Contents
The Otter holds 20 January to 18 February, and the site's tooltip gives it unconventional, nurturing, playful medicine. The placement comes from Sun Bear and Wabun Wind, The Medicine Wheel: Earth Astrology (Prentice-Hall, 1980), and it is one author's twentieth-century construction rather than any nation's teaching — a point the book itself makes in its Author's Note, which describes the system as "a new way revealed to us at this time" and not conforming to "any way of gaining self-knowledge used by any particular tribe."
In Sun Bear's system
The book calls this the Rest and Cleansing Moon. It keeps the span in the north under Waboose, and assigns the Butterfly clan — air, in the book's four-element scheme — with the quaking aspen as plant, silver as mineral, and silver as colour. Those six attributions are the book's throughout.
The otter in real traditions
The otter is a doodem — a clan — in the Anishinaabe system, where it is Nigig. Anishinaabe clan descent is patrilineal, children reckoned to their father's clan, and the clans are exogamous; the number of them varies by who recorded them and where, from a commonly cited five original totems up to the twenty-one that William Whipple Warren set down in the nineteenth century. That variation is itself the honest finding. There is no single canonical list.
The otter is widely associated with the Midewiwin, the Anishinaabe medicine society, and here this page stops short on purpose. The Midewiwin is a living, initiatory, degree-based society — advancement requires completed study and ceremony, much as an apprenticeship or a degree programme does — and its birch-bark scrolls were kept hidden and their interpretations "not easily given away." That much is public record. The otter-skin bag, the shell, and what happens in an initiation are not this page's to set out, and the sources it can reach do not set them out either. Such teachings exist; they belong to the society and to the communities that carry it.
On the Northwest Coast the otter is a different and darker figure. The Tlingit Kóoshdaa káa — literally "land otter man" — is a shape-shifter who takes human or otter form, imitates a baby's cry or a woman's scream to draw people to the water, and in some tellings drowns them while in others rescues the freezing by making them one of its own. Analogues are named among the Tsimshian ('Watsa), the Dena'ina (Nat'ina) and the Yup'ik (Urayuli). Note the species: this is the land otter, not the sea otter of the maritime fur trade.
Key dates
| 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, or a different set again |
| 1883 | The US Code of Indian Offenses outlaws the Sun Dance and "the usual practices of the medicine man" — the Midewiwin falls under this |
| 1884–95 | Canada's Indian Act amendments ban the potlatch, then ceremonies involving "wounding or mutilation" |
| 1891 | W. J. Hoffman's Midewiwin study appears in the Bureau of Ethnology's seventh annual report — the point at which much of the published record of the society enters print |
| 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 (date widely repeated, not firmly sourced) |
| 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, passed by 500 representatives of 40 tribes and bands. It names no individuals |
In the year
Late January and February is deep winter across the otter's range, and the North American river otter does not sleep through it. It stays active under the ice, using air pockets and open leads, hunting fish in water that is warmer than the air above it. This is also when otters breed — and the species delays implantation, so that the kits from a February mating are not born until the following spring.
That makes the book's "Rest and Cleansing" a slightly odd fit for the animal's actual February, which is neither restful nor still. It is, though, an accurate description of the month itself in the north: the coldest stretch, the year at its most inward.
The Anishinaabe name for February is about a different animal again — Namebini-giizis, the sucker moon, for the white sucker namebin; Border Lakes communities also give Makoonsiwi-giizis, the bear-cub moon, and Migiziwi-giizis, the bald-eagle moon. Lakȟótiyapi gives Thiyóȟeyuŋka Wí, the moon of frost on the lodge, and Čhaŋnápȟopa Wí, the moon when the trees pop with cold. These are lunar months, aligned only approximately with Gregorian ones, and the names differ from community to community — which is the point worth carrying away from any list like this.
Related
- Medicine Wheel Totems — the system, the 1980 book, and the objections to it.
- Snow Goose — the span before.
- Cougar — the span after.
- World Zodiacs · Religion · Calendar