Here it is; Full Corn Moon. There are many alternate delights and abundance, a chance to really develop our spiritual self. Are you grateful for your relationships? Get ready to be more ‘together’
I learned many things in my first Nations’ walk I made for half my life. This used to be the anniversary of marriage for many of the nations because, harvesting finished meant time to bond to another. To assist each other through the hard months. It was also the time when couples, who had not been good together, could walk away from each other (with one caveat: Elders knew that to have once been married, it was not good to stay without a partner for all the usual reasons. And, when the newcomers came and saw the couples split apart and go to the teepees of their new partners, they called it “Teepee Jumping”, without understanding the protocol and wisdom)
There was a great deal of protocol about joining together in a bond. A young man would go toa girl’s parents’ teepee and makes a request, giving beads to the mother and the father a breechcloth. If they take the gifts, it means they agree and the girl is led to her new teepee without any ado. That evening there would be a great feast, presided over by Elders who had watched, from the sidelines and made sure that the blood connections of the couple were at least four generation’s apart.
The father no longer had any control over his daughter. A young man could no longer look his mother-in-law, so to speak, in the eyes and they had to even put up a partition so he would not see her. If he took any other wives, it would be sisters of the girl or a close relative who had lost her partner. The first partner is always the main partner. Elders, and old tribes’ people were the ones that each couple could go to for counsel. The father or the mother could not get involved because it was thought they would create problems. Every tribe and, within that, every tribe or clan, the protocols were different.
No matter what tribe, though, the wife was highly honored because she did the main work except the fishing and hunting and warring which was her husband’s job.
You will hear of many First Nations marriages during this time. The gratitude feasts and the abundance feasts often go along with partnering. Women were a thing of great value and afforded abundance to a man, his family, and the tribe, in her work and in her chid-bearing/or rearing, to which she was taken. We often forget the women, in our families, who do the feast-making, and the work it takes to put on a beautiful thanksgiving dinner. Every day was a Mother’s Day in the tribes of early times, no matter whether from the East, the South, the West or the South, there are stories of some kind of abundance feasts, of gratitude days of joining partners. Fall was typically the time for this; after the harvesting, after a successful hunting party, and great gratitude was shown.
This Fall, remember the mothers/mother-figures, in your life that have afforded you great abundance, in some way. Remember those who planted the seeds of your being. Place the cornucopias, representing the womb of Mother Earth, the wheat sheaves, the corn cobs that represent this gifting of the Corn Moon.
©Carol Desjarlais 9.20.21
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