the fight is not over yet

earthmagick:

selchieproductions:

metapsychic:

In honor of the full moon tonight, here is a list of the Native American full moons, and their meanings. May all the moons be enjoyed!

 • Full Wolf Moon – January Amid the cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages. Thus, the name for January’s full Moon. Sometimes it was also referred to as the Old Moon, or the Moon After Yule. Some called it the Full Snow Moon, but most tribes applied that name to the next Moon.

• Full Snow Moon – February Since the heaviest snow usually falls during this month, native tribes of the north and east most often called February’s full Moon the Full Snow Moon. Some tribes also referred to this Moon as the Full Hunger Moon, since harsh weather conditions in their areas made hunting very difficult.

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I could just call whoever posted this something offensive and quite possibly ableist, but I am trying to watch my language, so I’ll use academia instead. 

First of all, the plausibility of all Native American tribes sharing the same traditional view of the moon is something you don’t even have to be an academic to question; with the incredible diversity found not only between cultures but also the areas these tribes live in, it would seem highly implausible that all five hundred tribes or more would all call the first full moon of the year the Full Wolf Moon.

There are no wolves in South America, not to mention that Yule is a European thing - carry on - and even more importantly, each and every tribe has their own cosmology, meaning that it would be rather ignorant to assume that the Yanomami who lives along the Orinoco River in the Amazon Rainforest would think of the moon in the same way as e.g. the Inuit of the far north.

To the Yanomami the moon is their ancestor, but not a good ancestor at that - before being shot with an arrow by the hero Suhirina, the moon was a child eater and the blood of the moon that fell once Suhirina had wounded him is what presumably gave birth to all humans. According to the Yanomami the moon’s blood is what makes people fight, meaning that the more moon blood one has (Europeans) the crueler one is, whereas the Yanomami who were all made of mere drops of moon blood are just perfect. 

And what about the Inuit? There are several myths about the moon among the Inuit, it being the home of Sedna, a sea goddess, but there was also a belief among certain Greenlandic Inuit that an unmarried woman shouldn’t look at the moon, as he was a womanizer and he’d make them pregnant if they looked at the moon.

No wolves here, carry on.

But let’s not just stop at the implausibility of everyone in two continents, despite different cultures, sharing the same cosmology, let’s look at the ways in which nature and language conspire together to make this impossible.

Language is formed by the combined forces of nature and culture and culture in itself is dependant upon the nature it finds itself in; this is the main reason as to why people love saying things like ‘the Inuit have 54673892874653627874652678 words for snow’, not realising that this in theory isn’t true, but merely a result of necessity - a culture will develop traditions as well as words for things that seem important to them. I doubt that there is more than one word for a camel in South Saami, but we have some forty different words for reindeer, as the reindeer is what traditionally made up the core of our culture, what with the Saami being reindeer herders and all that. 

Similarly the Amazigh have several words for sand and camels, not because they have been conditioned to think that camels are the coolest thing on the planet, but because it makes up a big part of their culture and as soon as something holds a certain cultural place among a people, it will be described with a number of more specific words than in a culture where it isn’t as important, especially if knowing the difference between something that to someone from another culture would seem useless could mean the difference between life and death in their culture.

In short, cultural differences, linguistic barriers, geographic distances and pure common sense together disprove this list; it is not so much a list of Native American names for the moon as it is an example of New Age trite, based on an offensive, romantic idea that loves to picture indigenous peoples as romantic, primitive, nature loving beings with a higher spiritual connection to the great fucking neo-pagan mystery. Lists like this holds no truth whatsoever, they’re examples of a western favourite hobby of diminishing other cultures and turning them into exotic Others.

Being Pagan to me comes with the idea that I am to treat everyone in a respectful manner - this is not how you do it; if your wish to be a Pagan stems from your wish to be Pocahontas, you’re doing it wrong - look back to your own people’s traditions, most people still have Pagan traditions that they, unknowingly, celebrate, isn’t it better to connect with your own heritage, rather than with an inaccurate, white man’s misrepresentation of something that does not exist, i.e. a pan-Native American unified culture?

Johan this was beautifully well said.