To pursue the theme of gender in North American Indian religious traditions is to bring the construction of gender, long in process, of ancient civilizations into dialogue with the concerns of the present. It necessarily involves a task of identifying carefully what gender means in traditional native cultures and defining the ways, past and present, that this aspect of culture can be assessed. Moreover it requires a critical appraisal of the propriety and accuracy of the conclusions made by those interpreters who were not inside the culture. Especially it demands a clear presentation of the relation of gender and religion, because this varies greatly from Western to traditional cultures.

The Construction of Gender

The construction of gender—indeed even the understanding of it—always takes place in the wider project of imagining the shape of the...