Indian Time - A Voice from the Eastern Door

We put our minds together and give thanks to our eldest Grandmother, the Moon, who lights the nighttime sky. She is the leader of women all over the world, and she governs the movement of ocean tides. By her changing face we measure time, and it is the Moon who watches over the arrival of children here on Earth. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to our Grandmother, the Moon.

We are nations of grandmothers, led by a leader female whom we call Iakisotha Karakwa, or Grandmother Moon. As Onkwehonwe (Native people), we relate to the moon in this way, as our Grandmother and respected elder. We are grateful to her and continue to extend to her our greatest esteem, attention and appreciation for all that she does. She has a special relationship to the waters of the Earth, big and small. From the waters at the doors of life, such as the follicular fluid that bathes primordial ovum, the dew on the grass in the dawn and at dusk, to the waters of the great oceans, she causes them all to rise and fall. Her constant ebb and flow teaches us that all Creation is related, made of one breath, one water, one earth. The waters of the earth and the waters of our bodies are one. Breast-milk is formed from the blood of the woman. Our milk, our blood and the waters of the earth are one water, all flowing in rhythm to the moon. Grandmother Moon looks after her daughter, the earth, and in concert with her arranges the cycles of continuous creation, making possible, with the caress of the male Sun, the growth of plants, animals and human beings.

We don’t doubt our Grandmother’s love for us, her grandchildren, for she continues to do as she was originally instructed. Preparing themselves with red willow for purification and using fire and tobacco, Skyholder and the first human beings to whom he gave breath enabled Sky Woman’s daughter, mother of the Creator twins, to rise into the night sky to become our unfailing moon. There she guides us human beings through the night and helps us to keep track of time. She reminds us when ceremonies need to be done, when medicines are to be picked, when the gardens must be planted and harvested and when babies will be conceived and born.

Our Grandmother Moon teaches us about ourselves. We journey through life in the cradle of her rhythms, seeking the cadence of our individual internal tempo in the reflection of her many faces. In her monthly wax and wane, in her continuous beginning and ending, she organizes human behavior on earth. A continuing relationship with her is essential to our survival as Onkwehonweh (Real People). Generations of human beings observed the intimate relationship of the Moon to agriculture and reproduction. From her we gained our first knowledge of the power of the circle, of cycles, of the ways of water and earth and of our humanity. For female life, a vision of personal healing and wellness is provided by our ancient Grandmother with whom we walk “hand in hand” in the course of our lives. She “visits” the women, her grand-daughters, whose legacy it is to instruct our female relatives in the proper respect and knowledge of the power of our fertility and the fertility of the earth. Furthermore, women must strive to build upon family networks, to build upon the kinship system we call clan and to cast our hope upon the common waters running through the veins of our grandchildren. In these ways, the Moon serves as the Grandmother of knowledge, science and medicine. She is the source of women’s privilege and authority over matters of production and reproduction.

By contaminating our food chain, including mother’s milk, with toxic compounds such as PCBs, dioxins, DDT and many others, corporate society has removed from us our very ability to feed ourselves, our families and our communities. Exposure to toxic contaminants in the environment (air, water, soils, local food, fish, wildlife and mother’s milk) has resulted in a rapidly changing epidemiology among many Native peoples. At Akwesasne, for example, incidence and prevalence of diseases like childhood asthma, diabetes and thyroid disorders are documented to be on the rise.

Over the past four decades, much of our community based medical practice has been lost with the influx of more industrial ways of life. For example, the institution of the hospital maternity ward and the biomedical practitioner, the obstetrician -gynecologist, have served to replace our primary healers and midwives. At the same time, we have also lost the backbone of our community discussion around these matters. While biomedicine has brought some obvious advantages to the management of disease, nonetheless, in some rather intrusive ways, it has interfered needlessly with the time proven practices and ways of care provided by Native midwives and other traditional health care practitioners. This loss of ethno-medicine in our family building ways has added to the rise in family dysfunction and the loss of self-efficacy among individual women. The disempowerment of Native women and the dissolution of family ways is an essential problem that our communities continue to face.

For the Haudenosaunee, women, usually grandmothers, are the helpers at birth. They are called Iewirokwas (yeh wee LOH gwas) in the Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) language. This is a cultural title held by Kanienkehaka women who “scoop then from the water” or “pull them from the earth” or “pull them from a dark, wet place.” Essentially, this is what the Moon does. Those of us who are practitioners of birth know what it is to scoop an infant from a puddle of amniotic fluid in order to clear an airway. We know what it is to “call the baby” with instruments of rattle, drum and the power of song and the human voice. We work hand in hand with creation in the moment of birth. Using her ceremonies throughout the cycle of a woman’s life, the Moon instructs us with her constancy and her light.

Birth is a ceremony, a life-way, that is primary in re-affirming people’s relationships to each other, to their environment, all of creation, and to themselves. Women are the first environment. They are where social bonds are created directly to the earth and the moon, our original mother and grandmother. Pregnancy and birth are windows of opportunity. They serve as a point in time in which a woman is filled with her primordial power of re-creation The psycho-social focus is the relationship of mother and infant, the recreation of the woman in her expanding family relationships, including foremost, her relationship with herself. The woman stands at center of a circle in which the four grand­parents are the four directions in the family. The baby and the father and mother are at the core, according to Skyholder’s instruc­tions. The woman is the center. The grand­parents are the four directions, and if they are unavailable, the vacuum of their absence must be filled with the right people. Many fundamental problems facing our communities today, including the disempowerment of Native women and the dissolution of family ways, result from our failure to give proper respect to our original instruction and our traditional teachings.

Proper respect of our ceremonies, our original instructions, our language and our traditional teachings are essential to guide our path to the future. Acknowledging this we sing to our celestial Grandmother our continuing devotion to the purpose of her being and her power.

The end.