Importance of Constellations to Natives

         Archaeoastronomy is the study of how people in the past understood the stars and the sky. There has always been a certain fascination with the night sky, because of this fascination stars and celestial events have made their way into ancient religions, stories, architecture, agriculture, and societal values. Even when tribes are geographically distant from each other, most tribes all thought of creation stories relatively the same. In Cahokia culture, there is a duality between the Morning Star and the Evening Star that is very important. Most tribes had a version of this duality, whether that be male vs female, upper world vs lower world, light vs dark, civility vs chaos, etc. In the year 1054 AD, there was a supernova that was visible for almost 2 years and was visible during the day as well as the night. In Cahokia culture, this supernova was marked as a turning point from Old Cahokia to New Cahokia which was termed a “big bang moment” by the archaeologists who had studied the Mississippian site. During this event, Cahokia structures were torn down to the ground in order to build up a new city which was filled with plazas and religious and political structures on top. For the Anasazi, the supernova was in many cave drawings indicating that it was a big moment in Anasazi history. Clive Ruggles a British astronomer and archaeologist states that it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy as the study of ancient astronomy and modern astronomy as a scientific discipline. Archaeoastronomy is often intertwined with ethnoastronomy which is the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary or modern societies. It is also often closely associated with historical astronomy, using historical record of cosmic events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, this uses written records to evaluate the past astronomical practices. Archaeoastronomy also usses a variety of different methods in order to uncover evidence of past practices that include archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, statistics, probability, and history. Since the methods used are so diverse and uses data from extremely different sources, combining all of the information has proved to be an extremely difficult task for archaeoastronomers. The purpose of archaeoastronomy is to fill in holes in landscape and cognitive archaeology. The material evidence and its connection to the sky can now reveal how a wider landscape can be combined into the beliefs about the cycles of nature, such as how the Mayans used their astronomy to grow its relationship with agriculture. Archaeoastronomy can be applied all different cultures and all different time periods. The definition of the sky varies from culture to culture, but there are scientific methods that can be applied to all cultures when examining ancient beliefs. The first archaeoastronomer is believed to be Heinrich Nissen by Clive Ruggles, while Rolf Sinclair believes that Norman Lockyer was the first archaeoastronomer. “John Michell argued taht the status of research into ancient astronomy had improved over the past two centuries, going ‘from lunacy to heresy to interesting notion, and finally to the gates of orthodoxy.’ Nearly two decades late, we can still ask the question: Is archaeoastronomy still waiting at the gates of orthodoxy or has it gotten inside the gates?” Before John Michell wrote the above there were no archaeoastronomers or professional archaeologists, instead there were astronomers and antiquarians. The term archaeoastronomy was coined by Elizabeth Chesley Baity in 1973, although as a topic of study, it may be much older depending on how archaeoastronomy is defined.
         Archaeoastronomy has for a long time been seen as an interdisciplinary field that uses unwritten and written evidence in order to study the astronomies of different cultures, because of this archaeoastronomy can be seen as helping to connect other disciplinary approaches for investigating ancient astronomy. Some of the different disciplines are astroarchaeology, history of astronomy, and ethnoastronomy. The authors of some recent doctoral dissertations have described their work as concerning the fields of archaeology and cultural anthropology, with various fields of history including the history specific regions and periods, the history of science, and the history of religion, with relations of astronomy to art, literature, and religion. When authors did describe their work as astronomical it was only as a secondary category. George Gummerman and Miranda Warburton have been known to view archaeoastronomy as a part of archaeology that is informed by cultural anthropology and is aimed to understand a “group’s conception of themselves in relation to the heavens’, in a word, its cosmology.” Todd Bostwick has argued that “archaeoastronomy is anthropology - the study of human behavior in the past and present. Paul Bahn has been known to describe archaeoastronomy as an area of cognitive archaeology. Many other researchers relate the subject of archaeoastronomy to the history of science, either because it relates to a culture’s observations of nature and the conceptual framework that they had devised to impose an order on those observations. Most professional archaeologists have had very mixed reactions to archaeoastronomy. Some have expressed incomprehension and even hostility, seeing this as a rejection of archaeology. Because archaeoasteronomers disagree so strongly on the characterization of the specific discipline, they even argue about the name. All of the three major international scholarly associations say that archaeoastronomy is the study of culture, using the term astronomy in culture. Michael Hoskin sees that an important part of archaeoastronomy is fact collecting rather than theorizing, proposing to label this aspect of archaeoastronomy as archaeotopography.
         “The Council of Chiefs” as the Skidi band of Pawnee Indians referred to a specific ring of stars, believed that the ring represented the style of their government, elders holding council to resolve important matters. This constellation was a way that the Pawnee interacted daily as well as their religious beliefs. The Pawnee used the stars in order to set agricultural patterns and embody their societal values. The “Chief Star” in “The Council of Chiefs” is the star that is now referred to as Polaris or the North Star. Polaris for the Pawnee represented their main god Tirawahat. In order to see the “Council” stars and let smoke escape their lodges, the Pawnee built their lodges with openings in the roofs. Today the stars that made up “The Council of Chiefs” constellation are known as the Corona Borealis.
         To the Ojibwe people, the Big Dipper constellation is known as the Fisher, The Pleiades Star Cluster is known as The Boys to the Cherokee tribe, according to Blackfeet tradition the Milky Way is known as The Wolf Trail. The Dakota and Ojibwe tribes in Minnesota have used constellations to plan and predict things. For the Ojibwe Ursa Major or Big Bear was known as a Fischer and the Dakota saw a Blue Woman. For the Ojibwe the constellations tell the story of the seasons; Fall was Dagwaagin or Moose, Winter was Biboon or Biboonkeonini (The Wintermaker), Spring was Ziigwan or Gaadidnaway, Mishi bizhiw (Curly Tail, Great Panther), and Summer was Niibin or Nanaboujou. For the Lakota people stars helped them find their way, and the time for them to hunt, gather, and do ritual activities. They also have an old folktale that tells how the “Seven Little Girls” or the Pleiades were placed in the sky. The Lakota people philosophically believed that the geography of the Earth was a reflection of the star world. The Arapaho people would call the constellation Ursa Major the Broken Backbone. Venus or The Morning Star as Native Americans call it, shines brighter than any other planet or star. The Lakotas had observed the planet and incorporated it as a symbol into the tribes' myths, ceremonies, and artworks.
         Because of the intentional and systematic erasure of Native American cultures knowledge is fragmented. One example of this fragmented knowledge is Annette Lee. Lee holds a doctorate in physics and astronomy, she also is an astrophysicist, artist, and the director of the Native Skywatchers Research and Programming Initiative. She is mixed race Dakota-Sioux, although currently, her communities are Ojibwe and D(L)akota. When she was working with Bell Museum and their planetarium she was relaying her vast knowledge about the phases of the Moon, but she needed to bring in Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous language experts in order to add names to the Moon for a certain month, “This splintering of knowledge and cultural connections is a trauma, Lee told the planetarium team. Younger Indigenous visitors coming in and hearing Indigenous knowledge from a non-Indigenous person can also be a trauma on a personal level, as it highlights the loss of knowledge from one generation to the next.”
         When different Native Americans saw the Orion constellation, they all saw different symbolisms. Today we only have views of more recent tribes, such as the Navajo, the Lakota, the Sioux, etc. Traces of the Mound Builder tribe have been seen to signify Orion in their handiwork. The Lakotas while the Greeks saw a Greek hunter, they saw the star group as a chief, the constellation however was broken into parts and the three stars that make up Orion’s belt were seen as a bison spine. The Chinook tribe viewed Orion’s belt and dagger as two canoes racing to catch a salmon in the Big River, which is what the Chinook called the Milky Way. The salmon is represented by the star Sirius and the Little Canoe which is the dagger is winning the race. When looking at Orion, the Navajo people see Á tse A ts’oosí or First Slender One. The Navajo people viewed this constellation as a hunter aiming a bow, the constellation was viewed as a protector, as the constellation moves ahead to protect the children of the Navajo tribe, who are portrayed by another constellation Dilyéhé. The Native Americans moundbuilders who used to live in present-day Portsmouth Ohio, saw the Milky Way as souls on a journey to Orion’s Nebula.
         The Mayans, Celts, and Egyptians all had their own methods for tracking the movement of the stars but all of them had a common belief that the stars and sky above them were somehow larger and greater than they were, because of that most ancient cultures associated the origins of everything, including the moon, sun, Earth, and sky with some sort of mythology relating to the stars.

References

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