Exploring the Foothills Night Sky, Part II
Exploring the Foothills Night Sky, Part II
Star Stories of Colorado
Guest Written by G. Dalton Peck, Undergraduate Student, Department of Astrophysics and Planetary Science, University of Colorado Boulder
We ended last week’s intro to the night sky by emphasizing a vital yet often overlooked point of astronomy: that the night sky doesn’t just belong to one culture or one region of the world, and that, at the same time the ancient Greeks and Romans were telling grand, fantastical stories on the origins of the stars, so too were the peoples who first made their homes in the foothills of Colorado. Like so much of their culture, these stories present another perspective on the world, one that’s at an all-too-salient risk of vanishing from the pages of history. It’s only right, then, that we give these stories the attention they deserve.
As we’ve discussed before, the foothills in the pre-colonial era were dominated by two particular indigenous tribes, the Southern Ute and Cheyenne peoples. While Ute legends are full of fantastical figures, such as a rather clumsy coyote distributing humanity across the land, tragically few, if any, sources remain to describe any relation between these myths and the Utes’ stories of the night sky. Cheyenne constellation lore, however, has been significantly better preserved.
While Western tradition recognizes the constellation of Ursa Major formally as a great bear and informally as the Big Dipper, Cheyenne legends speak of a different origin for such an unmistakable collection of stars. The Cheyenne story speaks of a young woman with a penchant for quillwork, designing beautifully ornate outfits and displaying the kind of talent that, in the Greco-Roman tradition, might have compelled Minerva to transform her into a spider. One day, the story says, this girl inexplicably began to design a set of seven men’s outfits, including war shirts, leggings, moccasins, and other accouterments, out of white buckskin. Her mother was puzzled by this as the girl was an only child and wasn’t being courted by any men in the village. The girl would explain that, through some innate intuition, she knew of seven brothers living far away who were destined for greatness. She planned to take the newly crafted outfits to these brothers and ask to be taken in by them as an adopted sister.
Sure enough, after saying goodbye to her mother at the halfway point of her journey, the girl eventually reached the brothers’ tipi, where they were glad to receive her and the gifts she bore. No sooner had she begun living with them, however, than the Buffalo nation took an interest in her. What followed was a series of increasingly threatening bison demanding, to no avail, that the brothers hand over the girl. Ultimately, the largest buffalo bull in the world appeared at their doorstep leading an army of bison behind him. The sister and seven brothers knew themselves to be outmatched, but, fortunately, they had a solid escape plan. The youngest brother, still only a small boy, possessed a quiver of magical arrows which, when fired into a tree, would cause it to grow to staggering heights. Doing this repeatedly allowed them to grab onto a nearby tree and be carried into the sky, jumping to safety on a cloud just as the buffalo smashed down the tree. From there, they made their new home in the sky, becoming the stars we call the big dipper.
Cheyenne mythology also demonstrates a more complex, two-way relationship with the stars than in Western tradition. Another story speaks of two young girls who stargazed one night when one expressed a desire to marry the brightest star in the sky. Later, she chased a porcupine into a tree only for the tree to grow rapidly into the sky, where she met a man who identified himself as the brightest star, who she had expressed her desire for. After marrying the brightest star, the girl was permitted to dig the roots of the celestial soil, with a singular prohibition against digging a large white turnip which, much like the Biblical tree of knowledge, quickly attracted her interest. Upon digging it up, she discovered the resulting hole in the ground to be a passageway back to her camp on Earth. Feeling homesick, she fashioned herself a rope and began lowering herself to the ground, but eventually lost her grip and fell to the Earth, meeting a gruesome fate on impact.
Her unborn son, however, survived the fall as he was made of unbreakable starstone. In a turn similar to a wolf raising Romulus and Remus, this child, Falling Star, would be taken in by a family of meadowlarks. Upon Returning to his mother’s people, his supernatural abilities helped him to slay a water monster and rescue everyone it had swallowed. In another village, he helped the locals with their buffalo hunt by tricking and capturing a white crow that had been warning the bison of the approaching hunters.
Indigenous star lore is no exception to the myriad challenges of preserving the culture of this continent’s original inhabitants, yet efforts to preserve these legends have still managed to find some success. In Canada, as reported by Science Friday in 2019, Ottawa’s Canada Science and Technology Museum took great efforts to integrate both D/Lakota and Cree constellations alongside Greco-Roman ones in their space display and worked with local schools to reconnect indigenous students to their celestial heritage. Closer to home, and on a humbler scale, the Little Thompson Observatory in Berthoud, Colorado has included a wall of Lakota Sioux constellations as part of their educational displays.
While we’re all familiar with one map of the sky, there are, in fact, countless, each with their endless culturally sacred stories from around the world. Taking some time to familiarize ourselves with these stories can help us truly appreciate what the stars mean to all of us.
You can find my Abert Essays ‘Encounters’ post on my social media sites:
Sources:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121113141020/http://pyramidmesa.com/chey4.htm
https://www.indigenouspeople.net/fallings.htm
https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/indigenous-peoples-astronomy/
https://www.starkids.org/telescopes/
https://www.wernative.org/articles/indigenous-star-stories/