Northern Great Plains Research Papers (original) (raw)

By the mid-18 th century, whether traveling in the eastern and upper Great Lakes area or on the Great Plains, many explorers and missionaries found a people with a vast knowledge of the night sky. When asked, the indigenous people of the northern Plains and Woodlands were never shy about identifying individual stars or sharing their names, traditions and the belief system that incorporated them. They willingly discussed their names for stars, the planets, constellations, the Milky Way and how all related to their view of the cosmos based on myths and oral traditions. Because of this fortunate interchange, more star names survived in many parts of North America than the recorded Anglo-Saxon and Norse counterparts (Bender 2020a). Furthermore, unlike the Christian purge of all deemed 'pagan' in Medieval Europe, many Christian missionaries, especially those of the Jesuit Order who arrived in the early part of the 17 th century, kept careful records of the Native American creation stories, cosmologies, star names, belief systems and cultural traditions or attributes related to them. It was this fortunate exchange, along with intermarriage and, in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, the work of dedicated ethnologists that was largely responsible for the survival of many parts of the cultural beliefs, star names and traditions of the eastern Woodland and Plains people. Without this foresight, all would have likely vanished during not only the first one hundred fifty years of European colonization, but what followed in the second one hundred fifty years. However, now a century later, the remaining traditional knowledge of how 'the people' view the universe and world around them is fast disappearing with the death of the traditional elders and Native language speakers. In response, and because of a request by members of two tribes for me to personally record the last of the stories, names and traditions before we all vanish from this earth, a list of the known individual star names and traditions prevalent in the northern Plains and Woodland cultures has been compiled. The list and this paper are the result of thirty years of friendship and trust, conducting public programs on the reservations, personal interviews, and research delving into the historical and ethnological reports that recorded Native star names and traditions.