Seasons- Equinox time

As I write we are at the time of Equinox, one of the two times in the year when day and night are of equal length, and the same all over the world. The Equinoxes are also times of very rapid change at higher latitudes, such as most of Canada, where the day lengths change dramatically between our summer and our winter seasons. As my partner recently pointed out, the change in day length over time can be represented as a cycloid, one of those familiar graphs of oscillating peaks and valleys. The peaks and troughs would represent the summer and winter solstices, where the sun indeed seems to stand still for a while. The Equinoxes are placed just at the times of most rapid change, and at our latitudes, we can see the day length change over a period of a few days. Here on Mountain Daylight time, it was just dawning at a bit after 7 in the morning, and the sun will set tonight at 7:38 according to the weather site. If I were in the middle of my time zone, there would be a perfect symmetry. I can anticipate a rapid shortening of day length now and dramatic shifts of the aspect of the land [deciduous trees will all drop their leaves, snow will mantle the ground once winter arrives]. Thinking about equinoxes made me think about seasonal knowledge: moon cycles, Solstice celebrations, predictors of planting dates, evidence of the timing of salmon migrations, and the like. Trevor Lantz and Nancy Turner wrote an insightful article on what they termed “traditional phenological knowledge”, or the use of one kind of seasonal biological event to predict the timing of another (Lantz, Trevor C. and Nancy J. Turner. 2003. Traditional phenological knowledge of aboriginal peoples in British Columbia. Journal of Ethnobiology 23(2):263-286). Among the Gitksan in northwestern British Columbia, the arrival of robins in the spring “announces” the arrival of steelhead migrating up the rivers from the Coast. The Gitksan interpret the robins' song as saying “Gii gyooks milit, milit”. Milit is the steelhead, and the phrase means the steelhead are coming, the steelhead are coming. In other places other indicators of salmon arrival are noted: the fruiting of the red elderberry, for example. In many traditional calendrical systems the names of the months indicate conditions or resources to be expected in those months. Iain Davidson-Hunt and Fikret Berkes give a nice exposition of this for the Shoal Lake Anishinaabe in their 2003 paper in Conservation Ecology (now renamed Ecology and Society, an online journal about adaptation, conservation, and traditional knowledge) www.consecol.org/vol8
and in their chapter in my upcoming book Landscape Ethnoecology, Concepts of Physical and Biotic Space (Berghahn Books, November 2009), a collection of topical papers on landscape knowledge co-edited with Eugene Hunn. Some of the named moons are “budding moon”, “blooming moon”, “ricing moon” [for the harvest of manomin, or wild rice a “cultural keystone species” for Anishinaabe], “berrying moon”, “leaves turning colour moon”, “falling leaves moon” and “whitefish spawning moon” –all obviously encoding information about the cycle of seasonal change and when key events are anticipated to occur. Other systems make reference to significant events in their local ecologies:

Nearer the equator, seasonal shifts are much more subtle, but nonetheless, in the Andes not far south of the Equator, the Quechua people have elaborate ceremonials at their winter solstice in June. The winter may see frost in places with cold air drainage, whereas in the summer season, the higher precipitation means that mists will prevent radiation of heat away at night, and the frost line is much higher. The present Intí Raymí Ceremony is a mid 20th century re-creation of an ancient annual Inca ritual, which was suppressed during the Colonial period by the Catholic church. The present re-created ceremony makes offerings to Pachamama, the mother earth for a successful renewal of the seasonal cycle and the return of the sun. Apparently the visibility of the Pleiades constellation at winter solstice, gives information about the coming season and when to plant (Orlove et al. "Forecasting Andean rainfall and crop yield from the influence of El Niño on Pleiades visibility." Nature 403, 68-71 (6 January 2000) | doi:10.1038/47456). Depending on the amount of moisture in the air at high altitudes, more or fewer stars will be visible. The fine tuning of traditional knowledges such as this are likely to shift dramatically with present and on-going global climatic change, as all global systems become less predictable, and show more events that are extreme or outside of historic conditions.
Joseph Bastien wrote a compelling and sensitive ethnography of the people of Mt. Kaata in the Bolivian Andes not too far from Cusco where I was, which details the spiritual and agricultural cycle of the local people as it was when he lived there in the early 1970’s Mountain of the Condors, Metaphor and ritual in an Andean Ayllu (1978 St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co.)