Eagles and Eagle Feathers

[Music] [Music] [Music] do a little bit of a smudge first just to ensure that what i'm doing and what i'm saying is it's going to be done in a good way [Music] so [Music] my english name is victor lyon and i'm the cultural resource coordinator at the friendship center and uh since uh it's officially summer now and um when you call that aboriginal day or indigenous day has uh come and gone i wanted to speak a little bit about the feathers because a lot of times people always associate feathers with uh first nations people and uh there's a lot of uh misconception about our relationship with the feathers and things like that so i just wanted to uh set some things straight not that i'm not that i'm an uh an official spokesman of anything to be able to know anything about this but i just want to share a little bit about what i've been taught and the things that i've been been shown through uh different visions and dreams and things like that so uh recently my wife and i we would uh travel to the bush and we put food out scrap food that we didn't couldn't finish or weren't able to consume and we'd put these out for the animals and on our trip trips out there um one of the things we found was all these feathers um these are all eagle feathers megazi miguen we call them miguen feathers we got an assortment of different types of feathers here this type of feather is near the tip of the wing before the the pointer feathers or as we call them feathers the ones that steer uses to steer his uh his flight i was even fortunate fortunate enough to find a tail feather it's the center one i believe it looks pretty straight we also found several uh mid-wing feathers that are kind of in the middle of the wing um they support the flight also one of the things we found too was some new growth feathers that were that were that were left there even some little uh smaller ones too so all these are our eagle feathers and uh we uh we honor these feathers and we we try to use them in our lives in a good way so uh our relationship with with magazine is is not one of worship or anything like that where we don't worship the ego we don't worship the feather or anything like that our relationship is based on love and uh there's a legend that goes along with the with with the with the eagle and how he uh willingly sacrificed was willing to sacrifice himself in order to try to save us save uh mankind anishinaabe and uh that's where you find the in the seven teachings of love it's not usually represented by the eagle and uh that's what these feathers represent to us is love you know this is the creator and uh when we find one it helps us to remind us remind us of that love that the creator has for us and that all of creation has for us and that we should have for each other also when we find an eagle feather oftentimes we will take tobacco most of us that i know of always carry tobacco and we'll take an offering of tobacco a little bit of tobacco and we put it around the feather we say a small prayer thanking the eagle for leaving that feather there for us or however we wanted to however we wanted to voice that thanks for that feather and we trade the tobacco for the feather and we leave the tobacco and take the feather there's a small clip of my wife you can probably clean that actually we found two feathers and on our way out we found this is the second one we found on the way out and this is the one that appears in that little clip about her uh giving thanks for that for that feather i didn't think of it at the time when we found the first one this one that that i should have recorded that but i was busy putting food out so i didn't have the the presence of mine think about grabbing a camera and doing that so anyways um the other thing i wanted to talk about feathers is that uh there's there's some there's a real spiritual connection between uh feathers and uh anishinabe and there's even a scientific scientific fact that that has been uh recently uh within the past few years recently come out to support the use of feathers also and correct me if i'm wrong but when the eagle we all know that the eagle is it's been said numerous times about how the eagle is uh one of the highest flying birds especially in this part of the world and when the eagle flies that high up into the air up in the upper atmospheres and soars and rides that wind the heat currents up there on these on these feathers on these feathers and on his wings he collects negative ions up in the upper surf upper upper atmosphere it gets loaded up with negative ions from the atmosphere up there and as as people as a anishinaabe and human beings of this earth sadness hurt anger all those kind of feelings that we that we have and we express where our body is actually being surrounded and pumping out positive ions so one of the things that our ancestors have taught long time ago is to smudge a feather and to brush it over top of a person when they're feeling sad when they're feeling down and when you're doing that when you're doing that act what you're doing is this feather as i said earlier is loaded with negative ions and your body is covered in positive ions so when you're doing this you're dispelling you're pushing away the positive ions off your body and thus it makes you feel better and that's the love that this uh the the the eagle has for us that's the gift one of the gifts many gifts that he gave to us and there's many different teachings about what the feather represents what the feather means one simple one is that this whole rib here represents your life so when you're given a feather when you've been found one or when you found one or if one's been passed on to you this here would represent your life from the time from the time when you were a child when you had no hair and you started having those frail beginnings and then as you grew older into being a child into a young man and each of these little ribs here that go off to the side represent our adventures and our things that we we go through in life but even though they go off to the side they always come back and we always come back and try to follow that same thing all the way to the top so that's another that's another simple uh teaching about the feather and there's many different teachings about the feather i can't like i said in the beginning i'm not one that knows everything i just know a little bit and i want to take time to share that because of uh like i said it's uh aboriginal day had just passed and uh we're all stuck inside and sometimes we we go we go outside nowadays more often because of uh are certain certain circumstances and uh we might come across feathers and i don't want anybody to just to pick them up and and and i want them to be able to do it in a good in a good healthy manner so me glitch for listening and we'll see you again another time on sweetglitch

Channel: Nishnawbe-Gamik Friendship Centre

Views: 5,517

Rating: 4.9569893 out of 5

Keywords: Eagle Feather, Eagle, Teachings, Nature, NGFC, Sioux Lookout

Id: rbdDHwvoc-Y

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020