The Skylore of an Indigenous People: The Case of the Performance Art and Traditional Beliefs of the Lenape Delaware (Algonquian) of the Northeastern Woodlands

This study falls into the category of Cultural Astronomy or Astronomy in Culture. It is focused on the research carried out by the American anthropologist Frank G. Speck in the 1930s and 1940s on the cosmology of the Algonquian people. His works highlight their rich and multifaceted view of the sky, associated animist beliefs and ritual practices, all of which were summarized in Speck’s remarkable, yet little known investigation called The Celestial Bear Comes Down to Earth: The Bear Ceremony of the Munsee-Mahican in Canada as Related by Nekatcit (1945). I must confess that my own interest in his research was motivated by my earlier work on the remnants of bear ceremonialism which have survived in Europe. These survivals are exteriorized each year in a vast variety of performances, classed primarily as folklore, although in more recent years as a combination of tangible and intangible heritage. When studied more carefully, the performances, rather than standing alone, form part of a complex meshwork of beliefs centered on bears, including the earlier belief that these animals possessed healing powers as well as the conviction that humans descended from bears, a belief retained by the Basque people of Western Europe but also implicit in other aspects of the European material. But before continuing I want to let the readers of these words know that I am aware that most of you probably have never heard of this thing called bear ceremonialism and have never pondered the question of why humans came up with a belief system in which bears were so venerated. And even if you are familiar with some of the strange furry costumes worn by European performers still today, it probably never occurred to you to relate them to what has been extensively documented for Native people across much of North America and northern Eurasia. As you will soon see, ritual performances in which the bear plays a key role, such as those exhaustively documented by Speck in the case of the two Lenape dialect groups, the Munsee-Mahican and the Unami, were focused on expressing respect for the animal and ritually fusing the landscape and skyscape together. Moreover, the admiration for the animal was intricately interwoven into an animist relational ontology where the notion of reciprocity was fundamental and the Celestial Bear, incarnate in the Dipper stars, played a key role. In short, the fact that remnants of bear ceremonialism are well documented in the case of Europe makes it even more important that we examine with great care the Algonquian sources for they could shed light on the kind of performances that in the past may have characterized those that were taking place in Europe. More importantly, the celestial coding found in these Native American materials is totally unique in the way that it incorporates the ursine genealogy, conceptually blending together two spaces, sky and earth. Therefore, it may provide a means of recuperating this aspect of the European performances. At the same time, it is quite possible that certain aspects of these European survivals might help fill in gaps left in our understanding of the Algonquian materials, as will be shown in what follows. In short, this means that the Native American beliefs and ritual practices may well serve to illuminate residual elements of bear ceremonialism still found across much of Europe today. The cross-cultural approach utilized in this study provides a means of retrieving earlier and deeper meanings associated with these European materials, at least hypothetically, by comparing them to the social practices and beliefs that characterized the Algonquian worldview in times past. Plus, these elements, documented in the ethnographic and ethnohistoric record of the past two hundred years, form part of a rich legacy that has been explored in depth by Speck and others. Thus, in what follows you will see that there is a kind of feed-back loop operating when the two sets of cultural conceptualizations and ritual practices are compared. And in this respect, there is no question that the Algonquian skylore provides a template whose value until now has not been sufficiently studied or appreciated.

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