Happy Thanksgiving!
The Lenape Autumn Rite
I grew up and attended the public schools of Ridgewood, NJ. As part of our curriculum, we were required to study the Lenni Lenapes, indigenous to that region. I always assumed every student in the United States had to study the tribes indigenous to their areas. Since growing up and realizing this is not the case, I am truly thankful for that public school system being so far ahead of its time in requiring this course of study. Even out of the classroom, I read how the Lenapes helped the early white settlers. They taught the early settlers many of the skills needed to survive and prosper in the region: fishing, hunting, the cultivation and usefulness of maize, and the yearly burning of the grass off the meadows -- these were learned from the Lenape.
The introduction of this topic always came around Thanksgiving, coinciding with the Lenape Autumn Rite, though the Lenape were long since gone from their homelands. We were taught that the Autumn Rite was celebrated with several days of feasting on corn and venison. They gathered at night in a ceremonial lodge and danced in a circle to the heartbeat of hide drums. They would place wampum or other valuables on the dance floor for the benefit of the poor or fatherless -- a sharing of their own bounty.
After being removed from their homelands, the Lenape (Delaware) continued to honor this tradtion by performing an elaborate fall ritual, the Big House Ceremony in a longhouse similar to their ancestral dwellings. Proceeding in a counterclockwise direction, around the representation of the Creator (a center post carved with masks), the worshipers danced, sang, and told of visions that brought them power from the spirit world.
Written and submitted by NAAHKITTY
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