SOURCE: A review of The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 25, 1987, p. 11.

Karvar is known for her English translations of Ponca and Lakota histories and myths. In the review below, she favorably assesses The Sacred Hoop.

My great-grandmother told my mother: Never forget you are Indian. And my mother told me the same thing. This, then, is how I have gone about remembering, so that my children will remember too.

In [The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions], a collection of 17 essays representing more than a decade of cultural research, Native American author and scholar Paula Gunn Allen challenges five centuries of misconceptions surrounding the role of Native American women in many "pre-contact" tribal societies; misconceptions the author contends have "… transformed and obscured what were once woman-centered cultures…."

In her first section, "The Ways of...