salish stories take a starring role as first nation professor examines the skies
3 minute read
shandin pete, an assistant professor at ubc.
arlen redekop
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shandin pete remembers looking at the night sky as a child with wonder, and asking his grandfather what their salish ancestors called the milky way. his grandfather knew their people had a name for it, but couldn’t remember what it was.
now the salish-dine man, an assistant professor in the university of b.c.’s department of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences, is dedicated to recovering and revitalizing the knowledge and traditions of his ancestors related to the cosmos.
“our creation stories are still told today, and known in our communities, but what was lost was connection to places that were not terrestrial: the patterns in the sky, and how those stories connected to our constellations,” said pete, a member of the bitterroot band of salish in montana.
much, but not all, of that knowledge was lost or dispersed due to colonialism and the destruction of culture and language.
through interviews with elders, archival research and anthropology field notes, pete has been piecing together salish stories with the stars overhead.
how indigenous people view clusters known as asterisms — smaller, but recognizable star patterns located within the 88 internationally recognized constellations — has largely been ignored by western culture, and excluded from the international astronomical union, a eurocentric body formed in the early 20th century.
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to see the night skies from a salish perspective, you need to look at it in a new way.
“what we see when we look up away from earth is another reality that mirrors what is happening on earth,” said pete, who has a doctorate in education.
in the salish world view, the starry nights are a mirror of what happened on earth.
“a lot of the forms are the characters in our stories, and you see them from the top, rather than the side as in a book.”
the celestial formations often represent a critical moment of transformation in a story, the moment something is about to happen or the moment something needs to be prevented.
one of the first asterisms he was able to find evidence connecting to salish stories is in the group of stars commonly known as orion in western astronomy.
“the belt of orion is the centre of the canoe and the right shoulder and opposing foot are the ends of the canoe. once you start understanding the story, you lose the form of orion and see the canoe so clearly.”
doing this work has brought pete some goosebump, code-cracking moments, when archival material, elder’s stories, star patterns and science all come together.
“there was a passage in one anthropologist’s notes written down by one of my ancestors years ago that said three stars that always rise in the same place, between where the sun and the moon rise,” said pete.
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he took the cryptic note to a few trained astronomers, and they couldn’t understand it either. pete was ultimately able to connect the archival story about the stars to the story of the canoe.
“it wasn’t until i started connecting some of these stories, i came to understand the phenomenon of lunar standstills and how they relate to summer and winter solstice, the rising and setting patterns of the sun and the full moon in particular. if you go right to the centre of that, that’s approximately due east and it happens to be orion’s belt, or this canoe, and it rises due east no matter where you are in the world.
“this knowledge is documented and recorded in many seagoing cultures (orion’s belt has long been used for navigation), but it is a testament to the knowledge of my ancestors that they also understood it,” said pete.
restoring and revitalizing indigenous astronomical knowledge has many layers of meaning, said pete.
“it’s important for my community, and in particular it’s important for the young people to have demonstrated how intelligent our communities were, and how well they functioned before the advent of technology.”
pete will share some of his celestial stories on dec. 13 at the h.r. macmillan space centre:
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salish skies: indigenous sky stories
when: saturday, dec. 13. doors open at 2:30 p.m., pete’s talk starts at 3 p.m.
where: h.r. macmillan space centre, 1100 chestnut st., vancouver
cost: $26.20 through eventbrite
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