At the close of the growing season in autumn, people, like squirrels, like ants, like bees, get busy gathering the great bounty of the land. We forage and harvest, hunt and herd; industriously amassing the abundance proffered by the earth, water, and sky. After the toil, the patient tending of the soil, the months of work and worry, we are ready and relieved to collect the crop and the kill.

Hi hianai hu!
Here on my field
Corn comes forth,
My child takes it and runs,
Happy.

Here on my field
Squash comes forth.
My wife takes it and runs,
Singing. 

– Papago Song of the Corn Dance

We set about preparing it, preserving it, salting it, saving it, packing it away for future use, making feverish haste in the race against the coming cold. But, first, before we store it, horde it for the hard times ahead, we take the time to glory in its goodness. With grateful prayers of thanksgiving we acknowledge our precious fortune, and gorge ourselves, and the god/desses, too, with fabulous feasts of plenty.

Harvest festivals are pandemic. They represent the successful completion of another fertile cycle. Another season of life and growth come full circle. Another round. In agricultural societies, the annual cycles are counted from sowing to scything. The cycle from birth to slaughter is followed by herders and hunters, the keepers and stalkers of stock and game. And the season starting with the spawning and culminating in the running of the salmon, the cod, the squid, the whale, is observed by those who fish to live.

Ultimately, all harvest festivities celebrate one more season of our tenuous survival. We have managed to live through another year. Another fertile period has passed in our favor. We have been lucky. One way or another, we will have the wherewithal to sustain ourselves through another winter, another dry spell, another monsoon, yet another tricky test of time.

Our own familiar fall festival of Thanksgiving is an amalgam of Old and New World harvest celebrations. The pilgrims brought the Harvest Home Festivals of the Ingathering from England with them. And very little else. By the time the Mayflower landed in Massachusetts in December of 1620, all of their supplies had been depleted at sea. They had little left with which to survive the first winter.

Indeed, by spring, only 55 of the original 102 settlers were still alive. And they had no seeds to plant. It was only through the generous sponsorship of the indigenous Wampanoag people that they would establish a foothold and ultimately thrive. Thrive and spread like the native vines, sending out endless shoots of sticky tendrils that strangled everything they touched.

The locals introduced the colonists to the domestic foods of Turtle Island (a common original name for the Western Hemisphere) and taught them cultivation techniques. By the following fall, the pilgrims’ first crops of corn, squash, and pumpkins were planted, tended and harvested successfully. A major celebration was called for. So the Indian hosts were invited as guests and ninety attended, joining the fifty-some whites.

Abundant stores of cranberries and oysters were collected, countless deer and turkey shot. Four English women and two teenage girls did all the cooking for the giant banquet. As in the Harvest Home tradition and also the great Autumn Green Corn Festivals celebrated by the agricultural tribes of the North, southeast, and southwest of Turtle Island, they sat down together to eat in fellowship and true Thanksgiving.

Games were played. Corn was popped. Arms were displayed. And the rest is history.

I liked the whites
I liked the whites

I gave them fruits
I gave them fruits

I am crying for thirst
I am crying for thirst

All is gone –
I have nothing to eat.

– Arapaho Ghost Dance Song

We, too. We have nothing to eat. It is the autumn of our culture and we haven’t put anything away safe for our own survival. We hunger and thirst for the spirit of reverence and respect for the world that sustains us. But in our push for ascendancy, for power, for dominance — over the land, over each other, over the odds, over Mother Nature Herself — we have poisoned our providence and sullied the source of our own livelihood. Our very ability to live at all is threatened.

And what of our children? Our grandchildren? The great grandchildren of us all? What have we saved for them?

The conservative infatuation with the restoration of family values — albeit singularly shallow, dangerously narrow-minded, myopic and intolerant — has certainly risen to reflect a profoundly-felt primal human desire for a realigned awareness and reconnection with those things in life that really matter.

This Thanksgiving let us remember that we are part of the vastly diverse, potentially functional family of humanity. Kin, clan, mishpocheh, Mitakuye Oyasin, kissing cousins to all the inhabitants of the Universe.

For this, let us be thankful.

 

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Donna Henes is the author of The Queen of My Self: Stepping into Sovereignty in Midlife. She offers counseling and upbeat, practical and ceremonial guidance for individual women and groups who want to enjoy the fruits of an enriching, influential, purposeful, passionate, and powerful maturity. Consult the MIDLIFE MIDWIFE™

The Queen welcomes questions concerning all issues of interest to women in their mature years. Send your inquiries to thequeenofmyself@aol.com.