Poem: "Saved by the Spirits of the Land"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This 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.

Comments

[siliconshaman]

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.