CEREMONY AND RITUAL, SOUTHEAST

Ceremony and Ritual, Southeast

The Southeast is noted for its large number of sacred sites and ancient ceremonial grounds, all strongly associated with American Indian ritual and ceremony. Many such sites are laid out in rectangular plazas, others have circular plans, and some are built with stone—but only a handful have been thoroughly studied or protected from the bulldozer, ploughshare, and pot hunter. Not one has been reserved for use by Indian people today. U.S. federal courts have never upheld Indians’ access to their sacred sites, unless the land was part of a reservation. A survey map of mounds assembled by Swanton for the Smithsonian Institution presents well over 20,000 locations. We can never know how many more lie hidden beneath rising ocean waters or under artificial lakes created by the Tennessee Valley Authority (as in the case of the ancient Cherokee capital of Tellico in Tennessee). An amateur archaeologist has located more than 500 shell middens of rather recent construction on the southern Florida shoreline alone, while naturalist Constantine Rafinesque found 105 circular temples on the Kanawha River in West Virginia in the 1820s. Moundville in Alabama; Etowah, Ocmulgee, and Kolomoki in Georgia; Mound Bottom and the Narrows of the Harpeth, outside Nashville; and Pinson Mounds on Forked Deer River are a few of the more famous “archaeological parks” that can be visited by the public today.

All such places bear silent testimony to the high degree of interinfluence, advanced social organization, and spiritual refinement in Southern tribes—not to mention their taste for lavish public spectacle. The last mound was built by the Natchez on the Red River in 1728. A little more than a hundred years later, Southeastern ritual and ceremony survived only in Indian Territory, and that in an extremely clandestine and tenuous fashion: one mixed with elements of Christianity and Judaism. Perhaps 95 percent of the region’s original ethnicity was already extinct. Today we do not know even the names of the tribes that built most of the monuments.

Descriptions of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, with its fascinating symbols of double axes, woodpeckers, and hands-with-eyes, amount to little more than daring guesswork, subject to a great deal of academic fashion. Despite powwows and other recent tourist phenomena such as cultural centers, American Indians for the most part still practice ritual and ceremony underground—for instance, at so-called inner circle gatherings. Although tribal government meetings may be opened with a prayer, they lack the religious character of old. Few at a powwow could explain why they wear the regalia they wear, do the things they do, or observe certain taboos (for example, never to let a feather fly free and touch the ground). One theory advanced by a Chickasaw medicine man in the television roundtable series “The Native Americans” was this: “When the white man came, most of our people were just waiting for fast food to happen.” Not every Indian was a priest or holy man.

The major religious festivals of the Cherokee in the eighteenth century, to take one culture out of many, were as follows. The Spring Festival on the first new moon of the year came first. Everyone in the village celebrated birthdays on that day, having survived the winter and thus become one year older. This corresponded to the busk of some tribes, when villagers threw out their utensils and household fixtures. Fires were renewed and the entire nation “went to water” to dip seven times and be purified. Next was the Green Corn Festival, held about June, when the young corn became fit to taste, an alternative busk time with certain tribes. (Corn is the only world food crop that can be eaten immature.) This was followed in time by the Ripe Corn Feast, when the fields were in roasting ear. Fourth was the Great New Moon Feast, actually the beginning of the cycle, or Cherokee New Year, still celebrated with great panache today in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and Cherokee, North Carolina. Fifth was the Ah tawh hung nah, Propitiation, or Cementation, or Friendship, or Bonding Festival. And the sixth was the Bounding Bush, four nights of dancing and sacrifice with “remade tobacco.” Additionally, a Great Thanksgiving Festival called the Uku, or Ookan, was held every seven years in the national capital.

The two main types of dancing at these feasts were the stomp dance, originally a communal land-clearing and burning rite, and the friendship dance. On special occasions, such as a peace treaty or the marriage of a chief’s daughter, the spectacular Eagle Dance was enacted. A version was incorporated into the choreography of the outdoor pageant “Unto These Hills,” a summer attraction at Cherokee.

Other ceremonies included the Black Drink, a purifying ritual, also called White Drink (cassia, cussena, Tihanama kiyantush), in which a conch shell full of white, frothy, black-bodied yaupon tea was passed among the men, with an emetic and hallucinatory effect; pipe-smoking rituals (with old, or wild, remade, or ceremonial tobacco, the last a kinnikinnnik, or mixture, with sumac, a favorite of the Cherokee); a scratching and bleeding ritual performed by priests with a kanuga (scraper with turkey cock spurs) to purify warriors and ballplayers and make them strong; circle visions, or sun dances, in which predominantly young people fasted in an arbor, blew on eagle bone or cane whistles, and found or renewed their life vision; sweatlodges for men and “moon lodges” for women in a log winter house built partway in the ground (asi in Cherokee); bonding or marriage ceremonies (a man and woman exchange deer meat and corn under a blanket symbolizing cohabitation, and in the Creek tradition they jump over a fire to mark their new life together); healing, mourning, and coming-of-age ceremonies; and a host of others, now obscure, including trading circles, in which no speaking was permitted, only sign talk. One should also mention all-male (for example, Shalagi Warrior Society) and all-female ceremonies.

The oldest ceremony is the Cedar Grass Honoring ceremony (achina, lishina apo wanji), a thanksgiving for fire (achila). Cherokee used to insist on seven sacred woods and elaborate rules for building a ceremonial, or sacred, fire. They say that the national council fire kept at Tellico and extinguished by the American soldiers in 1783 sank into the ground and continues to burn. Seven is a magic number for them—seven clans, seven counselors in the council-house, and so forth. Some ceremonies were conducted by a specific clan (always naming and adoption ceremonies). Major dances went all night—and still do at some of the Oklahoma stomp dance grounds. Musical accompaniment was restricted to the drum (usually a water drum among the Cherokee), rattles and whistles, and flutes being relegated to courting. Ordinary sticks were sometimes used—for example, for mourning songs.

The consecrated circle, arbor, or heptagonal council house is the center of the ceremony ground. Celebrants sit or recline in the sector designated for their clan. Council seats are hereditary, a fact proudly mentioned in stories and protocols. No one may enter with metal or a weapon. Only bare feet or moccasins are allowed, in order to show respect for Mother Earth. Generally, the opening is in the east, sometimes the northeast, as ancient coordinates are about 30 degrees west of today’s magnetic north—a trait shared with South American tribes. According to most protocols, entrants are purified, or smudged, often with cedar incense, an abalone shell, and turkey feather. They then walked clockwise at least one full turn, sometimes seven, before taking their proper seats. Traditionally, an intertribal hospitality system ensured recognition of one’s clan even in foreign towns or faraway locales. In native understanding, a circle unites the four cardinal directions plus four additional ones, the human dimension, or people, being the last. Circular movement in a clockwise or, “sun-wise,” fashion concentrates energy, while the opposite radiates it. Thus in one Cherokee dedication ceremony, the women go one way and the men the other.

To understand ceremonies, a note on time keeping is in order. Natives in the Southeast measured a year by the number of moons, or months, not days or weeks. The Cherokee had names for the months, such as Gule, “acorn month,” in August–September (when the doves begin to call loudly for acorns), or Strawberry Month in May–June (when everybody took a spring tonic of strawberry juice). Calendar keepers using stone circles observed the summer solstice, or longest day of the year, winter solstice, when the sun rose from its southernmost point on the horizon, and spring and fall equinoxes. These were often times for council meetings, feasts, and trade circles, and today many remnant tribes hold public festivals or gatherings on these dates. In sign talk, a day was a sleep, and a year was a winter. The sun was the day-star and the moon was the evening sun. Most Muskogee considered the sun female and the moon male, but the majority thought in terms of Grandfather Sun and Grandmother Moon. The Pleiades (“the Boys”), Big Dipper (“Bear”), Corona Borealis (“Medicine Bag”), and other stars were followed in the sky in their particular season. Also, the movements of Venus were carefully studied. Years were not numbered as dates but recorded with the name of a memorable event, such as the “year we cried” (1838–1839).

Donald Panther-Yates