Dawn Woman’s Blog: The Gratitude Time of the Early Harvests

A Medicine Teaching by Minisa Crumbo Halsey

Rabbit Brush’ Golden Flowers Time
By the natural calendar, autumn arrives now, in the southwest, with chokecherry picking, making chicos (horno roasted sweet corn), roasting and drying of red and green chiles, mud plastering of adobe buildings and restoring trips into the mountains. The long pinion fires which will not go out until spring, have not yet been lit. The short fire cook and smoke but are not yet needed for heat

Staking or marking with string, the medicinal roots, barks and berries which will be gathered when the green plant tops die back with the first frosts and before the snow falls hiding where you thought the plant lived. Beginning to make the house, barn, fence, field and ditch repairs, taking care to think of us all; the songs, dances and prayers that life might go on ‘in a good way’; the waters; the four-leggeds; those that swim, crawl, fly and move very slowly; the homes; the stored seeds of seven years; the Spirits of Place;  the ancestors and those yet to come, and of us, the two-leggeds.

These things and more take up their place in our new songs. We recount the days.  Continued…