Tribal Theory in Native American Literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Indigenous Worldviews

5. A Gendered Future: Wi and Hanwi in Contemporary Dakota Writing

Concepts of masculine and feminine principles are emic to numerous Indigenous oral traditions from the Haudenosaunee Sky Woman and Holder of the Heavens to Grandmother Moon and Grandfather Sun in Aztec tradition.These principles inform many traditional and contemporary Native American texts, as Kimberly Roppolo has suggested in“Collating Divergent Discourses.”Among contemporary Dakota authors, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Philip Red Eagle particularly invoke and deploy aspects of these gendered principles in their decolonizing narratives of healing, and these feminine and masculine archetypes are remembered and vivified in their epistemic debt to the Dakota oral tradition of creation. According to the Dakota oral tradition, in the beginning there was iƒyaƒ, the rock, who was all alone except for haƒhepi, the darkness, which surrounded iƒyaƒ. Iƒyaƒ wanted another entity to exercise its power over it, but the rock had to create that entity from its own lifestuff, and therefore iƒyaƒ took its own power and blood and formed a disk called maka,the earth.Iƒyaƒ also formed the waters and the sky maŸpiyato, with its blood. The creation of maka and maŸpiyato required so much blood that iƒyaƒ was CHAPTER FIVE A Gendered Future Wi and Haƒwi in Contemporary Dakota Writing drained completely and became hard and shriveled.After quarrels between maka and haƒhepi, maŸpiyato banished haƒhepi to the underworld and made aƒpetu, or day. Maka was unhappy because she was attached to iƒyaƒ perpetually, so in order to assuage her distress, maŸpiyato created wi, sun or moon, to clothe and warm maka. Marla Powers writes that the term Wi is essentially a female marker, and even today the term wi stands for both sun and moon, the two being distinguished by the qualifiers Anpetu Wi “sun,” that is day or light wi, and Hanhepi Wi “moon,” that is, night or dark wi. Here we see a symbolic replication: just as Inyan, in the beginning sexually undifferentiated, created out of itself both male and female properties [maka and maŸpiyato], we later see in the origin myth, the creation of the sun and the moon, again out of an undifferentiated wi. But wi signifies female and is in fact terminologically related to winyan “woman.” In the Dakota oral tradition the roles of wi and haƒwi are fundamentally interrelated. Aƒpetu wi rules the daytime, and haƒwi predominates during the night. It is aƒpetu wi who is celebrated eachAugust in the Sun Dance,and it is haƒwi who rules the women’s monthly cycles that in turn determine women’s ability to participate in ceremonies such as the Sun Dance.At the root we see that these two figures represent masculine and feminine principles,although their original source is without gender.1 Given the imposition of Eurowestern education and religion on the Dakota people,the fundamental balance between wi and haƒwi has been upset. Eurowestern influence has served to displace the role of women in Dakota society and has encouraged the proliferation of a number of practices that fly in the face of traditional values: domestic violence,elder abuse,child abuse,and alcoholism. At heart many of these societal ills are linked to the denial of the feminine principle by the missionaries and educators who infiltrated Dakota lands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.There are 94 | a gendered future numerous efforts to rectify this imbalance,including domestic violence shelters and tribally centered treatment programs, and these efforts to heal and return to traditional understandings of gender are mirrored in many contemporary Dakota writers’ fiction. In Sacred Hoop (1986) Laguna/Lakota scholar Paula Gunn Allen defines and historicizes the gynocracy that organized most Native American societies prior to contact.She observes that“[t]raditional tribal lifestyles are more often gynocratic than not, and they are never patriarchal.”She then describes the characteristics of tribal gynocracy from nurturing and pacifism to even distribution of goods and social responsibility.2 Sacred Hoop was and is a landmark study of NativeAmerican women’s central roles in tribal society,and Allen correctly draws attention to the gendered cultural genocide committed in the flesh and in the historical record.Simultaneously, the figure of the Native male also has been a consistent source of settler anxiety,and Dakota fiction writers,Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Philip Red Eagle,address...