#midewiwin

Top: Ojibwe and Abenaki birch bark scrolls. Used to hold ancestral stories and spirits, considered living beings themselves. Sometimes employed in Midewiwin, the Grand Medicine Lodge, a secretive teachings based religion amongst the New England native tribes.

A Midew is a practitioner of Midewiwin, the sacred practices of magic and healing among the northern tribes of America and Canada. 

Historically, Midew perform religious ceremonies, study/practice healing methods, and maintain a respectful relationship between humanity and nature. The practice of Midewiwin was very closed off, and although it has survived years of cultural assimilation, today it is much smaller than it once was. 

Because of the years of cultural assimilation, and government restrictions on Midewiwin practices, Midew today has significantly dropped in the numbers of practitioners. There are very few Midewiwin lodges in North America left now.

Why solitary practice? Solitary practice is a way of continuing this tradition, to keep it alive for future generations, and a way for those of us to reconnect with our cultural heritage. 

The Mide views on solitary practice today are that “reconnecting with their faith and tradition can help modern youth, as well as Indigenous peoples in general, to live a healthy life.”

Midewiwin is the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe)  Grand Medicine Society, a spiritual organization with complex rituals and healing magic, and is still practiced today, though not as widely. There are lone practitioners as well (see this post)

Practitioners of Mide are known as Midew.

It teaches about the supernatural world and spirits, through oral tellings and teachings. 

All are allowed to follow

A place to share culture, indigenous witch tips, and to ask questions

Cosa intendono i Nativi nordamericani per Medicina? La loro “tradizione” non è indietro nel tempo, in un passato inarrivabile, ma è qui, intorno a noi, una fonte di vita alla quale sempre possiamo attingere. In questo senso, Medicina. Le loro tradizioni sciamaniche, riscoperte e reinterpretate, mettono in comunicazione il nostro tempo presente con un tempo ancestrale, comune a tutta l’umanità. Il…

Throughout this Year of Years, I have personally only experienced four of the New Years: last Dec 31st, Chinese New Year, Jewish New Year and the english tax year - which was admittedly only momentarily exciting because I could mention it here. All the other New Years I’ve covered will most likely have been celebrated somewhere by someone, but my experience was second hand and, essentially, via the internet. This has been a project of epic travel around the world from the comfort of my sofa.

I’m well aware along the way I will have relied on inaccurate sources at times. I tried not to be presumptuous of my research, but I’m sure I’ve made mistakes. However I have also made choices to not include information too. And in particular, where I discovered scant  information about New Years that I just didn’t feel justified in sharing definitively. These tended to be aboriginal customs from indigenous peoples across Australia, and North America, of which it would be great to know more, but these single quotes or repeated phrases just didn’t feel reliable enough at the time. Here is a quick round up of some of the ones I didn’t include:

Murador New Year - claimed as 30 October,  of a Western Australian aboriginal tribe I couldn’t find any more information on.

Midewiwin supposedly celebrate(d) new year in the winter, and Waabanowin have a new year in the spring time called Minookamin. Midewiwin is also known as the Grand Medicine Society, Waabanowin as teh Dawn Society. Both are Native American secretive and animistic religions, and as such the information is scarce, or based on what feel like  bad western undertsandings, so I didnt feel comfortable including these.

I also found a long description in one article penned by Barry Fiore, whose has a radio programme and website called Tower of Song, a blog under his moniker the Gypsy Scholar. Its all fascinating, and his page about the Native American New Years sounds authoritative. But as I could find no other sources, I left it in his hands. I’m not debunking his statements, I just don’t want o parrot one single source without any other evidence in a half-arsed fashion. Which doesn’t mean there weren’t New Years celebrated - and I send out wishes now across the time space continuum to all who celebrated these, and to Barry.

There also may well have been other New Years I missed in my internet-reliant sofa-world research. And who knows. This turn of the earth may be almost done, but I’m not sure I am with this project….

Investigation or desecration? Tribes press for power to stop autopsies

MINNESOTA – Mushkoob Aubid’s family only wanted to take him home.

The 65-year-old spiritual leader died Feb. 7, a day after his car veered off a northern Minnesota highway and struck a utility pole. The family planned a four-day ritual based on the traditional Ojibwe religion known as Midewiwin that included ceremonial washing and dressing of the body.

But the Carlton County medical examiner had…