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The book calls this the Harvest Moon, keeps it in the south under Shawnodese, and assigns the Turtle clan — earth. Plant: violet. Mineral: amethyst. Colour: purple. The book's assignments.

Worth noting that the book says brown bear. The bear of Anishinaabe clan tradition in the Great Lakes is the black bear, and the bear of the Zuni directional set is likewise a black bear. The species in the book is not the species in the traditions it sits beside.

The Anishinaabe doodem system is the place to start, and it happens to be where the English word for this whole page comes from: doodem translates roughly as "the expression of, or having to do with one's heart," meaning extended family — and "totem" is a borrowing of it. A zodiac of totems is using an Anishinaabe word for something Anishinaabe clan structure is not.

Descent in that system is patrilineal, children reckoned to the father's clan, and clans are exogamous — strictly enough that a marriage between an Anishinaabe Bear Clan member and a Cherokee Bear Clan member would be regarded as improper. The Bear, Makwa, is one of the great clans; its members were traditionally both the warriors and police, the Ogichidaa, and the healers and medicine gatherers. It was once so large that it was subdivided by body part — Makoshtigwaan (bear skull), Nookezid (tender-foot), Makokon (bear's liver), Miskwaa'aa (blood), Waabishki-makwa, Mishimakwa (grizzly) — and those are now largely merged under Nooke, "tender."

How many clans there are depends on who was counting. Five original totems are commonly named; a seven-clan framework is widely taught; William Whipple Warren recorded twenty-one; John Tanner recorded fewer, and different ones. There is no single canonical list, and pages that present one are choosing without saying so.

In the Zuni six-direction scheme reported by Frank Hamilton Cushing in 1881, the black bear guards the west and carries the colour blue. Zuni carvings of the prey animals are widely sold, but true Zuni fetishes do not leave the village: they are blessed, kept by the carver or a designated recipient, fed ceremonially with cornmeal and ground turquoise, and held by medicine-order priests as mediators with the animals they stand for. What happens inside those orders is not set out here.

The bear is also in the sky, in more than one nation's reckoning and not in the same way. The Mi'kmaq know Mizar as Chickadee and Alcor as his cooking pot, in a story of the great bear and the seven hunters. Among the Haudenosaunee, Alioth, Mizar and Alkaid have been recorded as three hunters pursuing the Great Bear — though that attribution reaches us through a seventeenth-century colonial source and should be held loosely. The Lakota name for Ursa Major is Wičhákhiyuhapi, the Great Bear. A widely repeated detail — that the bear's blood reddens the autumn leaves — could not be documented for any of these nations, and is left out.

Date	Event
c. 3200 BCE	The Majorville cairn and medicine wheel, Alberta — 28 spokes, dated by artefact stratification
pre-contact	The Bighorn wheel, Wyoming — 28 spokes, seven cairns, no established construction date
1851	William Whipple Warren records twenty-one Anishinaabe doodemag; other recorders give five, or seven
1881 / 1883	Cushing reports the Zuni six directions — the black bear guards the west
1883	The US Code of Indian Offenses outlaws the Sun Dance and "the usual practices of the medicine man"
1884–95	Canada's Indian Act amendments ban the potlatch, then ceremonies involving "wounding or mutilation"
1903	S. C. Simms surveys Bighorn — American Anthropologist 5: 107–110
1951	Canada's ceremonial prohibitions are repealed
c. 1970	Sun Bear forms the Bear Tribe and names himself its medicine chief (date widely repeated, not firmly sourced)
1972	Hyemeyohsts Storm's Seven Arrows publishes the wheel as a chart; the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council condemns it
1974	Eddy's Science paper on Bighorn; Schaefer (1986) finds no statistical support for the stellar alignments
11 Aug 1978	The American Indian Religious Freedom Act is signed
1980	Sun Bear and Wabun Wind, The Medicine Wheel: Earth Astrology — where this placement comes from
1984	The AIM Southwest chapter resolution names Sun Bear and the Bear Tribe
1992 / 10 Jun 1993	Sun Bear dies; the Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality follows. It names no individuals

September is not the denning month — that comes later, in October and November. What late August and September is, for a bear, is hyperphagia: the weeks of relentless eating that put on the fat the winter runs off. Berries, nuts, spawning fish, whatever the country offers. "Harvest pragmatism" is, for once, a fair description of what the animal is actually doing.

The northern nations name the same weeks for leaves rather than for bears. Anishinaabemowin gives September as Waatebagaa-giizis, the moon of bright leaves; Lakȟótiyapi gives Čhaŋwápeǧi Wí, the brown-leaves moon. These are lunar months, aligned only approximately with Gregorian ones, and the names vary between communities — the Border Lakes Anishinaabe and the Minnesota Anishinaabe do not always use the same one.

• Medicine Wheel Totems — the system, the 1980 book, and the objections to it.
• Sturgeon — the span before.
• Raven — the span after.
• Cougar — the north guardian in the same Zuni scheme.
• World Zodiacs · Religion · Calendar