Poem: "Saved by the Spirits of the Land"
Oct. 4th, 2022 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThis is today's freebie. It was inspired by a prompt from Elijah of the_broken_tower. It also fills "The 6th Sense" square in my 10-1-22 card for the Fall Festival Bingo.
"Saved by the Spirits of the Land"
Every tribe on Turtle Island
has a legend handed down
from their ancestors, and
they all say the same thing,
differing only in the details:
When our people first came
to this land, they were cold
and starving and dying because
they did not know how to live here.
One person went out into the wild
and begged for help so that
the people could survive.
Then the land spirits took pity
and one of them appeared with
instructions, a request, and a gift.
The instructions were all different,
telling each group of people how
to live in the land they had found,
how to hunt and fish, which plants
were safe to eat or good medicine.
The requests varied too, and these
became the ceremonies that defined
what was sacred for each of the tribes,
like how White Buffalo Calf Woman
brought the Peace Pipe to the Lakota.
The gifts were things to help them thrive --
one granted a sixth sense to see and
speak with spirits, and another turned
teosinte grass into many-colored corn.
Every tribe tells of the time when they
were saved by the spirits of the land.
And the ones who did not listen?
They starved and died, so they
have no legends left to tell.
* * *
Notes:
The Four Sacred Medicines are Tobacco, Cedar, Sage, and Sweetgrass. These are widely used by many tribes, although some variation occurs across different ecoregions.
The legend of White Buffalo Calf Woman is one of many origin stories about how a spirit saved people from starving by teaching them good ways to live in that place.
Medicine people have many abilities, but their main job is being a bridge between the spirit world and the material world, so they customarily have some way of sensing spirits and other mystical matters.
Teosinte is the wild ancestor of modern corn. Pretty much all the tribes who historically relied on corn have a story about how it came to them and saved them.
the_broken_tower. It also fills "The 6th Sense" square in my 10-1-22 card for the Fall Festival Bingo."Saved by the Spirits of the Land"
Every tribe on Turtle Island
has a legend handed down
from their ancestors, and
they all say the same thing,
differing only in the details:
When our people first came
to this land, they were cold
and starving and dying because
they did not know how to live here.
One person went out into the wild
and begged for help so that
the people could survive.
Then the land spirits took pity
and one of them appeared with
instructions, a request, and a gift.
The instructions were all different,
telling each group of people how
to live in the land they had found,
how to hunt and fish, which plants
were safe to eat or good medicine.
The requests varied too, and these
became the ceremonies that defined
what was sacred for each of the tribes,
like how White Buffalo Calf Woman
brought the Peace Pipe to the Lakota.
The gifts were things to help them thrive --
one granted a sixth sense to see and
speak with spirits, and another turned
teosinte grass into many-colored corn.
Every tribe tells of the time when they
were saved by the spirits of the land.
And the ones who did not listen?
They starved and died, so they
have no legends left to tell.
* * *
Notes:
The Four Sacred Medicines are Tobacco, Cedar, Sage, and Sweetgrass. These are widely used by many tribes, although some variation occurs across different ecoregions.
The legend of White Buffalo Calf Woman is one of many origin stories about how a spirit saved people from starving by teaching them good ways to live in that place.
Medicine people have many abilities, but their main job is being a bridge between the spirit world and the material world, so they customarily have some way of sensing spirits and other mystical matters.
Teosinte is the wild ancestor of modern corn. Pretty much all the tribes who historically relied on corn have a story about how it came to them and saved them.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-10-05 11:07 am (UTC)Considering what we know of conditions in North America when the (probable) first settlers arrived, cold and starving and dying is pretty accurate.
Given that we know that when the ancestors of current Native tribes arrived, there was already a sparse population of people there who'd been around since before the ice age, so going and asking someone how to survive here might well have happened, albeit rather more mundanely.
The truly amazing thing is, these events have been recorded and passed down as tales for thousands of years with a pretty good degree of accuracy! There are parts of the oral histories, which if you don't take them literally, but also do not just dismiss them as fiction, then they quite accurately describe conditions at the time. Like the passage though a great cave... well, when you consider where the land bridge was, 4 months of complete darkness over winter would seem like being in a cave. Just described a bit poetically.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-10-05 02:34 pm (UTC)Interestng!
I'd heard of something similar in the British Isles, but not the Americas. Do you have a source or reference?
(no subject)
Date: 2022-10-05 03:22 pm (UTC)Here's a good start. Basically, there were multiple waves, going back 15,000 years or more. The last ice age officially ended 12,500 years ago. (although it started ending 25,000 ago... there's some dispute) However, recent discoveries place humans in North America much earlier, around 21 to 23 thousand years ago. Pre-dating known ancestors of current natives.
There is some evidence [foot morphology isn't quite right) that these precursors might not have been modern humans but one of our ancestral species, possibly neanderthals or Devonsian. Certainly they could've made use of the ice cap to cross over from Europe. As such they were probably around in the Americas for around half million years or more prior to colonisation by modern humans. Plenty of time to get used to the place and know their way around.
Yes ...
Date: 2022-10-05 07:15 pm (UTC)Also, there is some evidence that people traveled, not over land, but along the coast probably in canoes. A challenge in researching this is that most of the places they would have stopped or settled are now underwater.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2022-10-05 07:25 pm (UTC)Hm... I can't find the reference now but they did recently find a well preserved ocean-going twin hulled canoe that was dated to around 120,000 years old. Oceanic travel does make more sense, even with land bridges but as you say, anywhere they put in to port is now well and truly submerged.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2022-10-05 07:55 pm (UTC)Daaaaamn. That is way older than anything I've heard, and older than modern Homo sapiens.
>>Oceanic travel does make more sense, even with land bridges but as you say, anywhere they put in to port is now well and truly submerged.<<
I said most. It depends entirely on the coastline. Where it's a shallow slope, any small rise in sea level will submerge a large margin. But where it's steep, a much greater increase is required to make much headway. References I have seen include a few on beaches and some from offshore dives.
*ponder* If I were searching, I know one thing I'd look for: clam gardens along the now-submerged former coast. They're likely to leave scallop marks that should be visible with various modern scanning devices. Backtrack the shift in ocean levels and that should tell you roughly when that coast was at the right waterline to have people working it.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2022-10-05 08:01 pm (UTC)Yup, predating modern H.sapiens, and the skill level it was made with (well, as far as can be seen) was about comparable to polynesian long-range canoes at their best.
Which figures, because ancient people got everywhere and not all of that was accessible by land. There were precursor hominids in Asia including thailand and Malaysia and Australia. For all we know, they travelled out to the pacific islands and beyond as well.
Me, I'd start looking for piles driven into the mud and silt of the seabed. People had to make jetties, and the ocean floor is good at preserving stuff.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2022-10-05 08:37 pm (UTC)If you find that reference again, let me know.
>>Me, I'd start looking for piles driven into the mud and silt of the seabed. People had to make jetties, and the ocean floor is good at preserving stuff.<<
Canoes are designed so they don't need facilities, you can just drag them up a beach. But it's true that people may not want to get their feet wet, and jetties are convenient for fishing too. Doesn't hurt to look.
*ponder* But I'd check for stone spits as well as wood or stone piles. The first thing people usually try is just throwing rocks in the water, and in fact that's a way they hit on the idea of clam gardens. Next is felling a tree or two seaward. But wood floats, even big wood. It takes a while for folks to work their way around to the idea of a dock or jetty that stands above the water and is anchored onto pillars. They have to be good at either making planks (which is hard with early tools), making something like a lightweight raft, or weaving limber branches to make sort of a giant mat.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2022-10-05 10:28 pm (UTC)Kelp has a variety of uses and architecture made from plants will often strengthen and self-report over time. (Though I've only heard of this trick done with land plants.)
And could also be used as a garden plot.
It'd be cool to know what the whale and dolphin stories say about that part of history, but decoding the words and cultural context...
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2022-10-07 06:43 am (UTC)The Aquarium in Brooklyn reopened recently, and there's also an aquarium in Camden, NJ, and I'm probably not going to get to visit either one any time soon, dammit.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2022-10-30 11:56 am (UTC)Captivity tends to scramble cultural transmission, as can be seen with the modified versions of traditional (non-mainstream) folklore in the US today.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2022-10-05 09:14 pm (UTC)Especially if there are any remnants of aesthetic design (like carvings or inlays) in the canoe.
- K (he/they)