Aurora Borealis and springtime stars light up the sky over Medicine Hat last week. --PHOTO BY COLTON MCKEE
“We are the spirits of your ancestors and loved ones passed. A massive canopy of stories unfolding in front of your eyes every night. We are maps, clocks and calendars. We are language and we are spirits dancing across the sky.”
– “Stars”, Dawn Iehstoseranon:nha (She keeps the feathers)
The Spring Equinox has arrived to shift the year a quarter-turn, whispering to Mother Earth to emerge from beneath Her winter blanket.
The South Saskatchewan River is breaking free of its icy shell. The sun wakes with us now and lingers in the evenings.
This change in seasons is always a welcome one, though like Mother Earth changing from her winter-white cloak to one of spring-green, we can sometimes feel slow to move into the rhythm of spring. There is much to do as we move into this season of renewal, yet for many of us our energy clings to its subdued winter state. Our spirits wait for a sign to bloom into motion.
Three thousand years ago, the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) people’s ancestors, known as the Besant culture, discovered the perceived movement of the springtime stars heralded the sign of the changing season.
At their March 15 meeting, the South Eastern Alberta Archaeological Society of Alberta welcomed Blackfoot archaeologist Dr. Eldon Otahkotskina (Yellowhorn) to share ancient star lore of the Niitsitapi people with their membership.
Raised on a farm on the Piikani Nation, 250 kilometres southwest of Medicine Hat, Dr. Yellowhorn’s environment inspired an interest in studying the ancient cultures of his native southern Alberta plains. The Piikani Nation claims rich foothills and valleys in sight of the Rocky Mountains. Driving through this past weekend, this writer felt awed by the dramatic landscape of this area, open to wide sky and by night, an endless expanse of stars.
“Niitsitapi know our land through mental mapping, and that includes our sky country,” explains Dr. Yellowhorn, now a professor at Simon Fraser University, who is especially interested in the mythology and folklore of his Piikani ancestors.
“Archaeoastronomy is a subfield of archaeology that examines the way ancient people codified astronomical information in their folklore.”
For the people who made the northern plains their homelands for millennia, big game hunting was the key to survival. Blackfoot oral history gives us insight into communal hunting sites like Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a world heritage site just outside the northern border of the Piikani Nation. Using large numbers of hunters to drive the bison over these cliffs was a successful large-scale hunting method prior to the introduction of domesticated horses later used in a hunt’s chase.
Blackfoot ancestors used the lunar phases to tell time. Long before, their ancient Besant relatives survived because they also discovered a reliable stellar calendar.
“Our ancestors’ star lore imagines the stars as people who lived in families, or constellations in the parlance of our time,” shares Dr. Yellowhorn.
Blackfoot mythology holds that the cluster constellation Pleiades, (in Blackfoot, “Mioohpokoiksi”) tells the Legend of the Lost Boys.
At the time of a great spring bison hunt, a family with many sons could not provide new soft calf-skin robes for all of their children. Other children bullied the boys in their old robes of tough cow hides. In their anger, the boys left their old robes behind and fled to Sky Country. Moon, Ko’komiki’somm, took pity on them and asked her husband Sun, Naato’si, chief of Sky Country, to grant the boys refuge as stars.
“I examine some of those old stories through the lens of archaeology to decipher the knowledge they contain. In doing so, I can also situate the antiquity of Blackfoot myths with calendar years before present,” says Dr. Yellowhorn. The constellation Pleiades first appeared in the sky to the Besant culture 3,000 years before present time.
Star cluster Mioohpokoiksi, Pleiades’ seasonal disappearance from the night sky, “the lost boys”, after crossing paths with the moon, coincided with the bison calving season. Dr. Yellowhorn’s Scheduling Breakthrough Hypothesis explains it became the signal for people to leave their winter camps to join the first hunt; a mnemonic device used to reliably coordinate hunters over vast distances, ensuring the Besant culture’s survival. Mioohpokoiksi can be seen painted on modern Blackfoot tipis today, a visual aid for preserving oral tradition.
May we recognize a season of new opportunity is upon us, and leave our sheltered spaces to seek it.
“Each of you have a story and a thousand Grandmothers guiding you. We are up here, watching over you. If you listen, you’ll hear our voices. Tell our stories, teach our lessons and sing our songs…it will help you to understand who you are.”
– “Stars”, Dawn Iehstoseranon:nha (She keeps the feathers), Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk), Wakhskare:wake (Bear Clan), passthefeather.ca
JoLynn Parenteau is a Metis writer out of Miywasin Friendship Centre. Column feedback can be sent to jolynn.parenteau@gmail.com.
