Seeds of Change: Full Moon Feast
On the heels of learning about the origin myth of the first Thanksgiving, we wanted to dedicate our class today to learning about some of the ways Indigenous nations celebrate throughout the year, thinking particularly about how they give thanks. In Sean Sherman’s book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, he writes that “each tribe’s intimate relationship with the earth is marked by thirteen full moons throughout the year with traditions uniquely anchored in time and place.” Luckily for us, our class this week happened to fall on the date of November’s full moon. In honor of these full moon celebrations, and to show gratitude for the many foods that feed the world that were developed by the Native nations of North and South America, we centered our class around a Feast of the Great Spirit Moon, Gichi-Manidoo-Giizis. Sherman provides a sample menu for this late fall full moon feast: white bean and winter squash soup, smoked duck and sweet potato, wild rice pilaf, cedar-braised bison and hominy, and griddled maple squash. We encouraged the families who joined us to make snacks for this celebration, as easy or complicated as they wanted. To keep things simple, you could refer to a list of crops that were developed in the Americas and then put together a snack plate with some of these items (popcorn, chocolate, tortilla chips with salsa or guacamole, for example). If you want to make a more ambitious feast, some of Sean Sherman’s recipes are available online for free, but if you’re able to get your hands on his cookbook, it is really lovely and inspiring (and I think entirely gluten and dairy free).
Whether you have a snack plate or a full feast, the next step in our celebration is to make a Spirit Plate. Sherman writes about this in his book:
From Sean Sherman’s The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen
So we encouraged our classmates to build a little spirit plate with the foods they had available. While they were doing that, we read this short section from the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address:
“With one mind, we turn to honor and thank all the Food Plants we harvest from the garden. Since the beginning of time, the grains, vegetables, beans, and berries have helped the people survive. Many other living things draw strength from them, too. We gather all the Plant Foods together as one and send them a greeting of thanks.”
We talked about how giving thanks for nature’s gifts is a daily practice for most Native nations. This PDF from the National Museum of the American Indian explains, “American Indian peoples’ connection to place is about more than simply caring for the environment. That connection has been maintained through generations of observation, in which people developed environmental knowledge and philosophies. People took actions to ensure the long-term sustainability of their communities and the environment, with which they shared a reciprocal relationship. Today, Native knowledge can be a key to understanding and solving some of our world’s most pressing problems. In their efforts to support sustainability for all humans, environmentalists are acknowledging the benefits of some traditional indigenous ways of knowing.”
It’s worth exploring with kids whether or not they feel connected to nature in their own lives. What do they do for the earth? For the plants and creatures we share this space with? For other people? What more could we do?
With our remaining class time, we read We Are Grateful (video posted below) and learned about the way children of Indigenous nations played. This article on Fun and Games in Patuxet/Plimoth in 1621 provides a great overview of what childhood was like for the Wampanoag and Pilgrim children of that era. Their play was centered around acquiring skills they would need as adults, so making miniature versions of pottery or clothes for dolls would help kids learn how to sew and work with clay. Kids would compete in footraces because in a land without cars or horses, the faster you could run, the faster you could get somewhere. And kids would play with toys that helped their hand-eye coordination, which they would need for all kinds of adult skills, including archery and weaving. One such toy was this ring toss game, which we worked to make in class:
We also made corn husk dolls and learned about their origin story. Here’s a short video with the Haudenosaunee version of the story, a slightly longer video with the Cherokee version of the story that is told while a woman is making the dolls, and here’s a video about The Gift of Corn to the Choctaw- not about corn husk dolls, but so lovely that I had to include it.
And here’s the video of the story we read in class today- it’s a good one.
