic, biographer, critic, activist, and novelist Paula Gunn Allen was a leader and trailblazer in the field of women’s and Native American spirituality. Her work is both universal and deeply personal, examining heritage, anger, racism, homophobia, Eurocentrism, and the enduring spirit of the American Indian.
This groundbreaking collection of seventeen essays investigates and celebrates Native American traditions, with special focus on the position of the American Indian woman within those customs. Divided into three sections, the book discusses literature and authors, history and historians, sovereignty and revolution, and social welfare and public policy, especially as those subjects interact with the topic of Native American women.
Poet, academic, biographer, critic, activist, and novelist Paula Gunn Allen was a leader and trailblazer in the field of women’s and Native American spirituality. Her work is both universal and deeply personal, examining heritage, anger, racism, homophobia, Eurocentrism, and the enduring spirit of the American Indian.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOpen Road Media
- Publication dateMarch 3, 2015
- File size2253 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“[The Sacred Hoop] may make you more hopeful and more realistic about our possibilities.” —Gloria Steinem
“Provocative and illuminating.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“In these beautifully written essays, Paula Gunn Allen . . . makes a vital contribution to American Indian and feminist scholarship. . . . Allen brings to vivid life America’s powerful female roots.” —Booklist
“A landmark collection which may prove as important to American Indian women as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex has been for Western non-tribal women.” —New Directions for Women
“Paula Gunn Allen presents her material forcefully, gracefully, and . . . quite convincingly.” —Yvone J. Millspaw, Harrisburg Community College
“Allen’s life experiences as a Ph.D. in the field of Native American studies and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and more important, as a Laguna Pueblo/Sioux woman who believes that personal and cultural truth are inseparable and vital to survival, form the bias of this book. It is precisely this bias that gives The Sacred Hoop its power and insight as a commentary on the perceptions and priorities of contemporary Native American women and as a source of information for those who continue to seek more than sociological and bureaucratic definition.” —Los Angeles Times
“Provocative and illuminating.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“In these beautifully written essays, Paula Gunn Allen . . . makes a vital contribution to American Indian and feminist scholarship. . . . Allen brings to vivid life America’s powerful female roots.” —Booklist
“A landmark collection which may prove as important to American Indian women as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex has been for Western non-tribal women.” —New Directions for Women
“Paula Gunn Allen presents her material forcefully, gracefully, and . . . quite convincingly.” —Yvone J. Millspaw, Harrisburg Community College
“Allen’s life experiences as a Ph.D. in the field of Native American studies and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and more important, as a Laguna Pueblo/Sioux woman who believes that personal and cultural truth are inseparable and vital to survival, form the bias of this book. It is precisely this bias that gives The Sacred Hoop its power and insight as a commentary on the perceptions and priorities of contemporary Native American women and as a source of information for those who continue to seek more than sociological and bureaucratic definition.” —Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Paula Gunn Allen (1939-2008) was a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Native American of Laguna Pueblo and Sioux heritage. She authored many books, including The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradition, and was the editor of Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women, which won an American Book Award in 1990. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B00S21B2QK
- Publisher : Open Road Media; 2nd ed. edition (March 3, 2015)
- Publication date : March 3, 2015
- Language : English
- File size : 2253 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 381 pages
- Lending : Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #784,549 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #15 in Native American Literary Criticism
- #415 in Native American Studies
- #723 in Native American History (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A MUST READ FOR ANYONE WHO CARES ABOUT THIS PLANET WE LIVE ON CALLED "MOTHER EARTH"!
Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2017
Excellent book, even more timely today than when it was written 33 years ago. If you care about our Mother Earth, if you want to know why the Native women are at the forefront of all the movements to protect our environment, and where their courage and commitment comes from - and especially if you'd like to have that courage and commitment in your own life. please buy this book! Read it over and over and over again, every time you feel you need to be reminded of the wisdom within it, and to be remotivated.
11 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2013
I used this book to write a final paper in one of my senior courses and I cannot begin to tell you how informative that it is. I had read other books that claim to be "ethnographic" and first hand accounts, and this book made me realize how often these other books are biased. Paula Allen had me laughing with her whit and she is not only very educated, but also understands the language and sets the record straight on how these tribes really functioned. It is inspiring and gives me hope. Her book is referenced in many other books that I've read, and I have yet to come across anything that beats her book. Great book to read if you are interested in Anthropology, Native American culture, feminism, matriarchies, spirit people, lesbians and gays, traditions, Gynocracy, poetry, myths, and rituals to name just a few topics she discusses. This text is very comprehensive and does not get boring. Basically if you want to know how matriarchal societies actually function and where the bias lies in history, this has quite a bit of information on the topic.
19 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2000
This white feminist found The Sacred Hoop eye-opening and mind-expanding. While I cannot presume to be able to truly understand tribal thinking, I nonetheless found the concepts and philosophies described here to be completely pertinent to my place in existence. I am struggling to realize my place in a multifaced, complex web-world and have never felt comfortable with the typical feminist need to stand out in the foreground. It is also very empowering to see that there have been many versions of woman-based cultures. Unlike those in Crete, for example, tribal cultures were fully functioning in North America less than 500 years ago! It is unfortunate (though not at all surprising, given the difficulty of writing about concepts in the language of the patriarchy) that this gospel of hope and renewal is not reaching many, many people--especially our young people in colleges and universities. Don't take this wrong, Paula Gunn Allen, but you go, girl!
54 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2018
Great read. The Sacred Feminine is calling to our world at this time. She needs to be rediscovered and honored.
4 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2018
I love this book!
One person found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2013
I lost the first copy and had to buy it again so I could finish reading it. So far it has been a wealth of information, anyone needing to learn more about the female side of Native Traditions should check this book out.
6 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2014
Paula Gunn Allen was referenced in two Native American courses that I took for my Masters in English. I wanted to read more about her studies, and this book did not disappoint me! I purchased it for the article entitled "The Sacred Hoop" but got so much more.
2 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2015
Quite enlightening for those who wish to study feminism and Native American culture.
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Top reviews from other countries
Mikki
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 30, 2022
Bought as required reading for Uni, really interesting book. It arrived in new condition, with good packing and fast delivery. Thanks.
E. Yule
4.0 out of 5 stars
Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 14, 2015
A classic, helpful for those wanting to learn about ceremony and traditions.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
5.0 out of 5 stars
Immensément inspiratoire mais regrettable conclusion
Reviewed in France on August 18, 2015
I would have sworn to everyone that this book was essential and I enjoyed it from the front cover to page 261. But the concluding essay frustrated me totally and I am going to start with this to clear up the field, to state the stake. Then I will be able to speak of the phenomenally positive content of this book.
PGA’s Last essay
In her last essay she calls for what she names “tribal gynocracy” (p. 265) and she makes it very clear that she meant a radical change from phallocracy to gynocracy, from the dictatorship of males to what she considers the domination of the tribe by women, from exclusive patriarchy to exclusive matriarchy. And she wants the whole world to recognize this gynocracy as the only possible way and solution out of all our ills, all of us on the planet. I have never accepted any ideology that asked for the dictatorship of one class of people over the other class or over pother classes of people. I did not accept the Marxist dictum that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was supposed to be replaced by the dictatorship of the working class, of the proletariat mind you. We know what this ideology led to. I refuse any form of dictatorship even that of women. She goes on with “male writers . . . will be forced to write and think more creatively, more accurately, and more honestly about their tribes, their lives, and their histories.” (p. 265) And that creative change will come from accepting the women-centered vision Paula Gunn Allen declares the basic Indian tradition that has to be re-instated and imposed as the only possible vision.
And this concept of obligation is constantly present in that concluding chapter. “Critics. . . will have to dig more deeply.” (p. 266) “The truth is more compelling.” “Contemporary literary studies will have to be altered.” (p. 266)
And the last sentence of this chapter, and of the book, is the full expression of such a one-sided vision: “We understand that woman is the sun and the earth: she is grandmother; she is mother; she is Thought, Wisdom, Dream, Reason, Tradition, Memory, Deity, and Life itself. Nos Vemos.” (p. 268) What’s left for the male members of this society?
This position is extreme, untenable, and the question is how on the basis of a very interesting and fascinating exploration of women in the Indian cultures and heritages that nourishes the whole book did Paula Gunn Allen reach this extreme conclusion? To answer the question we would have to explore every essay in this book in full detail. Here I am only going ti explore some central ideas. We must also understand that it is a collection of essays that were initially published in the 1970s and 1980s. Even in 1992 they were already getting outdated as for the data quoted in them. Today this phenomenon is even wider and the new situation in the US concerning American Indians with the reparations decided in court and fully financed by Congress and distributed to the various reservations, with the possibility for any American citizen to declare more than one ethnic origin, on a voluntary basis I would say unluckily, leads to the fact that the number of people declaring their Indian origins has multiplied in great proportions. Paula Allen Gunn speaks of one million American Indians in the USA. But the US Census Bureau gives 3,753,858 as of July 1, 2010 and 6,532,598 as of July 1, 2014, hence a 74% growth rate in four years. In other words if this trend goes on the number of US citizens who will claim their Indian roots will reach ten millions in just a few years, and we have to know there is some resistance among African Americans who are Black as for race (and cannot be white because of the one-drop theory) to declare that they are partly Indian since then they would feel and their community would feel there is a conflict of interest. So we have to consider what Paula Gunn Allen says in these essays in the context of the period.
PGA’s Basic concepts
First of all She asserts that American Indians believe in the fact that all is life, that we have to consider the universe as sharing a global cosmic life of which the earth and on this earth humanity as a whole are only a small, tiny, maybe minuscule part. This makes American Indians in their traditional culture both ecological to respect thus Global Cosmic Life which is their personal life, making this Global Cosmic Life the mother of it all, and by being ecological they want to be sustainable. She insists on the fact Indians have endured and hence have been durable but she advocates a wider approach in which American Indians are doing more than enduring but are sustaining the survival and the expansion of humanity as such and their role can increase if they go back to their traditional cultures and heritages. It is surprising here she does not use the Maya concept of Seventh Generation that more or less states that Indians in general would globally revive in the 1990s. This absence of a connection to a prediction from long, long ago could be interpreted positively. She does not want to be seen as superstitious and leaning on something that is not realistic in the modern world: she believes American Indians (and she strangely enough speaks practically only of them in the USA) have to bring themselves back by regenerating their own cultures. Then why not going back to Mayan culture, which she does in her more recent book on Pocahontas.
Then she gets into this culture or rather these cultures as they were before colonization (she knows what she says is entirely in contradiction with the reality of American Indians in the 1980s). She is aware the side she takes represents only about 70% of American Indian cultures but she speaks as if it was the future for them all. The first principle is that “Indian culture is ritual first.” (p. 80) She clearly defines this ritual side of things. “Thus ritual – organized activity that strives to manipulate or direct nonmaterial energies toward some larger goal – forms the foundations of tribal culture.” (p. 80) This widens the approach of her concept of global cosmic life at human level. She sees “a psychic and spiritual whole” in what she calls here a “transformative process [that] engenders the ritual cycle of dying, birth, growth, ripening, dying, and rebirth.” We can wonder why she does not see this approach is a lot wider than American Indian because it is the basic approach of Buddhism for one example, though Buddhism is stating that those who manage to get enlightened and reach nibbana (or nirvana) can step out of this cycle of birth-life-death-rebirth by merging into the cosmic energy of the universe. But there is here a fundamental philosophical connection nevertheless that needs to be explored. It would be interesting if she explored the concept of rebirth she states here. But she does not. The closest suggestion is that we are born unattached in consciousness and we have to have a vision that will make us attached to a clan and eventually one representative of that clan, one famous member who has passed away. This is not real rebirth or reincarnation (as the Hindus or the Tibetan Buddhists would suggest) but it is continuation (more in phase with Theravada Buddhism). She uses the word “continuance.” (p. 267)
But she widens this concept of ritual when she adds: “It is also the basis of cultural artifacts such as crafts, agriculture, hunting, architecture, art, music, and literature. They all take shape and authority from the ritual tradition.” (p. 80) We can see that for her there cannot be any development of Indian culture that does not go back to these rituals as the very basis and inspiration of the creativity of the craftsmen, thinkers or artists. For her this gives three dimensions to this global cosmic life. It is the force that animates the cosmos, and when an American Indian connects with it through his/her vision and his/her coming of age in the early teenage of boys as well as girls this force becomes power. The vision-inspired individual has power over things and people. That power can vary very much according to the vision and the clan (that has nothing to do in its definition with the individual’s blood relations) the person belongs to. And this power can be used to help other people and that becomes what she calls medicine. And here again she seems to lean on, and in fact she clearly favors, the idea that women have a privileged role to play in this capture of the force and its transformation into power and medicine.
PGA’s CONFRONTATION TO GENOCIDE/GYNOCIDE
That’s when she starts wondering why this privileged position of women in Indian culture has been negated and rejected by most Indian tribes today. That’s when she describes what happened to Indians when Europeans arrived and started meddling with their affairs. She speaks of genocide, both physical (including extermination) and mental through forced education and assimilation, what she sums up in the word “acculturation” meaning the forced adoption of European principles. The survivors are cast in a male-dominated structure in contradiction with tradition and that leads these men to alcoholism and self-destruction by losing their safeguard in life. The definition she gives page 129 is comprehensive: “alienation in its classic dimensions of isolation, powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, lowered self-esteem, and self-estrangement, accompanied by anxiety, hopelessness, and victimization.” Women on the other hand are reduced to a state of total alienation that can go as far as being beaten up by their husbands, or would-be husbands. Strangely enough she asserts that this total rejection of women enables them to railroad underground their primeval nature, rebuild unseen on the surface a power that could regenerate the whole Indian culture. That’s where she brings in the mythic dimension of this culture. She defines this word in a note page 274: “Mythic: 1. narratives that deal with metaphysical, spiritual, and cosmic occurrences that recount the spiritual past and the ‘mysteries’ of the tribe. 2. sacred story. The Word in its cosmic, creative sense. This usage follows the literary meaning rather than the common and vernacular meaning of ‘fictive’ or ‘not real narrative dealing with primitive, irrational explanations of the world.’ 3. translational.” She develops this idea and she pretends that these myths have hardly ever been brought to a non-Indian public because what all anthropologists or folklorists have gathered, recorded, etc, is nothing but the popular tales, stories developed from the myths that are never revealed. She actually quotes the name of Paul Radin in this field and we can wonder if she means the Trickster or the Twin Brothers and other tales collected by him are on the secret myth side or on the public popular tale side. She seems to believe that these myths have been kept intact and untouched over the five centuries of European invasion. And she does not communicate any part of them. This leads to the next element, “gynocide” or “gynecide.”
“Gynecide” or “gynocide” is a concept that is original to this author. It means the destruction of the woman-centered Indian civilization (cultures, rituals, social practices, political institutions, etc) by Europeans who considered this dominant position of women as a danger to their own phallocratic organization and vision. She accuses Christianization and colonization to have imposed this total change onto Indians. Strangely enough in 1986 and in 1992 she only considers US American Indians and yet neglects the case of Louisiana or Florida that were at first colonized by the French and the Spanish. She assimilates the French and Spanish Catholic churches to the various English Protestant churches or organizations that produced the United States. She totally ignores the situation in Mexico where the Spanish systematically exterminated Indian males and saved most Indian females and then the Catholic Church and its Inquisition imposed the rule that all black slaves have to be married and enjoy a Christian life. Since most black slaves were males, they were systematically married to Indian women, which explains that by the end of the 17th century the Blacks had practically disappeared from sight in Mexico. They had merged into the Indian population. For her, and she is right on one point, all Christian churches imposed a male-dominated “family” structure. But she ignores the originality of the two Catholic churches of those days as compared to the Protestant churches. But She also ignores the official position of the Catholic Church of the USA in 1977 duly published in a brochure on the necessity concerning American Indians to introduce in the Catholic Church and in society a triple policy summarized in three words: “remember, reconcile, recommit.” If she had followed this line she would have been able to consider that the genocide as much as the gynocide had produced a PTSS of its own that we could Identify as Post Genocide/Gynocide Traumatic Stress Syndrome. And that would have widened her vision and she would have been able to realize that what she proposes is the proper treatment of that post-traumatic situation. Because what she proposes is fundamental.
PGA’s TRIBAL versus NON-TRIBAL
But before it is interesting to see how she describes the Indian tradition as opposed to the Western or European or Christian tradition (she uses the three references and at times summarizes them under the word industrialized). She comes thus to a strict opposition of tribal culture to non-tribal culture.
TRIBAL CULTURE. It favors harmony and balance based on the centrality of women and the search for what she calls “proper order”. It practices equal distribution of value among all elements in a field. It has no heroes, no villains, no chorus, no setting (inert surrounding), no minor characters because it does not practice the foregrounding of one element and the backgrounding of everything else. She insists on mutuality that explains that winter and summer are not enemies and their battle is not a military battle with the defeat of winter but the establishment of ritualistic change from one season to the other that has to be reactivated every single year. Tribal culture works in unified-field fashion with inclusive-field perception. It is accretive and fluid, a-chronological, dependent on harmonious relationships of all elements within a field of perception. She here introduces the concept of background that she has rejected before but this time it means that the background is part of the foreground in a way because when what has had its time to act and perform, it will step in the background it had not really left and another element of this background will have its time to act and perform. Indian culture is also multidimensional, a-chronological (again) and in-cluding.
NON-TRIBAL CULTURE. At once she states it is conflict-centered. She identifies it as being Christian and European. It is for her industrialized and based on industrialized patriarchs. Here we come to the idea that time is not important for Paula Gunn Allen (she is a-chronological) because the colonization of Northern America by the English only started in 1607 but at least one and a half century before the very beginning of industrial mechanization, hence two centuries before the beginning of industrialization per se. The patriarchal organization of English society (with the tremendous exception of Elizabeth I after Mary I and some more Queens later on) and all other European societies is not basically industrial but basically Roman and maybe even Greek. The patriarchal tradition comes from antiquity and the Catholic church only reproduced the patriarchy of the Jewish religious organization (perfectly visible in the Old Testament and the Talmud) that only reproduced what was practiced before. In fact we could think that this patriarchal organization evolved from the invention and development of agriculture some time after the Ice Age. She then could have wondered why Indian societies in the Americas did not develop that patriarchy though they developed agriculture most of the time on the side of hunting, fishing and gathering. We could also nowadays use the recent research on cave paintings all over the world that seems to show that the imprinted hands are not male but female, demonstrating that before the Ice Age humanity was dominated spiritually by women, which would go in her direction. But that would also show that the Americas are a special case. But can we say Mayan, Aztec, Toltec, Inca civilizations are women-dominated? To go back to her non-tribal definition, we can add in European culture winter can be vanquished, which is unsustainable. Europeans have single-focus perception and western masculinist monotheistic modes of perception. They practice the systematic foregrounding of some elements and backgrounding of others with no rotation between these two sets. They are linear and fixed, chronological in thinking and a lot less dependent on harmonious relationships of all elements (this less might even mean not at all). They discount the importance of the background as the living nursery of anything temporarily brought to the foreground. Finally they are uni-dimensional, monolithic, ex-cluding and chronological (again, showing this chronology element is fundamental for Paula Gunn Allen).
Obviously there is a lot of archaeology to be done and then a lot of anthropology to be done. If the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy was so fast and effective among Indians when the Europeans arrived, it’s maybe because the change was happening at the time in the various Indian tribes who are as she says “accretive and fluid.” She states in fact that they would have been extremely unchanging though they were at the time in a process of change that the colonization by the Europeans accelerated and imposed. She thus calls for a shift from the male dominated cluster of warrior-brave-hunter-chief to the female dominated cluster of grandmother-mother-Peacemaker-farmer. (p. 265) and she even calls for a similar change in symbols from feathers-wampum-war bonnets-war paint-bows and arrows-tomahawks to cornmeal-corn pollen-corn mother-metates-grinding stones-hoes-plows-pottery and basket designs (p. 265) to achieve a shift from “warrior oriented” culture to “peace oriented” culture (p. 265). This is Paula Gunn Allen’s objective in order to repair the damage of Christian industrialized colonization and go back to a purely Indian culture and civilization.
PGA’s CONTRADICTION & PROJECT
And that’s where the contradiction in Paul Gunn Allen’s thought is most apparent when she qualifies Indian civilization as being based on “continuance” whereas European industrialized civilization is based on “transitoriness.” This freezing and ossifying of her thought short-circuits the tremendously brilliant proposal to treat the Post Genocide/Gynocide Traumatic Stress Syndrome (that she does not identify as such) via theater and drama.
The theater is bringing together music, text, dancing, lights, settings, costumes and acting. We must understand that Indians do not UNIFY all these but BALANCE them in some harmonious composition. The text is not set to the music and the music is not set to the text. All these elements are supposed to create a fascination each one with its own autonomous and original means. The music is thus a reference to old drums and their ritualistic use. They create a sonorous reference to cultural heritage that is all-pervading because drums were used for every single ritualistic occasion. The text uses one essential characteristic of rituals in Old Indian societies, and this aspect has survived along with music and dancing. An Indian ritual text is repetitive and uses some repetition patterns that are meaningful: the four cardinal directions, the six cardinal plus sky and earth directions, and the seven cardinal plus sky and earth directions plus the center of it all. These patterns, four, six and seven, are used to build songs that repeat some sentences, some stanzas, some syntactic patterns a certain number of times to create hypnosis to bring the individual back inside himself or herself and his/her community itself back to some collective togetherness or balance and the individual and his/her community in some osmosis one into the other. This fascination founding the valorization of the past with music, text and dancing, not set one TO the others but reciprocally balanced one ONTO the others is the best possible treatment of a Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome of any type because it brings liberation, inner liberation of individuals and outer liberation within the recaptured heritage and culture of old times revalorized into life and value. This aims at bringing regeneration to individuals, to collective bodies, inner and outer for both sides. That is the ambition of those theater people she calls “Word Warriors” dedicated to Old Spider Woman, the Creatrix, and Grandmothers.
What she seems to neglect at this moment is that the objective is not to recapture and go back to what Indians used to be but to recapture Indian vital energies that will enable Indians as individuals and collective bodies, communities, to become creative again, to take control of their present and future, to conquer a leading role in their own life, in their community and for their community in wider communities. She remembers the past so much that she wants to go back to it, which is an illusion. She wants to reconcile Indians with Indians but she does not want to reconcile Indians with Europeans. She wants to recommit Indians with their heritage and values, but she does not want to recommit Indians to wider human values that would unite all segments of humanity. Somewhere she loses the clearly expressed ambition to bring Indians back into the Global Cosmic Life that necessarily includes all segments of humanity. How can American Indians achieve that goal without losing their souls? In fact they can by recapturing, reconstructing and rediscovering their souls in the new modern circumstances that require for sure a reconsideration of the position n and role of women in Indian society and in society as a whole. That would imply a reexamination of all gender orientations and definitions, and Maybe Paula Gunn Allen makes her lesbianism too central and dramatic though it is in fact a secondary element having to do with gender freedom and not women per se.
Then we understand that Paula Gunn Allen got trapped by her own research and little by little lost contact with the world beyond her Indian field. But if we overlook the sectarian and exclusive final essay this book is crucial for us to understand what can, could and should be done to reintegrate American Indians in humanity as a creative dynamic force.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
PGA’s Last essay
In her last essay she calls for what she names “tribal gynocracy” (p. 265) and she makes it very clear that she meant a radical change from phallocracy to gynocracy, from the dictatorship of males to what she considers the domination of the tribe by women, from exclusive patriarchy to exclusive matriarchy. And she wants the whole world to recognize this gynocracy as the only possible way and solution out of all our ills, all of us on the planet. I have never accepted any ideology that asked for the dictatorship of one class of people over the other class or over pother classes of people. I did not accept the Marxist dictum that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was supposed to be replaced by the dictatorship of the working class, of the proletariat mind you. We know what this ideology led to. I refuse any form of dictatorship even that of women. She goes on with “male writers . . . will be forced to write and think more creatively, more accurately, and more honestly about their tribes, their lives, and their histories.” (p. 265) And that creative change will come from accepting the women-centered vision Paula Gunn Allen declares the basic Indian tradition that has to be re-instated and imposed as the only possible vision.
And this concept of obligation is constantly present in that concluding chapter. “Critics. . . will have to dig more deeply.” (p. 266) “The truth is more compelling.” “Contemporary literary studies will have to be altered.” (p. 266)
And the last sentence of this chapter, and of the book, is the full expression of such a one-sided vision: “We understand that woman is the sun and the earth: she is grandmother; she is mother; she is Thought, Wisdom, Dream, Reason, Tradition, Memory, Deity, and Life itself. Nos Vemos.” (p. 268) What’s left for the male members of this society?
This position is extreme, untenable, and the question is how on the basis of a very interesting and fascinating exploration of women in the Indian cultures and heritages that nourishes the whole book did Paula Gunn Allen reach this extreme conclusion? To answer the question we would have to explore every essay in this book in full detail. Here I am only going ti explore some central ideas. We must also understand that it is a collection of essays that were initially published in the 1970s and 1980s. Even in 1992 they were already getting outdated as for the data quoted in them. Today this phenomenon is even wider and the new situation in the US concerning American Indians with the reparations decided in court and fully financed by Congress and distributed to the various reservations, with the possibility for any American citizen to declare more than one ethnic origin, on a voluntary basis I would say unluckily, leads to the fact that the number of people declaring their Indian origins has multiplied in great proportions. Paula Allen Gunn speaks of one million American Indians in the USA. But the US Census Bureau gives 3,753,858 as of July 1, 2010 and 6,532,598 as of July 1, 2014, hence a 74% growth rate in four years. In other words if this trend goes on the number of US citizens who will claim their Indian roots will reach ten millions in just a few years, and we have to know there is some resistance among African Americans who are Black as for race (and cannot be white because of the one-drop theory) to declare that they are partly Indian since then they would feel and their community would feel there is a conflict of interest. So we have to consider what Paula Gunn Allen says in these essays in the context of the period.
PGA’s Basic concepts
First of all She asserts that American Indians believe in the fact that all is life, that we have to consider the universe as sharing a global cosmic life of which the earth and on this earth humanity as a whole are only a small, tiny, maybe minuscule part. This makes American Indians in their traditional culture both ecological to respect thus Global Cosmic Life which is their personal life, making this Global Cosmic Life the mother of it all, and by being ecological they want to be sustainable. She insists on the fact Indians have endured and hence have been durable but she advocates a wider approach in which American Indians are doing more than enduring but are sustaining the survival and the expansion of humanity as such and their role can increase if they go back to their traditional cultures and heritages. It is surprising here she does not use the Maya concept of Seventh Generation that more or less states that Indians in general would globally revive in the 1990s. This absence of a connection to a prediction from long, long ago could be interpreted positively. She does not want to be seen as superstitious and leaning on something that is not realistic in the modern world: she believes American Indians (and she strangely enough speaks practically only of them in the USA) have to bring themselves back by regenerating their own cultures. Then why not going back to Mayan culture, which she does in her more recent book on Pocahontas.
Then she gets into this culture or rather these cultures as they were before colonization (she knows what she says is entirely in contradiction with the reality of American Indians in the 1980s). She is aware the side she takes represents only about 70% of American Indian cultures but she speaks as if it was the future for them all. The first principle is that “Indian culture is ritual first.” (p. 80) She clearly defines this ritual side of things. “Thus ritual – organized activity that strives to manipulate or direct nonmaterial energies toward some larger goal – forms the foundations of tribal culture.” (p. 80) This widens the approach of her concept of global cosmic life at human level. She sees “a psychic and spiritual whole” in what she calls here a “transformative process [that] engenders the ritual cycle of dying, birth, growth, ripening, dying, and rebirth.” We can wonder why she does not see this approach is a lot wider than American Indian because it is the basic approach of Buddhism for one example, though Buddhism is stating that those who manage to get enlightened and reach nibbana (or nirvana) can step out of this cycle of birth-life-death-rebirth by merging into the cosmic energy of the universe. But there is here a fundamental philosophical connection nevertheless that needs to be explored. It would be interesting if she explored the concept of rebirth she states here. But she does not. The closest suggestion is that we are born unattached in consciousness and we have to have a vision that will make us attached to a clan and eventually one representative of that clan, one famous member who has passed away. This is not real rebirth or reincarnation (as the Hindus or the Tibetan Buddhists would suggest) but it is continuation (more in phase with Theravada Buddhism). She uses the word “continuance.” (p. 267)
But she widens this concept of ritual when she adds: “It is also the basis of cultural artifacts such as crafts, agriculture, hunting, architecture, art, music, and literature. They all take shape and authority from the ritual tradition.” (p. 80) We can see that for her there cannot be any development of Indian culture that does not go back to these rituals as the very basis and inspiration of the creativity of the craftsmen, thinkers or artists. For her this gives three dimensions to this global cosmic life. It is the force that animates the cosmos, and when an American Indian connects with it through his/her vision and his/her coming of age in the early teenage of boys as well as girls this force becomes power. The vision-inspired individual has power over things and people. That power can vary very much according to the vision and the clan (that has nothing to do in its definition with the individual’s blood relations) the person belongs to. And this power can be used to help other people and that becomes what she calls medicine. And here again she seems to lean on, and in fact she clearly favors, the idea that women have a privileged role to play in this capture of the force and its transformation into power and medicine.
PGA’s CONFRONTATION TO GENOCIDE/GYNOCIDE
That’s when she starts wondering why this privileged position of women in Indian culture has been negated and rejected by most Indian tribes today. That’s when she describes what happened to Indians when Europeans arrived and started meddling with their affairs. She speaks of genocide, both physical (including extermination) and mental through forced education and assimilation, what she sums up in the word “acculturation” meaning the forced adoption of European principles. The survivors are cast in a male-dominated structure in contradiction with tradition and that leads these men to alcoholism and self-destruction by losing their safeguard in life. The definition she gives page 129 is comprehensive: “alienation in its classic dimensions of isolation, powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, lowered self-esteem, and self-estrangement, accompanied by anxiety, hopelessness, and victimization.” Women on the other hand are reduced to a state of total alienation that can go as far as being beaten up by their husbands, or would-be husbands. Strangely enough she asserts that this total rejection of women enables them to railroad underground their primeval nature, rebuild unseen on the surface a power that could regenerate the whole Indian culture. That’s where she brings in the mythic dimension of this culture. She defines this word in a note page 274: “Mythic: 1. narratives that deal with metaphysical, spiritual, and cosmic occurrences that recount the spiritual past and the ‘mysteries’ of the tribe. 2. sacred story. The Word in its cosmic, creative sense. This usage follows the literary meaning rather than the common and vernacular meaning of ‘fictive’ or ‘not real narrative dealing with primitive, irrational explanations of the world.’ 3. translational.” She develops this idea and she pretends that these myths have hardly ever been brought to a non-Indian public because what all anthropologists or folklorists have gathered, recorded, etc, is nothing but the popular tales, stories developed from the myths that are never revealed. She actually quotes the name of Paul Radin in this field and we can wonder if she means the Trickster or the Twin Brothers and other tales collected by him are on the secret myth side or on the public popular tale side. She seems to believe that these myths have been kept intact and untouched over the five centuries of European invasion. And she does not communicate any part of them. This leads to the next element, “gynocide” or “gynecide.”
“Gynecide” or “gynocide” is a concept that is original to this author. It means the destruction of the woman-centered Indian civilization (cultures, rituals, social practices, political institutions, etc) by Europeans who considered this dominant position of women as a danger to their own phallocratic organization and vision. She accuses Christianization and colonization to have imposed this total change onto Indians. Strangely enough in 1986 and in 1992 she only considers US American Indians and yet neglects the case of Louisiana or Florida that were at first colonized by the French and the Spanish. She assimilates the French and Spanish Catholic churches to the various English Protestant churches or organizations that produced the United States. She totally ignores the situation in Mexico where the Spanish systematically exterminated Indian males and saved most Indian females and then the Catholic Church and its Inquisition imposed the rule that all black slaves have to be married and enjoy a Christian life. Since most black slaves were males, they were systematically married to Indian women, which explains that by the end of the 17th century the Blacks had practically disappeared from sight in Mexico. They had merged into the Indian population. For her, and she is right on one point, all Christian churches imposed a male-dominated “family” structure. But she ignores the originality of the two Catholic churches of those days as compared to the Protestant churches. But She also ignores the official position of the Catholic Church of the USA in 1977 duly published in a brochure on the necessity concerning American Indians to introduce in the Catholic Church and in society a triple policy summarized in three words: “remember, reconcile, recommit.” If she had followed this line she would have been able to consider that the genocide as much as the gynocide had produced a PTSS of its own that we could Identify as Post Genocide/Gynocide Traumatic Stress Syndrome. And that would have widened her vision and she would have been able to realize that what she proposes is the proper treatment of that post-traumatic situation. Because what she proposes is fundamental.
PGA’s TRIBAL versus NON-TRIBAL
But before it is interesting to see how she describes the Indian tradition as opposed to the Western or European or Christian tradition (she uses the three references and at times summarizes them under the word industrialized). She comes thus to a strict opposition of tribal culture to non-tribal culture.
TRIBAL CULTURE. It favors harmony and balance based on the centrality of women and the search for what she calls “proper order”. It practices equal distribution of value among all elements in a field. It has no heroes, no villains, no chorus, no setting (inert surrounding), no minor characters because it does not practice the foregrounding of one element and the backgrounding of everything else. She insists on mutuality that explains that winter and summer are not enemies and their battle is not a military battle with the defeat of winter but the establishment of ritualistic change from one season to the other that has to be reactivated every single year. Tribal culture works in unified-field fashion with inclusive-field perception. It is accretive and fluid, a-chronological, dependent on harmonious relationships of all elements within a field of perception. She here introduces the concept of background that she has rejected before but this time it means that the background is part of the foreground in a way because when what has had its time to act and perform, it will step in the background it had not really left and another element of this background will have its time to act and perform. Indian culture is also multidimensional, a-chronological (again) and in-cluding.
NON-TRIBAL CULTURE. At once she states it is conflict-centered. She identifies it as being Christian and European. It is for her industrialized and based on industrialized patriarchs. Here we come to the idea that time is not important for Paula Gunn Allen (she is a-chronological) because the colonization of Northern America by the English only started in 1607 but at least one and a half century before the very beginning of industrial mechanization, hence two centuries before the beginning of industrialization per se. The patriarchal organization of English society (with the tremendous exception of Elizabeth I after Mary I and some more Queens later on) and all other European societies is not basically industrial but basically Roman and maybe even Greek. The patriarchal tradition comes from antiquity and the Catholic church only reproduced the patriarchy of the Jewish religious organization (perfectly visible in the Old Testament and the Talmud) that only reproduced what was practiced before. In fact we could think that this patriarchal organization evolved from the invention and development of agriculture some time after the Ice Age. She then could have wondered why Indian societies in the Americas did not develop that patriarchy though they developed agriculture most of the time on the side of hunting, fishing and gathering. We could also nowadays use the recent research on cave paintings all over the world that seems to show that the imprinted hands are not male but female, demonstrating that before the Ice Age humanity was dominated spiritually by women, which would go in her direction. But that would also show that the Americas are a special case. But can we say Mayan, Aztec, Toltec, Inca civilizations are women-dominated? To go back to her non-tribal definition, we can add in European culture winter can be vanquished, which is unsustainable. Europeans have single-focus perception and western masculinist monotheistic modes of perception. They practice the systematic foregrounding of some elements and backgrounding of others with no rotation between these two sets. They are linear and fixed, chronological in thinking and a lot less dependent on harmonious relationships of all elements (this less might even mean not at all). They discount the importance of the background as the living nursery of anything temporarily brought to the foreground. Finally they are uni-dimensional, monolithic, ex-cluding and chronological (again, showing this chronology element is fundamental for Paula Gunn Allen).
Obviously there is a lot of archaeology to be done and then a lot of anthropology to be done. If the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy was so fast and effective among Indians when the Europeans arrived, it’s maybe because the change was happening at the time in the various Indian tribes who are as she says “accretive and fluid.” She states in fact that they would have been extremely unchanging though they were at the time in a process of change that the colonization by the Europeans accelerated and imposed. She thus calls for a shift from the male dominated cluster of warrior-brave-hunter-chief to the female dominated cluster of grandmother-mother-Peacemaker-farmer. (p. 265) and she even calls for a similar change in symbols from feathers-wampum-war bonnets-war paint-bows and arrows-tomahawks to cornmeal-corn pollen-corn mother-metates-grinding stones-hoes-plows-pottery and basket designs (p. 265) to achieve a shift from “warrior oriented” culture to “peace oriented” culture (p. 265). This is Paula Gunn Allen’s objective in order to repair the damage of Christian industrialized colonization and go back to a purely Indian culture and civilization.
PGA’s CONTRADICTION & PROJECT
And that’s where the contradiction in Paul Gunn Allen’s thought is most apparent when she qualifies Indian civilization as being based on “continuance” whereas European industrialized civilization is based on “transitoriness.” This freezing and ossifying of her thought short-circuits the tremendously brilliant proposal to treat the Post Genocide/Gynocide Traumatic Stress Syndrome (that she does not identify as such) via theater and drama.
The theater is bringing together music, text, dancing, lights, settings, costumes and acting. We must understand that Indians do not UNIFY all these but BALANCE them in some harmonious composition. The text is not set to the music and the music is not set to the text. All these elements are supposed to create a fascination each one with its own autonomous and original means. The music is thus a reference to old drums and their ritualistic use. They create a sonorous reference to cultural heritage that is all-pervading because drums were used for every single ritualistic occasion. The text uses one essential characteristic of rituals in Old Indian societies, and this aspect has survived along with music and dancing. An Indian ritual text is repetitive and uses some repetition patterns that are meaningful: the four cardinal directions, the six cardinal plus sky and earth directions, and the seven cardinal plus sky and earth directions plus the center of it all. These patterns, four, six and seven, are used to build songs that repeat some sentences, some stanzas, some syntactic patterns a certain number of times to create hypnosis to bring the individual back inside himself or herself and his/her community itself back to some collective togetherness or balance and the individual and his/her community in some osmosis one into the other. This fascination founding the valorization of the past with music, text and dancing, not set one TO the others but reciprocally balanced one ONTO the others is the best possible treatment of a Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome of any type because it brings liberation, inner liberation of individuals and outer liberation within the recaptured heritage and culture of old times revalorized into life and value. This aims at bringing regeneration to individuals, to collective bodies, inner and outer for both sides. That is the ambition of those theater people she calls “Word Warriors” dedicated to Old Spider Woman, the Creatrix, and Grandmothers.
What she seems to neglect at this moment is that the objective is not to recapture and go back to what Indians used to be but to recapture Indian vital energies that will enable Indians as individuals and collective bodies, communities, to become creative again, to take control of their present and future, to conquer a leading role in their own life, in their community and for their community in wider communities. She remembers the past so much that she wants to go back to it, which is an illusion. She wants to reconcile Indians with Indians but she does not want to reconcile Indians with Europeans. She wants to recommit Indians with their heritage and values, but she does not want to recommit Indians to wider human values that would unite all segments of humanity. Somewhere she loses the clearly expressed ambition to bring Indians back into the Global Cosmic Life that necessarily includes all segments of humanity. How can American Indians achieve that goal without losing their souls? In fact they can by recapturing, reconstructing and rediscovering their souls in the new modern circumstances that require for sure a reconsideration of the position n and role of women in Indian society and in society as a whole. That would imply a reexamination of all gender orientations and definitions, and Maybe Paula Gunn Allen makes her lesbianism too central and dramatic though it is in fact a secondary element having to do with gender freedom and not women per se.
Then we understand that Paula Gunn Allen got trapped by her own research and little by little lost contact with the world beyond her Indian field. But if we overlook the sectarian and exclusive final essay this book is crucial for us to understand what can, could and should be done to reintegrate American Indians in humanity as a creative dynamic force.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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