Native American Harvest Feasts Before Thanksgiving

November is American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month. See the links at our national museum sponsored by the Smithsonian for more information: http://www.nmai.si.edu/heritagemonth/

Background

Native American Nations from the First Nations in Canada to the Native Americans in the USA to the Indigenous Peoples in Mexico and Central and South America are related to all of the Circumpolar Peoples around the world. All of them have traditions of thankfulness or thanksgiving for surviving winter and for receiving crops and game for their hard work. See these links:

• The Acadians - Cajun Easter Foods, Recipes & History
• Cajun Recipes - Nova Scotia to Acadiana
• Healthy Thanksgiving Holiday Recipes - Cranberries From the Native Americans
• Native American Nations Around the World

The northern Siberians, the Sami, Northern Chinese, Mongolians, Koreans, and many others are related to Native Americans. Some of the cultural components have also transferred. The Western Hemisphere Indigenous Nations migrated from the Eastern Hemisphere some 12,000 years ago or even earlier. They eventually travelled all the way back around to Greenland and even Iceland, meeting the Lapps and the rest of the Indigenous Polar and Sub-polar Peoples again.

Besides DNA and blood markers (genetic similarities in blood types) readily found to match, all of these peoples show similarities in some customs, parts of languages, and in their Feasts and Feast Days that celebrate Thankfulness.

I am related to Mohawk Nation in the US. Native Americans give thanks first to every animal whose life they take in order to have food and clothing. They give thanks to the Great Spirit for their crops, from seeding to harvest. It is the Harvest Feast Days that some non-Native persons may recognize as a type of Thanksgiving ceremony - they are centuries old and centuries older than those ceremonies of the early Scandinavians, Italians, Portuguese, Pilgrims, Puritans, Spaniards, Polish, Dutch, French, Acadians, Huguenots, English, Germans, and all the rest who came and took land from the Indigenous peoples or ran their own people (like the Acadians) off.

The American Government just happened to make Thanksgiving a Federal Holiday.

Thankfulness for crops and months later for surviving the winter, all shown in Feast Days, is 1000s of years old - about 12,000 years old in America and part of these traditions came from East Asian countries from where First Nations and Native Americans migrated over time. Another similarity is in Origin Myths - Native Amricans often have the story that the Earth was formed on the back fo a turle and some Asian countries have the same story. In Sami lands like Lapland and other near-polar countries,an Indigenous belief is that a Reindeer pulls the sun up into the sky in the east every morning - in Asian it is a dragon (antlers become the dragon's hair-streamers) - in First Nations, some myths say it is a Buffalo or Elk (streamers back into horns/antlers).

Also see this link about the gross misinformtation taught about the day in 1621 that we now call "Thanksgiving":  There Was No Pie on Thanksgiving..

Each month of the calendar is marked by its full moon and Native Americans named these moons. I received the names below from some North and Northeastern US Native Americans at a Pow Wow.

January - Wolf Moon

February - Hunger Moon

March - Maple Sugar Moon

April - Planter's Moon

May - Budding Moon

June - Strawberry Moon

Harvest festivals were maintained in North America at least, and probably in Mexcio and the Americas in August, September, and October of every year, from around 10,000 BC or earlier. This predates anything by the earliest explorers coming to The New World from Scandinavia and Western Europe.

July - Blood Moon

August - Green Corn Moon

September - Harvest Moon

October - Hunters Moon

November - Beaver Moon

December - Cold Moon

Today, these festivals of thanksgiving to the Great Spirit and to nature for crops and life are still celebrated in homes, at Pow Wows, and on reservations. Many nations have thanked the Great Spirit for providing abundance after the first full moon of September.

NOTE: The Harvest Thanksgiving Festival of Sukkoth is over 3,000 years old itself, Hebrew in origin, and celebrated by many Jews around the world, including America. That would place their first celebration sometime around 1000+ BC, before Thanksgiving in The New World.

I thoroughly love many Asian customs and traditions, because they make sense to me. They did so before I learned that I am related through the Native American bloodline. These traditions have always made sense to me. Being thankful for food and clothing makes sense to me, just as good stewardship of all resources does. This is, however, inherently Asian in nature, and inherently Native American/First Nations in nature. I haste waste and like to see a reverence in taking care of Earth and its resources, without worshipping the planter itself.

CHINA celebrates the Harvest Moon Festival between mid-September and mid-October. Many of the legends of the Chinese Harvest Festival did not come over to North America. However, September-October is the same time period in which many Native Americans celebrate a Harvest Festival of thanksgiving. Both cultures have celebrated with many fruits, vegetables, grains, small cakes, and other foods prepared for eating and for keeping through the winter.

With the Chinese, the Harvest Festival of thanksgiving began as moon worship in the Xia and the Shang Dynasty back to 2000 BC, then the Zhou and the Tang Dynasties (through 907 AD). The moon worship part dropped out in the Southern Song Dynasty in 1127, when people sent moon shaped cakes to relatives as as sign of wishing a family reunion. During the Ming and Quing Dynasties through 1911, the celebration was one of a party and wishing relatives the best. There have been dozens of other activities associated with the festival through the centuries.

Additional Asians cultures participate in similar types of moon and harvest festivals, based in their own cultural beliefs and customs. There is a variety of such festivals with different elements added, all across Asia,

In America, First Nations and Native Americans marked time by the sun and the moon, a moon being a month, with the Full Moon being the most important night/day of each month. This is similar to the Lunar Calendar used by many Asian cultures in the past and present. Feast Days (festivals) were held at each Full Moon around North America, the type of celebration led by the customs of the Indigenous Nation involved.

However, Autumn seems nearly always to have been the time of THREE Native Nations thanksgivings - celebrations of 1) the Green Corn Moon, 2) the Harvest Moon, and 3) the Hunters Moon. Thus, there were three thanksgiving feast days (holidays) every fall before the "white men" came to the Western Hemisphere. The whites had their own commemorative festivals in The New World and sometimes there was a joining of Native Americans and Whites.

This Festval of Thanksgiving and Forgiveness lasts at least three days.

Native Americans have celebrated this festival after the first full moon in August (sometimes September), when the corn is a certain height - the young corn for a first tender harvest. The nations that celebrated and celebrate this holiday include: Iroquois (7 nations, including Mohawk, in New York, Pennsylvania and surrounding areas, also near New England), Creek, Cherokee, Seminole, and Yuchi. Some others may also observe the holiday -- There are 1000s of nations, bands, pueblos, and official communities within just the US itself.One cannot record everyone's habits. The Santa Ana Pueblo people of New Mexico, celebrate again on July 26, before August and sponsor a dance and fiesta as well.

A number of activities have been observes during this holiday, including initial fasting and cleansing, praying, and building a scared fire that is not to burn out during the days of feasting (like the Olympic Torch). Some groups beleived that the young harvested corn contained a female spirit that they called First Woman. Otherwise, the Great Spirit was thanked for everything.

Roasted corn is first eaten in celebration of the first young harvest and is followed by cornbread, corn soup, tortillas of maize in the Southwest, game caught by the hunters of the group, fruits, and other vegetables. here are also games, dancing, and singing. Drumming circle cannot be forgotten.

This is the Thanksgiving of September when a full harvest of corn, fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, fish, and small game. and other foods are gathered together. Originally, the Native Americans thanked every living thing around them for helping them to live through sacrificing themselves to be food and clothing. This is similar in part to the Animistic religion of early Korea and some other Asian nations, in which all living things have a spirit. With Native Americans, the animals and crops were not worshipped, but they were thanked. Festivites have included a lot of dancing, dancing contests now held at Pow Wows, singing, drumming circles, games, and other activities.

This holiday has historically presented thankfulness for life, food, shelter, and clothing. The Great Spirit, a single God, was thanked for all of it. After this celebration, hunting big game for the winter food supply began at full force.

Today, this holiday is celebrated in September or October. In Indiana, for instance, it is celebrated at the end of September. The Feast of the Hunters Moon in Indiana recreates the old annual gathering of the French and Native Americans at Fort Ouiatenon trading post in the early 1700s.

Before the 1700s, and especially prior to 1500, the Native Americans in the Midwest and Northeastern US celebrated by themselves, or with neighboring hunting bands. This was not something initiated by people in Indiana at the time, as some sources state. The Native Americans had, in fact, celebrated it for centuries and, as other sources describe, had begun to drift away from it as the Eupeans began over-hunting the ranges of America.

The current Indiana celebration includes all the crops and game foods that the Native Americans have always enjoyed in thanksgiving, along with French traditions, and military re-enactments.

In Kentucky, the holiday is celebrated in Grand Rivers in October. There are also several small celebrations throughout southern Ohio. The Hunter's Moon Festival is not celebrated as widely overall today as as the Green Corn Moon and Harvest Moon Festivals. This may be because hunting is not such a large part of life any longer for many Native Americans.