Stories from the Plains Sky- Part 1

The Pawnee people have long looked at the sky for guidance, meaning and connection. In this episode, Matt Reed, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Pawnee Nation, shares stories of ceremony and tradition that tie the Pawnee to the stars, moon and storms.

See photos, maps, and glimpses of prairie life on Instagram: @rootedintheplains

*Part one of a two-part series exploring the stories and science of the Great Plains sky. 

Transcript

Stories from the Plains Sky- Part 1 Transcript

Welcome to Rooted in the Plains, a podcast about the people, places, and moments that shape the Great Plains. I'm Nicole. As we reach the end of the first season, I have a two-part episode to share with you. Throughout this series, I have had so many conversations that remind me why I started this project, and this one is no exception. I had the honor of speaking with Matt Reed, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Pawnee Nation. 

Nicole: Tell me a little bit about your role as a tribal historic preservation officer. 

Matt Reed: Well, it's like an onion, it has many multiple layers. Just by regulation or by law, my job is to review infrastructure projects that have federal, some kind federal funding connection to make sure that there in compliance with the national historical preservation act. So basically, it’s the same thing, as your state historical preservation office would do. What my facet is to this is that I'm making sure that whatever the project is not going to have some kind of adverse effect on our cultural landscape or our history, archaeology, sacred sites, that kind of thing. And so, tribes have a little bit more, a little bit distinct or unique aspect to the whole process because you know we're not just looking at historic properties. You know, most people they would know what the National Register of Historic Places is. So, it could be a building or it could be a neighborhood or you know, something like that. But from our perspective, you know, we could look at landscapes, and so we're not just concerned with an actual built environment, but also some of our sacred places, there's a feeling to it, you know. So, like the way that it looks, your view scape, some instances, the soundscape, all of that comes into consideration. 

Case in point, so solar farms, and it's if for this instance, uh, we have a sacred site in Nebraska that the name of that site and our whole interaction with it is really dependent upon how it looks when the sun hits it at you know a certain time. And so, if you have something like a solar farm being built next to it, and it's either going to cast some kind of glare or it's going to interfere with that interplay between the sun and the site, then that really you know kind of has an adverse effect. You know, you don't want to you want to mitigate that. So, in this instance, I think it was a USDA project, not too far away, but I had a concern like you know, which direction are you facing your solar panels? What you know, what's that gonna look like and how big are they, and you know, that kind of issue. Whereas, you know, if you were putting up building a sidewalk, you know, near there, I'm not as concerned if there's no archaeology in the area. So yeah, you know, twists and turns, you know, with it. So, a little different than a state historic preservation office.

Nicole: Yeah, that's cool. So, what kind of traditional signs in nature, sky color, wind, animal behavior, plants were used by the Pawnee to understand or prepare for weather changes, or what kind of things are passed down or stories.

Reed: I'm paused because I'm sitting here thinking, you know, when we talk about climate change, you know, these days, that's something that our folks never took, never had to deal with. The other aspect, you know, is like just normal season change. So, like with our so our year was a lunar year and had more months than 12. I think we actually have 13, maybe 14. A lot of it was dependent. So sometimes the months have a direct correlation to like, you know, whatever it is that was of tandem out importance then. 

So, like, you know, there's a moon about pulling grass, which is talking about you know, weeding our fields and crops and everything, making sure that they're not being choked out. And then there's some moons that are based on constellations, and the constellations are going to tell you like, oh, when it's when it's time to start the new year, when it's time to head out to go uh hunting buffalo, when it's time to tell certain stories. That you know, there's some activities and stories that are only permissible at in the winter, and so those constellations and which moon you're in kind of helps determine, you know, we need to we need to put the drum away, and we and this is the time that we do these stories and we play this kind of game and that sort of thing. So, it's just little things like that.

Nicole: Were storms or lightning or broader forces of a sky viewed or talked about in any traditions?

Reed: Oh yeah. Well, our creation story, as far as I can tell, we might be the only tribe that's this way. I don't know, I know a lot of tribes, but I don't know any others with a story similar to this. So, our creation story utilizes, well, first of all, it says that we come from the stars, but the first man and the first woman, when they were put on the earth, they were put on the earth with a tornado. And so that's the unique aspect, is that this phenomenon that's unique to the plains, you know, it's incorporated into our origin story. Whereas a lot of the other tribes, there's kind of a bad connotation. You know, it might be evil forces, it might be the dead, or it might, you know, there's all always some kind of negativity around it. 

Whereas with us, that was a real positive thing. Along with that origin story, there's all kinds of discussion about you know thunder and lightning and the how storms out on the plains, you know, they usually come from the west. And so that direction of the west is connected with one of our sacred sites, and the fact that your water and all these things, if you think about this as like a farmer, how they would think of life on earth, you know, your source of water, in a in a sense, springtime, and how everything comes back to life, whether it's you know leaving out or it's starting to produce fruit or whatever, it's all connected to the West and storms coming from the West. And so, all of those things that we think of as like pretty commonplace on the plains, not so much on the coasts, it's kind of um has a religious connection for us. And so just the very nature of life on the plains has a spirituality to us that most people don't have. 

There's one story, I've always seen it connected with like you know how little kids they kind of tend to get scared, especially in spring thunderstorms. There's like a lullaby talking to kids about how not to be afraid of the thunder because that's the voice of our grandfather being the creator. When you hear that thunder, it it's a and it's a matter of importance. That's a direct connection to our creation, it's a direct connection too to the uh beginning of the new year. When you start hearing that spring thunder, that's when it's time to like plant your crops and start thinking about getting everything organized for the upcoming summer and the year. So, it's kind of a nice thought, you know.

Nicole: Yeah, that's cool. How did colonization or forced relocation affect the way weather or sky knowledge was preserved or shared?

Reed: It has an effect, and it's something that I wasn't really made aware of until I, you know, you get out and interact with other tribes from across North America. And I think this is something that it might actually be unique to tribes that are in, especially in Oklahoma, because everybody here, unless you're Wichita, you're not from here. You're you were moved here from someplace else. And there's 39 different tribes here in the state.  So, it to us, the way it worked out was that our relocation and the reservation system and assimilation and all the policies you know that were put on us by uh the government really made us kind of, I don't know, realize or actualize the things that were the most important to us. 

And before I get too much further, there's one other aspect you know that we have here that might be unique against the rest of the country, is that we went through a process even after we came here and we purchased our reservation from the Cherokees and the Creeks. Are they about 20 years later they decided that we still had too much land, and so they uh gave each person 160 acres and everything that was left over, they took it and opened it up for settlement. And so that allotment process kind of minimized, and this is the intent of it, was to minimize uh our connection to the land. 

So, you know, even all of the treaties that we signed in Nebraska and here and everything, it's all designed to separate us from our land base, and so you do that to people, and the only thing that you really have to rely on is your culture, and so you're uh we couldn't go to our sacred sites anymore, so we only had our ceremonies, ceremonies and stories, and songs, and you know, all of this. And so we had to rely on it, and we had to protect it here because you know, at the same time, they were trying to stamp out our culture, and so it was actually illegal to have ceremonies and dances, and one of the big things it's probably with every tribe, but like having feasts and meals and dinners, you know, can as a community. There's one big meal that's cooked communally and then it's served communally, and everybody participates communally. That was highly discouraged. 

Our agent hired informants to like, you know, keep tabs on who was leading these things and who were who our cultural leaders were and that sort of thing. And so, we had to take some of our ceremonies and hide them in simple games. And so, you know, we come out, we have a tradition, you can look up books about it, uh, called the Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game. So, a hand game is just a game, it's a way to pass the time in the winter. But in order to for us to have a ghost dance, we had to incorporate it into these games. So that the agent came along or one of his snitches came along, you could just say, Well, we're just we're just playing hand game. It's nothing important. That's all it is. Yeah, and then when they left, we'd continue on with the ceremony. 

So, in a way, like that removal and all that, it forced us to like to rely more on our culture and not so much on our place, our the real estate of the Pawnee Nation. Um, we're very fortunate with the amount of culture that we've held on to and retain, you know, and we're like everybody else, there's elements of it. There's stuff that we're just have big gaps in our information uh about our culture and our history because of what happened. But at the same time, we're really strong in a lot of our culture, a lot of our language and so forth. So, it's a it's a weird, weird, weird uh way to live, I guess.

Nicole: Like if you had a missing piece and somebody else had a missing piece, if you put them together, like if they fit.

Reed: Yeah, on the surface, what I'm supposed to do is to preserve historical places and cultural places. But one of the many roles that I do in addition to that is like helping to reconnect ceremonies and ceremonial objects with our community, helping to reconnect people with our language, with cultural practices that have almost disappeared. Like there's been a couple of instances where we found things, you know, through even through archaeology, uh, that helped us reconnect with through stories from maybe the 50s and 60s, you know, that where we had lost something that just that not that long ago, but we had made we had held on to it for thousands of years, and then it just passed away, and then now we've rediscovered it and reconnected back to it. So yeah, it's a weird thing. So that's like the other duties as assigned.

Nicole: Are there current efforts within the Pawnee Nation to record, teach, or revive traditional environmental or sky-related knowledge? When you do have ceremonies or gatherings, do they tell stories?

Reed: On the surface, one of the things that we had always continued to do, and we never did really stop, was this practice of, you know, in the winter, especially around that time between Christmas and New Year's, even on the Western calendar, was we set that aside for a period where we play hand games and we get together and have meals. And so, every night, it’s you know, it's only a short period of time, maybe a good solid week in our community. There's different organizations that host a hand game every night. For every night between Christmas and New Year's, we're doing that. And that's if you're going to tell, you know, like there's sometimes you talk about stories, that's when you talk about it, or that sort of thing. 

So, in a way, you know, we kept that up without even, I don't even know if anybody made a conscious decision. I think it just never stopped. But there's definitely things that we've brought back in the last 20 years, maybe like trying to reconnect our folks uh back with like uh cosmology, equinoxes, the spring equinox, the fall equinox, uh the starting of our new year, look actual knowledge and familiarity with our constellations. You know, the every constellation that everybody knows, they're like Greco-Roman. Well, we didn't have those constellations, we had different ones. So, it's like trying to familiarize our community with our constellations and what they're called and why it's important, and you know, that sort of thing. 

And like, you know, one of the easiest ones that we use all the time is in the springtime. Well, the Pawnee constellation is called the ducks. There's two quote-unquote ducks, and how this goes across in Greco-Roman is that the tail end of uh Scorpio is there's a couple of little stars there, and those are the ducks in Pawnee constellations, and so when those ducks rise above the horizon, that's when you start listening for your spring thunderstorms. So, the cool thing about it is when you start trying to observe it, especially in the winter, is that the tail of the Scorpio, it usually doesn't come up until the sun's already up. And so, and then, you know, by the time it you would see it, you can't because it's so bright outside. 

And then slowly time progresses, eventually, you'll get to a point where those two stars are just slightly visible for a few minutes before the sun comes up. And so, it as you go along, it gets later and later, and they become more visible because they come up before the sun. But by that time, it's obviously spring, so you have to catch it that just that little sweet moment, you know. So as soon as that happens, then we know, okay, well, now you know, start paying attention for the first spring thunderstorm, the first sound of thunder, and then as soon as that happens, now it's the new year. So now you start making preparation for our first ceremony, which is usually the spring equinox. I think mid-March to maybe early April, we'll have that instance where you'll have your spring thunderstorm and then the spring equinox. So yeah, works out. So that's like I said, that's something that we just started doing, you know, the last 20 years or so. I say 20, maybe not quite 20. But you know, our folks, they probably did that ever all the time and never thought about it, you know. It's just that's the way life is. So, this is something that we've had to make a concerted effort to try to re-institutionalize.

Nicole: Yeah. Thank you so much for your time and your knowledge. And yeah, I really appreciate it.

Reed: Oh, you're welcome. It was like gave me a lot of deep thoughts.

Listening to Matt is a reminder that the stories of the plains don't just live in books or archives. They live in the land, in the sky, and it's deep in our roots. In part two, we'll look to the sky again. This time with Dr. Randy Peppler, whose work bridges science and history. Thanks for listening to Rooted in the Plains. For photos, maps, and glimpses of Plains life, visit the Instagram page Rooted in the Plains.