Apisa Tuchina
"Lesson Three"Charley Jones
Empty your mind of thoughts of a nine to five job, forget about your Lexus SUV, dump your little pink house within a gated community cookie cutter home housing track. Take those clothes off while you are forgetting a society which has rendered you into a helpless person who could not survive a day out in the wilds. Imagine, sincerely imagine yourself living a life with a wilderness. No cities, no houses, no cars, no society, no worries save for staying alive. Fantasize you are solely responsible to find food, to find shelter and to make clothes for yourself, perhaps for your family, your clan.
This is living in a wilderness, this is your life depending upon your survival skills. What notion of time would you have living within wildness? Only time which matters is right now. Events of your past are gone and no longer have an effect upon your survival other than lessons learned. Your future is certainly unknown, you do not know if you will still be alive tomorrow. Your only concern is present time, your only concern is this very moment. You are busy, you are hunting, mother of your children is gatherering and your children are whining and crying about being hungry. You only give attention to what is happening right now. This is our culture's traditional sense of time.
A survival skill you learn out in the wild is food, plants and animals, move north during summer and move south during winter. You learn to chase after seasonal migration of food sources, you learn to behave in harmoney with Mother Nature. You learn to chase after our sun, learn to chase after warmth and survival. My traditional Choctaw cuture enjoys two seasons per year, Summer and Winter, tofa and hashtula.
Choctaw begin Summer, tofa, around March 22 each year with the vernal equinox. Winter,
hashtula, begins with the autumnal equinox, a day around September 22 according to our
modern Anglo calendar.
Tofa (tow-fah) - Summer.
Hashtula (hash-two-lah) - Winter.
Our traditional Chahta hashi nitak isht ikhana -
Choctaw calendar is based upon moon phases. As you know from your high school science classes
there are twenty-eight days to a lunar cycle, new moon to full moon. A calendar year based upon lunar
cycles is 354 days in length compared to our Gregorian 365.25 day calendar year. Clear to me Pope
Gregory XIII was an idiot. A lunar phase calendar simply makes more sense than a solar event based
calendar.
For Christians reading here, yes, Pope Gregory, like most Popes, is an idiot. Our English word "lunar" derives from "luna" as does derive "lunacy" with both words meaning crazy, madness or insanity. Boys are driven to madness by we women for one week of each month. Every twenty-eight days, right on cue, we women suffer The Curse, menstruation. Our Curse is perfectly snynced with lunar phases. This is Mother Nature's way. Our Choctaw calendar is in keeping with Mother Nature's intent. Pope Gregory, like almost all Popes, never got laid, never knew much of anything about women and Mother Nature.
Because our Choctaw year is only 354 days long, periodically we toss in a extra month to bring our calendar back in sync with changing of seasons, Summer and Winter. Each year the equinoxes, vernal and autumnal, "move" ahead of our calendar by eleven days. Over a span of three years, our calendar falls behind about one month compared to actual seasonal events, changing from Summer to Winter. Pope Gregory is still an idiot. Every three or four years we toss in an extra hashi - month to correct this time lag. This special month is know as luak mosholi - "extinguished fire".
There is virtually no etymology for luak mosholi which is one of many results of four-hundred years of genocide against American Indians. By the time of the Trail Of Tears, there were no surviving Choctaw tribal members who enjoyed knowledge of luak mosholi other than there was an associated ceremony; reverence. Those survivors of murderous genocide at the hands of Christians and in the name of God, held only scant knowledge of this special month, "extinguished fire", which adjusted our calendar to match up with our fireball in the sky, the sun.
This four hundred years of genocide points a notion discussed many times in previous lessons. This notion is our words, our thoughts, our way of thinking, all are controlled by immediate context. You must be careful to set a context and select words which fit your context. Our past history was slaughtered by Christians, and many of our words where slaughtered by Christians. A side effect is a lack of etymology (history) for many words; there is uncertainty about usage of some words.
Our word for month is hashi which enjoys many different meanings. This word can mean sun, moon, month or even sunflower. I know of a couple dozen expressions which are based upon hashi. This is an extra important word for Choctaw. This word for month is directly related to survival out in the wild. Next few lessons you will learn of many expressions using hashi as a root word.
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