Paula Gunn Allen Publishes The Sacred Hoop
Paula Gunn Allen's 1986 publication, *The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions*, is a groundbreaking collection of essays that explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, and Native American culture from an Indigenous perspective. Allen, a Laguna Pueblo-Lakota Sioux scholar, combines autobiography, historical narrative, poetry, and literary analysis to examine the impact of homophobia, sexism, and racism on the interpretation of American Indian traditions. The work delves into the historical acceptance of diverse gender identities within Native cultures, particularly the concept of "two-spirit" individuals, who embody both male and female qualities and are often revered in tribal societies.
Allen's scholarship challenges the patriarchal frameworks imposed by European colonization, arguing for the recognition of female-centered, egalitarian social systems that honor diversity rather than enforce conformity. The book is significant not only for its insights into Native American gender identities but also for its contribution to the discourse on lesbian, gay, and transgender histories. Allen's candid acknowledgment of her lesbian identity in the introduction adds depth to the work, positioning it as a vital text for understanding the complexities of gender and sexuality within Indigenous contexts. *The Sacred Hoop* ultimately serves as both a reclamation of Indigenous traditions and a critique of the cultural erasures instigated by colonialism.
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Paula Gunn Allen Publishes The Sacred Hoop
Paula Gunn Allen, a specialist in American Indian/Native American studies, published The Sacred Hoop as a challenge to the Anglo-European erasure of indigenous American beliefs about gender and sexuality.
Date 1986
Locale United States
Key Figures
Paula Gunn Allen (Paula Marie Francis; b. 1939), Laguna Pueblo scholar of Native American sexuality and gender history and women’s studies
Summary of Event
In 1986, Native American scholar and lesbian Paula Gunn Allen published The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, the first collection of essays in which gender issues and sexuality are examined from an American Indian perspective. The book combines autobiography with historical narrative, poetry, literary analysis, and myth, and explores how homophobia, sexism, and racism have significantly distorted how American Indian cultures are perceived and interpreted. The Sacred Hoop is of added significance to lesbian, gay, and transgender history because Allen comes out as lesbian in the book’s introduction.
Allen, born Paula Marie Francis in 1939 in Cubero, New Mexico, has a Laguna Pueblo-Lakota Sioux-Scottish mother and a Lebanese American father. She is a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe. She spent much of her childhood absorbing the stories and beliefs of the female-centered Pueblo culture from her mother and grandmother. As a result, Allen’s thinking has been deeply influenced by the Native American experience. Allen, who received her bachelor’s degree in English in 1966 and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing in 1968, both from the University of Oregon, also earned a doctorate in American studies with an emphasis in Native American studies from the University of New Mexico in 1976. She retired as a professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1999. In both nonfiction and fiction, Allen has addressed Native American lesbian and gay ways of life. Along with The Sacred Hoop, she has written poetry and novels and has edited several collections.
The Sacred Hoop journeys to the roots of American Indian cultures to find ways to challenge patriarchal constructions of gender identity. Native American cultures once celebrated people who were “two-spirited,” that is, individuals, found in most tribes, who would now be called lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. The Kaska culture would designate as a boy one girl in a family of only girls. The new “son” would dress in male clothing and then would function in the Kaska male role for the rest of his life. The Yuma culture had a tradition of gender designation based on dreams; a female who dreamed of weapons would become a male for all practical purposes. A Cocopah girl who chose to play with boys or with boys’ objects such as a bow and arrow would become a male functionary. Among the Mohave, the hwame, or lesbian, took a male name and was in all respects subject to ritual male taboos such as avoidance of contact with a menstruating wife. The hwame’s wife was considered not a hwame but simply a woman. The Navajo considered lesbians an asset to their culture, and the Mohave, Quinault, Apache, Ojibwa, and Eskimo all viewed homosexuals as a natural and necessary part of society.
This fluid definition and understanding of “gender” had been quickly dismissed and forgotten by European settlers. Allen reports that in the centuries following European colonization of the New World, American Indian tribes have seen a progressive shift from gynocentric, egalitarian, ritual-based social systems to secularized systems closely imitative of the European patriarchal system. Patriarchy is harmful to gender-bending and rule-breaking gays and lesbians, whereas female-centered social systems, also called matriarchies, accord honor to a diversity of people, including gays, lesbians, and those who are transgender; patriarchy, on the other hand, values masculinity and sameness. Female-centered societies and cultures are focused on social responsibility rather than on privilege. To the pre-Columbian American Indians who originated this female-centered system, it was a way of life to recognize and respect diversity rather than enforce conformity and sameness. Allen’s notion of gynocentrism is not the same as the idea of a matriarchy, however, in which females dominate males. To Allen, the genders operate in the context of balance and mutual respect.
European colonizers of the Americas also had been threatened by Native American culture because it was a culture of decisive, self-directing females and nurturing, pacifist males. To achieve total conquest, the Europeans needed to establish and practice a patriarchal social and cultural system. Along with the devaluation of women in patriarchy comes the devaluation of traditional spiritual leaders, and, largely because of their ritual power and status, the devaluation of lesbian and gay tribal members as leaders, shamans, healers, or ritual participants. Virtually all sexual customs among the tribes had been changed by colonialism, including marital, premarital, homosexual, and ritual sexual practices. Allen argues that this loss of tradition and memory, in particular the erasure of tribal gynocentric belief systems, represents the root of oppression.
Significance
Paula Gunn Allen was one of the most prominent American Indian intellectuals and writers of the twentieth century. Her scholarship on Native American understandings of “two-spirits” represents some of the most significant work on the subject, laying the groundwork for more research in this area. Despite increased scholarly interest in women of color, Allen’s feminist writings have not attracted the attention they deserve. Scholars such as AnaLouise Keating have attributed this lack of attention to what many believe is the extreme nature of Allen’s views.
Reflecting Allen’s background as a feminist of color who came of age politically in the 1960’s, Allen takes a separatist stance grounded in a rigidly gynocentric American Indian life perspective. She has been criticized for taking what some consider to be a monolithic, essentializing view of spiritual forces and the feminine in American Indian traditions. In addition, because she conceives of an inner self that often receives guidance from the supernatural, Allen has been further challenged for perpetuating romantic images of a mythic tribal universe to which Euro-America can securely escape in a desire to find an exotic, authentic Native Other.
Allen nevertheless has made visible the lives of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people from the past. She has written these individuals into Native American history. In doing so, she has helped to undermine the notion that homosexuality is an “unnatural” concept.
Bibliography
Allen, Paula Gunn. Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-busting Border-crossing Loose Canons. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. 1986. New preface. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
Anderson, Kim. A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood. Toronto, Ont.: Second Story Press, 2000.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Native American Women Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998.
Hansen, Elizabeth. Paula Gunn Allen. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1990.
Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two-spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Keating, AnaLouise. Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.
Pulitano, Elvira. Toward a Native American Critical Theory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.