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Pamir
 Oct 4, 03 - 5:55 PM |
Bear Medicine
Honey Paw, Lightfoot, Old Man of the Mountains, Big Hairy One. For Native Americans, and native people across Eurasia, to speak the name "bear" was to evoke its power. Instead, out of respect for the bears, they were given nicknames. Grandfather of the Hill, Grandmother, Strong One, the One Who Owns the Den. These and other nicknames were used by the Finns, Tungus, Lapps, and Blackfoot Indians, among other tribal people across the Northern Hemisphere. The bears of this story (a children's book) are brown bears, also known as grizzly bears in the interior of northwestern North America. From Scandinavia, clear across Siberia and into North America, they are both the same species Ursus arctus, which means bear in Latin and Greek, respectively. For thousands of years, brown bears have evoked fear in humans and for good reason. They can weigh up to almost one ton (the Kodiak bear, a brown bear of coastal Alaska, grows larger even tan a polar bear), run faster than the fastest human, and with a massive paw smash the spine of a moose. And they are very unpredictable. Yet a visitor to a national park in bear country is about three hundred times more likely to be killed by a car than a bear. But fear is not the sole reason why native peoples have respected bears. Traditionally they have felt kinship with bears, considering them our closest animal relatives. Indeed one traditional name for bears used by the Haida is Elder Kinsman. For the Haida and other Pacific Northwest cultures, bears are a powerful totem and and are important family crests. To the Cree in Central Canada, bears have been known as Four-Legged Humans. Like humans, bears are intelligent and curious. They often stand on their hind legs, walk upright, and pick berries in the same manner as a person. Like humans, they are omnivores--they can eat almost anything, preferring highly nutritious food they can get easily and in large quantity (therefore, except for coastal brown bears with easy access to salmon, they are 80%-90% vegetarian.) It's understandable why many tribes would not eat bear meat, believing it was like eating a person, a relative. The famous naturalist John Muir called bears our "hairy brothers." They could as well be called our hairy sisters, or mothers. Bears are good mothers. Cubs are not born knowing how to be bears; they must learn from their mothers (the males take no part in rearing cubs). Cubs nurse for one year, and a yearling would have little chance of surviving without its mother. But by age two or three years, the young bear's mother will chase it away; by then, then cub will be ready. It will be big and strong and smart. Yet in spite of their great strength and intelligence, in the lower forty-eight states, where there are less than nine hundred left, brown bears are listed as threatened by the Endangered Species Act. The last grizzly in the "Golden Bear State" of California was shot in 1922. There are perhaps fifty left in Norway, three hundred to five hundred in Finland and Sweden, one hundred in Italy, and one hundred and fifty in Spain, and only twenty or so survive in France. Thousands roam Alaska, northwestern Canada, and what was once the Soviet Union, but even in these areas brown bears are rapidly disappearing. Can we learn once again to share the land with the bears, as native people once learned? Grizzlies need space. Can't we afford to give space to Honey Paw and Lightfoot? Can we afford not to? --Honey Paw and Lightfoot by Jonathan London, illustrated by Jon Van Zyle |
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Dalene
Oct 29th, 2004 - 5:20 PM |
Re: Bear Medicine
WEST Strength, Introspection, Self-examination Physical body Water Blue Plant kingdom Manifestation: Healing Present Stars Autumn the "looks within" place (www.shamanelder.com) 
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Frank
Dec 28th, 2004 - 1:53 AM |
Re: Bear Medicine
Hi there: I found a very interesting blog about grizzlies in BC on the Internet the other day. Looks fairly new. Check it out, here is the link: http://grizzliesinbc.blogspot.com/ |
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