WASHINGTON, Conn. – It’s hard to tell what visitors to the Strawberry Moon Festival at the Institute for American Indian Studies expected. But what they got was an experience of the transcendent Northeastern woodlands and the spirituality of a Native ceremonial circle.
The institute is a nonprofit museum and education and research center dedicated to the study of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere, particularly those of the Northeastern woodlands. It has more than 300,000 artifacts in its collections, including the largest collection of artifacts from western Connecticut tribes.
This year, the IAIS decided to hold its first Strawberry Moon Festival on June 16 – and it delivered on all of the promised activities.
Dale Carson, Abenaki and a food columnist for Indian Country Today, served her special strawberry cake made from a Narragansett recipe and strawberry tea.
Janice Us, Mohawk-Shinnecock and a member of the IAIS education staff, enchanted the more than two dozen children with Native stories in the museum’s longhouse room.
The museum staff engaged the children in a strawberry craft project – weaving small baskets they filled with live strawberry plants to take home.
But it was Terri Delahanty, Cree, who captured the spirit of the faultless late spring day with her drums, rattles and song around the circle of fire at the replicated Algonquin village on a cleared hill in the woods above the museum’s research center.
Delahanty has been with the institute for around two years, presenting drum and rattle workshops.
”They are sacred rattle workshops, but I think people don’t really understand exactly what that is because they were advertised as elk hide rattle workshops, which makes it sound like a craft, whereas it’s a sacred tool.” Delahanty said.
The choice of materials is not random, Delahanty said, but deliberate and specific.
”There is meaning in the different hides you use whether it’s elk for strength or bear for going into the void, the dark place to then be creative and create something new. It’s all made with a purpose. It’s made with prayer; each stitch has a prayer in it. Or depending on what you use for a stick, whether it’s pine for peace, elm for playfulness, or oak for strength and endurance, it all has meaning,” Delahanty said.
Delahanty works at the University of Hartford’s Magnet School with inner city students and runs a family literacy program, and before- and after-school program, and a summer school program.
She was born in the state.
”My mother came down from New Hampshire. My grandmother was Cree, and my mother was very afraid for us. We were very poor in Unionville and [the other kids] would call us half breed and what not and always tease us.”
Despite the physical disconnect from the reservation, Delahanty said she learned the cultural lifeways from her mother and her grandparents, ”out in Kansas. I kept practicing. And I kept getting teachings. I was gifted a hide. I tried to do an eight-hole drum but it didn’t work so I started doing 16 holes and grouping them into four for the four directions … I think the culture is just in use, in the blood and the cells and the organs. I always had rocks and feathers under my bed. I would pick up certain rocks. It was a calling, a yearning, I felt they were talking to me,” Delahanty said.
That’s how she got the name Many Feathers in ceremony.
Everyone who entered the spiritual circle Delahanty created was affected. Four-year-old Frances Veronno picked up one of Delahanty’s drums and started dancing and drumming in perfect time to her drumming and singing.
”It’s very peaceful here,” Veronno’s mother said. ”It turned out to be just the kind of day we wanted. I love it here. I love all this stuff.”
Delahanty brings the same spiritual sense to everything she does, Elizabeth McCormick, the institute’s executive director, said.
McCormick said she was happy with the turnout.
”We felt as long as the people who came were happy, that’s really what we were aiming for,” McCormick said.
But some important lessons were learned.
”We’ll definitely have another strawberry event next year, but it won’t be called a festival. Some people attach things to that word and expect to see elephants and dancers. I think we’ll just call it a Strawberry Thanksgiving,” McCormick said.