Ritual

For centuries.

Muscogean speaking Natives of the Southeastern United States have known that the soul can lose its luster over time.

Life gets messy and confusing, and the mistakes we make along the way can lead to bitterness and regret.

Eventually, our spirits begin to grow weary.

Southeastern Natives saw an opportunity in their yearly corn harvest to prevent despair from creeping into the community.

Before they traded the dusty dregs of last year's crop for the corn ripening in their gardens, a ritual known as the Green Corn Ceremony helped them lighten their spirits and make a fresh start.

The ceremony lasted about a week, a time when they purified themselves outside and and resolved any interpersonal conflicts by clearing the air and asking for forgiveness.

Thus, refreshed the community threw a grand feast.

And together they relished freshly harvested corn as bright and golden as the dawning of a new day.

Today, I'm going to learn about the people keeping the Green Corn Ceremony alive and ask why they see the teachings of this ritual as a matter of survival.

I'm Tarriona Tank Ball and this is Ritual.

The Southeast is the ancestral home of many indigenous tribes, from the larger, more powerful nations like the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muscogee, to smaller nations like the Tunica, Acolapissa, Bayougoula, and Houma.

But there were fewer divisions between them in the days before the European conquest.

Muskogean speaking people descend from the great mound builders, whose elaborate earthworks date all the way back to 3500 B.C.

Though eventually each tribe evolved in its own way, there remained many shared traditions throughout the region.

They also created a common trade language to ensure they would be understood even when they traveled far from home.

Visiting members of different tribes were always offered the calumet pipe upon arrival, a ritual of hospitality that helped to keep the peace.

When French, Spanish, and British colonists settled throughout the region bringing discord and disease, Southeastern tribes began to lose this cultural cohesion.

The founding of the United States only made matters worse.

Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830 stripped these powerful nations of their land and legal rights, and for over a hundred years they were systematically made to feel inferior by a nation determined to relegate living people to the past.

But their cultures proved to be too strong to slip away, and today many indigenous communities are reviving rituals like the Green Corn Ceremony.

Today, I'm sitting down with Grayhawk Perkins, member of Louisiana's United Houma Nation, to hear how he maintains these ancestral connections.

Hi, how are you doing?

Hey Grawhawk.

It's amazing to sit here with you.

You have an amazing story to tell.

You are a historian.

A culture beaarer.

You have cool hats.

You play at Jazz Fest.

You're a composer.

You're part of, like, two tribes.

Yeah.

Choctaw and Houma?.

It's pretty amazing.

How about you tell me about the Green Corn Ceremony?

Well, Green Corn Ceremony is a part of our culture in the Southeast that has been around for a thousand years.

More than a thousand years.

And it is our new year.

It's a renewal time.

You make peace with everyone around you before you go to Green Corn.

You have to go to everybody.

You might have had any words with it.

And even if it wasn't your fault, you apologize cause you got to go with a clean slate.

And we fast, we dance and we go many days without sleeping.

It's also to honor our women.

Because without our women, none of us would be here.

And really, even at the beginning of Green Corn, the men don't even go on the ground until the women do the first dance.

Basically, they cleanse the ground and then the men come on and they do their dance.

So we don't do anything.

We can't even dance without the women, because the women keep a rhythm for us.

And why haven't I heard about this?

Why haven't I heard about the green corn ceremony?

Well, to a lot of our our Green Corn Ceremony had to go underground because it you know, the outside culture made it illegal, you know, and so you had to go underground.

So a lot of times you wouldn't let anybody know you were still doing that.

But later on about the eighties or going into the nineties, a lot of elders said, you know, we need to let people know that we're still here, that we're still doing Green Corn , we're still doing the ceremonies and still have our language.

And so at that point, they started to allow people to go out and do stuff in public, talk about it and things like that, because at one point I wouldn't be able to talk to you about it.

Ours is a ceremony.

It's a dance.

We don't wear fancy costumes.

And so it's not flashy.

It's not for public entertainment.

What are some of your favorite memories of the Green Corn Ceremony?

My favorite memories of Green Corn, I guess, is just the camaraderie of being there and knowing that I'm doing something that my ancestors did when the Mounds were being built a thousand years ago or older.

I'm singing the songs the same way, we're doing dances that are actually on the pottery that those pottery were made seven, eight hundred years ago.

And we're still doing these dances and we're doing something that my ancestors did and a lot of people can't say that.

Wow.

For Muskogean speaking peoples, the Green Corn Ceremony is an expression of a worldview in which life is a vast network of interconnection.

This is only one of many rituals that honor and reinforce the ties between community members and the plants and animals that sustain them.

For United Houma Nation member Tammy Greer, the first step to reviving the traditions of her ancestors is restoring the connection they had with the natural world.

Since 2005, she's been showing people the way with the help of her traditional garden, which she calls the Medicine Wheel.

As the steward of the Medicine Wheel garden, she sees these plants as a map to a lost understanding of the power and sovereignty of all living things.

I am in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with Tammy Greer, member of the United Houma Nations and the caretaker of this amazing medicine wheel garden.

Can you tell me what a medicine wheel garden actually is?

So the medicinal garden is a garden that's designed to be a circle with cardinal directions pointing out the different paths in the circle.

We planted our garden with indigenous plants in this area, so plants that were used by our ancestors for building materials, weapons and dyes, food and, of course, medicine.

That's amazing.

What inspired you to make this garden?

I was listening to the Elders talk about what kind of traditions we were missing, and so they were telling me that we were out of relationship with the plants and they had forgotten not only their names in the original languages, but also their uses, like how did we tend one another?

How did we help one another?

And so we were thinking on that when we thought, well, we need a place where people can come where there are hundreds of plants that were used by Southeastern tribes of this area in different ways and they can wake up that knowledge about plants and what their uses are, so that when we see these plants out in the wild, they're not just a plant.

They're like our relative.

We know what they're used for.

We know their names.

How was the medicine wheel garden and the Green Corn Ceremony connected?

So the Green Corn Ceremony brought us together as a community like these plants here, together as a community at some point in the Green Corn Ceremony, we would fast addressing our bodies.

Our physical bodies were important.

And the Green Corn Ceremony pointed that out.

And the medicine will also has a path for our physical bodies.

And then we would dance.

Also our physical bodies get them in motion, and our path on the medicine wheel also addresses we need to keep our bodies moving and then the teachings of the Green Corn Ceremony had to do with forgiveness and maintaining community and coming back together, starting over, letting go of past.

We have a northern path right there that talks about our mental selves and how we need our mental and our physical and our emotional and our spiritual selves all together to tackle hard things like climate change.

Right.

And, you know, back in the day it was survival.

It wasn't just like platitudes.

It was survival for them.

Yeah.

Wow.

But, you know, today it's still survival.

Think on it.

We can't survive without our communities coming together and speaking with one another, understanding one another, forgiving one another for all what we do as human beings because we're not perfect people.

What has the medicine wheel garden taught you?

The medicine wheel teaching says that you need to maintain a balance.

Getting out of relationship with what we need to nourish us, getting out of relationship with the plants in our environment, it makes for an imbalance in the world and we're suffering some consequences for that.

Exactly.

That's exactly what you mean by relationship.

It seems so simple.

A plant, a swamp, a garden.

But it's the littlest things that make up our community.

And we all in relationship with each other and have to protect each other.

I totally understand what you're talking about here.

I have a garden at home.

I will pay her a little more attention.

It just takes so much work.

But what relationship doesn't.

Exactly.

In the Muskogean speaking world, the relationship between plants and people was reciprocal: each offered their gifts to the other.

The Green Corn Ceremony is a time to clear out any obstacles standing in the way of connection, a reminder that the individual cannot survive without the collective.

Cleansing the soul of the community in order to greet the new crop is a sign of respect to the spirit in the growing corn.

Today, the natural world has been thrown into chaos by our failure to respect the delicate balance of our ecosystems.

It certainly seems like the modern world has a long way to go before our relationship with plants is once again defined by reciprocity.

But as the Green Corn Ceremony teaches us, if we take the time to ask forgiveness for the harm we have caused, we can earn the chance to begin again.