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Cree Bear Dance Ceremony (2010)

Ojibwa Spirit Bear Song

Annual Northern Ute Bear Dance

Laura Grizzlypaws Bear Dance

Among several Algonquian groups (Cree, Ojibwa, Menomini, Micmac, Delaware, etc.), when a bear was killed a ritual was performed with the purpose to appease the animal spirit, before proceeding to the butchering and dismembering of the body. The bear meat constituted a sacred food and was consumed in a public feast, during which invocations were addressed to the animal, designed to promote the reproduction and abundance of game. After the ceremony, the bear skull was cleaned, dried and painted, and then put in some high place, on a platform, a pole or a rock, with tobacco offerings and colored ribbons.

Similar ceremonies were practiced by the Northern Eurasian peoples (Lapps and Siberian peoples), so that anthropologist Irving Hallowell (1928) has identified in these analogies the traces of a bear cult, common to all the circum-boreal world. Shared traits of these rites were: the invocation for a good hunt and for the abundance of game, an atonement ritual after the killing of the animal, the welcome of the killed animal as if it was a distinguished guest, the accurate disposition of the skull and bones, according to detailed norms, which assured the animal’s rebirth. Often the bear was regarded as a “Master of the animals”, representing all the animals of the forest, sometimes as a spirit or divinity having taken an animal shape in order to offer himself as prey to the human hunters. Integral part of these ceremonies  is a myth, which usually narrates of the marriage between a woman and a bear. Afterward, the bear let himself to be killed by some relative of the woman, provided that in future bear hunting expeditions they should follow the rules he has established.