Articles

Decolonizing Curriculum

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An essay review of
The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions
(Allen, Paula Gunn. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986/1992)

by
Christine E. Sleeter
California State University Monterey Bay
Monterey, CA, USA

The Sacred Hoop by Paula Gunn Allen was perched on my desk as I was
preparing to write this review, when one of my graduate students stopped
in to get my signature on a form. On seeing the book, she exclaimed, I love
that book! I use it all the time! Then she added, A friend gave it to me.
So it was with me. About 20 years ago a Potawatomi friend gave me the
book, knowing of my interest in multicultural education and my engagement with curriculum debates. Pinar (2004) pinpointed the heart of such
debates when he wrote, The school curriculum communicates what we
choose to remember about our past, what we believe about the present,
what we hope for the future. Curriculum debatessuch as those over
multiculturalism and the canonare also debates about the American
national identity (p. 20). Initially, I anticipated that The Sacred Hoop would
be mainly about American Indians, or, more precisely, American Indian
feminist challenges to American national identity. Since Paula Gunn Allen
was a literary theorist, I also thought that it would be about American
Indian literary theory. On reading the book, however, I realized that while
it is both of these, it is also much more: The Sacred Hoop also interrogates
Euro-American ways of knowing from the standpoint of a Laguna Pueblo
feminist intellectual.
CURRICULUM THEORIZING AND INDIGENOUS STANDPOINTS
To introduce The Sacred Hoop to readers who may be unfamiliar with it and
puzzled as to why I chose to write about it here, I will situate the book within
2010 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto
Curriculum Inquiry 40:2 (2010)
Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road,
Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-873X.2010.00477.x

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CHRISTINE E. SLEETER

central questions in curriculum studies. Flinders and Thornton (2009)

state that, among the perennial questions around which curriculum scholars have organized theory, research, teaching, and curriculum evaluation,
are the central questions: What do schools teach, what should they teach,
and who should decide? (p. 1). What schools should teach and who should
decide are issues that lie at the heart of curriculum. Reflecting on the
importance of what she calls aims-talk, however, Noddings (2009)
acknowledges considerable impatience most people have with it, as if the
aims of education have been settled. But at the same time, she notes that If
anything, the current [curriculum] goal in the United States is even narrower than Platos because it concentrates almost entirely on the economic
status of the country (p. 429). Today, the main sorts of questions curriculum workers ask are how to align curriculum with standards and tests, the
entire standards project resting mainly on the aim of raising the nations
status in global economic competition.
Henderson and Kesson (2004) urge us to step back from technicalities
of how to construct curriculum to ask deeper questions about how we
envision and enact a good life. They offer the concept curriculum
wisdom to direct attention toward the processes by which we engage
children and youth in learning to make moral judgments about how life
should be lived. What we teach our children embodies what we most
value in our society. The curriculum, in all its complexity, is the culture.
Embedded in it are our values, our beliefs about human nature, our
visions of the good life, and our hopes for the future. It represents the
truths that we have identified as valued and worth passing on (pp. 206
207). Increasingly curricula have been harnessed to neoliberalism, a
market-based view of the world that conceptualizes the good life largely as
pursuit of wealth and material consumption within a highly competitive
market-based system. Neoliberalism can be understood as neocolonialism
through global capitalism. Diminished aims talk means diminishing the
power of education to help people critically question such a conception of
the good life.
The Sacred Hoop can be understood as a project of decolonization.
Decolonization refers to an interrogation of how European American
thought, knowledge, and power structures dominate present society
(Brayboy, 2006, p. 430), and how that thought and knowledge system
undergirds Indigenous peoples loss of land and sovereignty. As Brayboy
(2006) points out, colonization is an ongoing process that is endemic to
United States policies, undergirded by a drive toward material acquisition.
Traditional school curricula teach the values, beliefs, and knowledge
systems that support colonization. To decolonize curriculum is to critically
examine that knowledge and its relationship to power, recentering knowledge in the intellectual histories of indigenous peoples (Grande, 2004, p.
172). Decolonization also entails theorizing the histories and experiences
of nontribal, detribalized, and mixed-blood peoples (Grande, 2004, p.

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173) to imagine a way of life for all peoples that is not predicated on taking
from or controlling others.
In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen, a member of the Keres Pueblo
tribe in the southwestern United States, works her way through a false dark
created by the massive revisionism of tribal life and thought that characterizes American literary scholarship, drawing on her background in
locating material that points to the truth about the nature of the tribes
prior to Anglo-European invasion and conquest (Allen, 1986, p. 264). In
so doing, she places a mirror in front of American readers, juxtaposing
values, beliefs, visions, and epistemology of the dominant society with those
of Indigenous peoples.1 She challenges us to recognize a much more
life-sustaining, equitable, and spiritually whole vision of what society could
be, and how life can be lived, by learning from the Indigenous peoples who,
although colonized and historically decimated, are still here. But to do so,
we must interrogate ontological and epistemological assumptions on which
Western knowledge rests, and which massively distort comprehension of
Indigenous knowledge.
In U.S. mainstream curriculum, American Indians usually appear as an
add-on. Analyses of mainstream textbooks repeatedly find Native Americans appearing as a small minority located mainly in the past, but also
occasionally in stories in reading books that are set in contemporary times
(Sleeter, 2005). Searches for articles about American Indian, Native American, Indigenous, Aboriginal, or First Nations curriculum theory yield
almost nothing. By contrast, many Indigenous educators have proposed
frameworks for rethinking Indigenous curriculum (e.g., Cajete, 1994; Cornelius, 1998; Grande, 2004), sometimes suggesting that Aboriginal curriculum based on Aboriginal thought and experience can contribute to the
landscape of curricular theory (Weenie, 2008, p. 555); but these are
usually ignored by mainstream curriculum theorists. At the time I first read
The Sacred Hoop, I was attempting to reconceptualize mainstream curriculum from standpoints of historically marginalized groups (Sleeter, 2000). I
found that Allen powerfully questions fundamental assumptions defining
what counts as knowledge and where knowledge comes from, and fundamental ideas on which knowledge rests. She directly confronts the problem
of projection of one set of cultural assumptions onto another cultures
customs and literature (Allen, 1986, p. 67), discussing vividly why Westerners generally do not apprehend Indian perspectives. I found myself
learning through story and conversation with Allen as I read.

THE SACRED HOOP

Paula Gunn Allen (19392008) was a daughter of a Lebanese-American
father and a Laguna-Sioux-Scotch mother. She grew up in New Mexico
near the Laguna Pueblo reservation, identifying most strongly with this

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community, in particular the Keres tribe. She studied creative writing in

college and earned a doctorate from the University of New Mexico in 1975
in American Studies with an emphasis on Native American literature. She
received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Writing in 1978.
A poet, novelist, literary critic, political activist, and theorist, Allen published several books, including The Blind Lion (1974), The Woman Who
Owned the Shadows (1983), Spider Womans Granddaughters: Traditional Tales
and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (1989), and Life Is a Fatal
Disease (1996).
The Sacred Hoop is a collection of essays Allen wrote over a 10-year period,
in which she drew on the Indigenous knowledge system she had learned
growing up, as well as her academic studies and her immersion in American
Indian literature. In the book, she speaks to the problem of accessing
traditional knowledge we are left with 500 years after the beginning of
conquest. Allen points out that records of traditional systems were written
largely through Western patriarchal eyes that did not understand tribal
knowledge, and that ignored women or diminished the central roles
women played, further distorting what was written. Traditionally, and in the
way Allen was raised, knowledge and identity were taught through story,
from grandmother and mother to daughter. Having grown up with access
to traditional knowledge passed down orally, Allen brought to bear a view
of the world and a knowledge of history that originates outside Western
ethnographic, narrative, and historical records. Allen explains that she had
to theorize from her own tribal experience to shift from a male-centered to
a female-centered interpretation of the Indian world, centering that which
is life producing and life sustaining rather than that which is violent. It is
this decolonized viewpoint and body of knowledge that grounds the essays
in this book.
Essentially, Allen argues that ontologically and epistemologically, Indian
knowledge systems, which are very different from Western knowledge
systems, offer possibilities for understanding life and organizing society in
a way that is equitable, sustainable, and spiritually whole. In the Western
worldview, reality is understood as hierarchical, linear, consisting of distinct
categories of phenomena (the material world being quite distinct from the
spiritual), and static in that changes can be arrayed on an unchanging
underlying system. The hoop symbolizes an Indian worldview in which all
things are connected and in relationship, the spiritual and the material
everyday worlds are connected manifestations of the same essence, and the
universe is a dynamic living being. Traditional Indian societies, although
varying widely, were generally more gynocratic (woman centered) than
not, and were never patriarchal. Allen argues further that the physical and
cultural genocide Indians experienced was based mainly on Western patriarchal fears of gynocracy. Despite colonization and genocide, Indigenous
systems have endured much longer than Western systems, and It is
unlikely that a few hundred years of colonization will see their undoing

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(p. 2). She believed that Indigenous peoples reverence for the earth basis
of life may lie at the root of endurance and survival of traditional systems
both in North America and globally.
The books essays are divided into three sections: The Ways of Our
Grandmothers, The Word Warriors, and Pushing Up the Sky. The three
essays in the first section discuss the gynocentric nature of most Indian
social organizations. Although known by different terms, many tribes in the
Americas viewed primal power as female, and Thought Woman2 as the
original source of knowledge. Womens power originates in the power to
give life and to create knowledge about life-sustaining concerns such as
cooperation, peace, and health. Under gynocentric systems, male and
female are seen as complementary, not as opposite. In contrast, Western
society is largely male centered (with God as He) and hierarchical. (Allens
analysis of gynocentric Indigenous systems anticipates Riane Eislers analysis of women-centered traditional societies, published a year later in 1987.)
In the process of conquest, womens power was forcibly replaced with
patriarchy. This was done in part militarily, and in part through Christianization in which Thought Woman was replaced with a male God, and the
patriarchal Western family structure as well as forms of education that
emphasize external control were imposed. Allen explains that many tribes
(such as the Cherokee) actively replaced traditional systems with European
systems in order to survive, but experienced dispossession and genocide
anyway.
The middle section of the bookThe Word Warriorscontains eight
essays that mainly analyze Indian literature, starting with traditional literature, then moving to novels and poetry. Allen explains that literature is
central to Indian thought because it is the verbal component to ritual,
which is the process by which Indian peoples bring things into balance. By
fusing traditional literary structures and symbols with contemporary concerns, authors knit the old ways to the new circumstances in such a way
that the fundamental worldview of the tribe will not be distorted or
destroyed (p. 180).
The first essay in this sectionThe Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary
Perspectivelays the theoretical groundwork for the essays that follow.
There, Allen argues that Indian literature (including oral literature) is
based on such fundamentally different assumptions from Western literature that it is usually either dismissed entirely, or viewed as childish and
simple folklore. She explains that literaturewhich reads and interprets
symbols in nature about the cosmos (symbols that most Westerners miss) is
a part of ceremony. Because the universe is alive and organic, ceremony has
the purpose of directing organized and collective energy toward a goal of
the tribe, and ceremonial literature serves to redirect private emotion and
integrate the energy generated by emotion within a cosmic framework (p.
55). Allen elaborates on these general ideas with considerable detail about
ceremonies, drawing on examples from different tribes. This essay zeroes in

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on fundamental epistemological differences between how Indians have

traditionally read the world and how Westerners do so, and how these
fundamental differences block Westerners from understanding Indian
thought. The Western view based in rationalism assumes a positivistic
stance (a world out there to be measured and classified). When applying
that stance to traditional Indian knowledge, Westerners miss not only its
substance but also the ontological and epistemological basis on which it
rests. In the process, we dismiss ways of organizing society, relating to the
natural world, and conceptualizing the good life that we could well learn
from.
The essay entitled Something Sacred Going On Out There continues
developing the relationship between traditional knowledge, traditional literature, and ceremony by discussing myth and the centrality of vision. Allen
explains that vision is an individual experience; myth is how vision is shared
with the community through symbols and characters from the specific
vision. Vision and myth fuse past-present-future time frames, the ordinary
and the sacred, and the conscious and the unconscious; myths provide a
way of situating the self in cosmic order, making whole the disparate
strands of experience. Westerners usually encounter Indian myths out of
the context of vision and community participation. When read as a story or
a document, a myth becomes an artifact that has been stripped of its actual
use and life.
The remaining essays in this section discuss specific forms of contemporary literature, mainly novels and poetry, showing how they are grounded
in traditional themes, literary structures, and social functions. For example,
the essay entitled Whose Dream Is This Anyway? shows how novels by
Indian authors have shifted from a Western literary structure that centers
on conflict and its resolution, and that foregrounds individual characters,
to a more traditional Indian literary structure that is a-chronological and
centered on ritual. Allen then illustrates the latter with a discussion of
Leslie Marmon Silkos Ceremony, a novel that Western readers (including
me when I first read it) often find confusing and difficult to follow because
it does not follow a Western literary structure. The basis of Indian time is
ceremonial, cyclical; everything is connected and in motion (which as Allen
explains in a subsequent essay is very similar to how physicists understand
nature). In contrast, the basis of Western time is mechanical and linear,
locating phenomena on a grid of time and space that assumes these to be
fixed.
Chapters focusing specifically on novels and poetry have direct relevance
to anyone who teaches literature, but perhaps less direct relevance for
curriculum theorists who are grounded in other disciplines. Although I had
read some of the literary works Allen discusses, because I was reading the
book mainly for its discussion of the relationship between worldview and
intellectual expression, details about literary works and authors went
beyond the scope of my interest. For example, I skimmed the essay This

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Wilderness in My Blood, which reviews five women poets and their work,
and the essay A Stranger in My Own Life, which reviews themes in
contemporary Indian literature. However, Allens detailed discussion of
specific literary works draws attention to some larger issues. For example,
although loss and alienation are not major themes in traditional Indian
literature, they strongly characterize contemporary literature because they
speak to lived consequences of conquest.
The last section of the bookPushing Up the Skyconsists of six essays
that develop tribal feminist theorizing. One that I have found particularly
useful for thinking about curriculum is Kochinnenako in Academe: Three
Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale. This essay (which I have
used in a curriculum course) demonstrates how an Indian story can be
understood and told very differently depending on the knowledge framework and standpoint brought to bear. Allen presents a Keres tale about
summer and winter, first telling it as it is usually told today through a
patriarchal perspective with a linear narrative European plot structure in
which a protagonist experiences and resolves conflict. In this case, the tale
becomes a romance story. Allen then retells the tale in different ways: as a
traditional Keres Indian would have told it (orally, and structured not by
narrative storyline but by an axis of directions, maternal relationships
among people, and movement), then from modern feminist perspectives
(with paragraphs representing liberal, radical, and radical lesbian interpretations), and finally from a feminist tribal perspective. Each point of view
offers a quite different understanding. Allens main argument is that How
one teaches or writes about the one perspective in terms of the other is
problematic (p. 244), and that readers/writers/teachers must be deeply
reflexive about their own assumptions when engaging with knowledge that
has very different origins, in this case, non-Indians attempting to understand Indian knowledge.
In the essay Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism, Allen
argues that the ideals of the feminist movement, and indeed all of the
dreams of liberation that characterize the modern world (p. 214), have
tribal origins; feminism did not begin with White suffragettes, but has much
longer roots in tribal life. Allen points out that during the early history of
the United States, there was considerable contact between Indians and
non-Indians (the fact that a large proportion of U.S. citizens have Indian
ancestry attests to histories of familial relationships), suggesting abundant
opportunity for White Americans to learn Indian views of egalitarianism
and freedom, which gradually not only influenced mainstream American
culture but also helped to inform the developing U.S. governing system.3
Allen also discusses, with examples, flows of cultureparticularly a free
and easy egalitarianism (p. 218)from the Americas to Europe, paralleling research on flows of food from the Americas outward.
Two essays in this section explicate a lesbian standpoint. In How the
West Was Really Won, Allen reviews alternative constructions of gender

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and designations of gender that were normal in various tribes. For

example, in many tribes, gendered roles were assigned based on inclination
of the individual rather than biology; some women functioned as men
(including marrying a woman), and visa versa. A highly important womens
role was life support and spiritual centering; in that context, it was unthinkable to disrespect mothers and grandmothers. Allen argues that conquest
was fueled partially by homophobia. Through Christianization, many
Indians rejected Indian traditions and the power of the grandmothers, and
adopted Europeans homophobia. In a subsequent essay, Allen explores
the problem of actually having knowledge about lesbianism, because today
it is rarely discussed among Indians, and historically not only did ethnographers discuss families and households on European terms, but also Christianity violently suppressed variations of sexual relations and family
structures. Allens theorizing, then, is based on her knowledge of gender
and family that she learned growing up.

A PROJECT OF DECOLONIZATION
In a discussion of the process of decolonizing research, Linda Tuhiwai
Smith (1999) states, While the language of imperialism and colonialism
has changed, the sites of struggle remain. The struggle for the validity of
indigenous knowledges may no longer be over the recognition that indigenous peoples have ways of viewing the world that are unique, but over
proving the authenticity of, and control over, our own forms of knowledge
(p. 104). Smith argues that colonial narratives have been extraordinarily
disruptive to the lives of indigenous peoples; decolonizing knowledge is a
matter of survival.
The Sacred Hoop can be recognized as a project decolonizing how the
Americas and American people are understood and taught. Allen was well
aware that not only do dominant narratives reflect the knowledge and deep
assumptions of the colonizers, but also that tribal people have internalized
much of the colonizers understanding of the world. For example, in a
discussion of violence that Indians in general and women specifically experience today, Allen points out that many Indians have internalized Western
patriarchy, acting out its violence toward women. Her discussions of literature repeatedly point to ceremony as the fundamental curricular structure
for decolonization. While school curriculum is usually enacted as an individual process of knowledge consumption, with testing used as a means of
finding out the extent to which each student has acquired the designated
knowledge, ceremony is a communal process of spiritually integrating
individuals into the tribe and the cosmos.
For mainstream curriculum, the implications are challenging because
the dominant society generally resists decolonized perspectives. It does so
by locating the entire process of colonization in the past and greatly sani-

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tizing what is remembered (Sleeter, 2004), and by characterizing Indigenous knowledge as either childish fiction or something akin to New Age
spiritualism (Grande, 2004). When teaching curriculum, I as well as many
other curriculum theorists want educators to step back from questions
about how to construct curriculum, to consider the nature of knowledge
and the worldview that curriculum embodies. As Thompson and Gitlin
(1995) put it, this involves the creating of spaces that lend themselves to
the possibility of changing relationships in ways that problematize
co-ordered power and that engender new habits, expectations, and notions
of appropriateness (p. 148). I challenge educators to think critically about
power relationships locally and globally today, power relationships on
which society was historically constructed, and alternative relationships and
ways of conceiving of life that are possible. I also challenge educators to
think critically about who they dialogue with and listen to when considering
these issues, and who they have learned to dismiss.
Over the years, I have repeatedly found teachers interested in creating
curriculum about American Indians, but very often resistant to learning from
American Indians. In one course, I require teachers to read intellectual
work written by and for adults from a marginalized community as a basis for
curriculum transformation. For example, an elementary teacher, after realizing that her social studies textbook told U.S. history from a White point of
view, read several Indian accounts of history (see Sleeter, 2005). At first she
was baffled about how to reconstruct her social studies curriculum because
the White and Indian accounts were so opposite. She ended up creating a
well thought-out short unit in which the Wampanoag of Massachusetts
brought the European settlers to trial for misusing natural resources, using
the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Great Law that governed trials, thereby
using Indigenous knowledge substantively. However, many teachers who
focus on American Indians insist on reading only childrens literature
about them rather than intellectual scholarship by American Indians.
Like the graduate student with whom I opened this essay, I repeatedly
turn to The Sacred Hoop to see the world through a different lens. This is
certainly not the only piece of Indigenous scholarship I use and learn from,
but it continues to provide conceptual groundwork that I have been using
since reading it for the first time over 20 years ago. The Sacred Hoop helps to
rework the conversation between colonizer and colonized from one of
domination to one of dialogue across intellectual traditions. It is in spaces
of dialogue that those of us in the dominant society might learn reciprocity
and power sharing. Jones and Jenkins (2008), in their examination of the
historic roots of White New Zealanders denial of the education that Maori
(the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand) desired, observed: This, the
colonizers inability or refusal to learn from the indigene necessarily laid
down the beginning of an education system within which Indigenous
knowledges had no real place for Maori or Pakeha, making impossible an
educational engagement in Maori interests (p. 188). They suggest that

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outcomes for both the Indigenous peoples and the colonizers would be
quite different if the colonizers had learned to listen and learn from those
who were being colonized. I suggest that it is not impossible for those of us
who are White to learn to do so, and I recommend reading The Sacred Hoop
as a rich place to begin.

NOTES
1. A word about terminology in this essay. I use the term Indigenous to refer both to
Indigenous peoples globally, as well as Indigenous peoples of North America. I
use the term American Indian in this essay because that was the term Allen uses to
refer to the various tribes of the Americas. I use other terms (such as Native
American) when such terms are commonly used in a specific context I am
referring to.
2. Allen defines Thought Woman as the true creatrix for she is thought itself, from
which all else is born (p. 14). Indian tribes accounts of the origin of all things
vary, but most name a quintessential intelligent spirit who, in most cases, is
female.
3. Allen mentions links between the U.S. Constitution and the Iroquois White
Roots of Peace, links that are documented in detail by Grinde and Johansen
(1991).

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Allen, P. G. (1989). Spider womans granddaughters: Traditional tales and contemporary
writing by Native American women. Boston: Beacon Press.
Allen, P. G. (1996). Life is a fatal disease. Albuquerque, NM: West End Press.
Brayboy, B. M. J. (2006). Toward a tribal critical race theory in education. The Urban
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Cornelius, C. (1998). Iroquois corn in a culture-based curriculum. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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