Maya McFadden photos
Norm Clement uses sage to cleanse attendees of negative energies.
Monday’s Indigenous Peoples' Day cultural celebration on the New Haven Green.
Sage smoke, traditional dancing, and a “prayer of the four directions” filled the Green Monday afternoon as dozens gathered for an annual ceremony honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Norm Clement, who has organized local Indigenous Peoples’ Day celebrations for the past decade, said he looks forward to the day when we no longer celebrate Columbus Day but just Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
“It’s a new day for Native people,” Clement said. (While the second Monday of October continues to be recognized as the federal holiday of Columbus Day, and while municipalities and states across the country now honor that same day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, in New Haven this holiday is officially recognized as Italian Heritage Day.)
Attendees line up by the dozens to get sage cleanse.
The Monday gathering on the Green brought together local Indigenous Peoples and other community members to share appreciation for the still active and vibrant Indigenous cultures in Connecticut.
Attendees did a round dance together with hands linked.
Jennifer Rawlings.
New Haven native Jennifer Rawlings attended her first Indigenous Peoples-focused event Monday with the hope of reminding herself and others like her that “it’s so important for Natives to take up space” in their communities.
Rawlings grew up celebrating her Wampanoag heritage and said the culture is still very vibrant and alive around New England.
During the pandemic, Rawlings attended the gathering for the removal of the Christopher Columbus statue in Wooster Square Park in June 2020 and said the backlash the removal received made her realize “how important it is for the New Haven community to be revealed to its Indigenous people that have been here.”
Rawlings wore traditional deerskin garments, hawk feather hair accessories, and jewelry made from quahogs to represent her “coastal woodland people.”
While growing up, Rawlings said she had to navigate her life that was “100 percent city living” and “100 percent Wampanoag.”
She emphasized the importance of having representations of the duality among Indigenous people.
Clement expressed support for the movement by the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) to search for Indigenous Peoples’ lost bodies in landfills.
“Indigenous women go missing everyday. No one bothers to look,” Clement said.
Clement led attendees through a “Prayer of The Four Directions” guiding them to face the east, south, west, and north as he said the prayer in a megaphone.
The prayer reads:
Great Spirit who comes out of the East,
Come to us with the power of the East,
We are thankful for the light of the rising sun.
Let there be light on the path we walk.
Let us remember always to be thankful that you give the gift of a new day.
Spirit of Creation, we turn to the South,
We are thankful for sending us warm and soothing winds from the South to comfort us and caress us when we are tired and cold.
Unfold us as your gentle breezes unfold the leaves on the trees.
And as You give to all the earth your warm moving wind, give to us warmth and remember to be grateful
So that we may grow close to You.Great Life-giving Spirit, we face the West, the direction of sundown.
Let us remember every day that the moment will come when our sun will go down.
Never let us forget that we must fade into you.
Give us beautiful color; give us a great sky for setting,
So that when it is time to meet you we come with glory.Great Spirit of Love, come to us with the power of the North
Make us courageous when the cold winds of life fall upon us.
Give us strength and endurance
For everything that is harsh, everything that hurts, everything that makes us squint.
Let us move through life ready to take what comes from the North.
Great Spirit of the Sky, lift us up to You that our hearts may worship You and come to You in glory.
Hold in our memory that You are the Creator, greater than we, eager for our good life.
Let everything that is in the world lift our minds and our hearts and our lives to You, so that we may come to You always in truth and in heart.
Giver of all Life, we pray to you from the Earth. Help us to remember as we touch the earth that we are little and need your pity. Help us to be thankful for the gift of the earth
and never to walk hurtfully on the world. Bless us with eyes to love what comes from Mother Earth and teach us how to use well your gifts.
Clement said that historically, Indigenous Peoples had to hide in church basements or others’ homes to pray or do traditional dances.
“This is a celebration that we are still here,” he added.
Clement brought along 10 pounds of sage to cleanse attendees of impurities, he said.
He wafted a bowl of burning sage with a fan made of feathers around the bodies of attendees who opted to join in the traditional smudge method.
Mother Eliza McNamara with daughter Willow.
During Monday’s smudge ceremony, Eliza McNamara joined in with her six-year-old daughter Willow.
While the sage smoke surrounded Willow, she reminded the community, “I have no bad vibes.”
The two attended the indigenous celebration after attending a rally outside of City Hall about the ongoing war in Israel and Gaza.
She attended the City Hall rally as a way to grieve, she said.
“It’s important to me to find ways to have really hard conversations with children,” McNamara said. “Sometimes it makes more sense to show rather than tell her what I care about.”
McNamara, who lives in Norwalk, said she came to the Indigenous Peoples celebration to also offer her daughter more knowledge about different cultures, particularly because she still learns about celebrating Columbus Day in school.
While at the Green, McNamara recalled her daughter attending her first rally on the New Haven Green while McNamara was pregnant and attending a Bernie Sanders support rally.
Several community members joined Clement in bringing a banner reading “500 years of genocide and we are still here” to hang it outside of the Knights of Columbus building Monday evening.
The banner had red hand prints represent the lost Indigenous women whose bodies were never found over the decades.
The orange letters reading “we are still here” represented Indigenous children who were lost when sent to residential schools.
“Schools shouldn’t have graveyards,” Clement said.
“These are the things done to us by colonizers for hundreds of years,” he added. “These are the things that are being done to the Palestinian also.”
Before the conclusion of the gathering, Rawlings performed a traditional Native dance. A music group called Chaneque Rebelde performed a song called “Pájaro cú.”
