Gamwing: A Lenape feast of thanksgiving and renewal

ANNE WILLARD
Posted 8/21/12

Long before the Plymouth brethren sat down with the Wampanoag Tribe at the 1621 feast generally considered to be the first Thanksgiving, the Lenni Lenape occupied the Upper Delaware area, enjoying …

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Gamwing: A Lenape feast of thanksgiving and renewal

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Long before the Plymouth brethren sat down with the Wampanoag Tribe at the 1621 feast generally considered to be the first Thanksgiving, the Lenni Lenape occupied the Upper Delaware area, enjoying the bounty yielded by the land and the water, and holding ceremonies to thank the gods and spirits for it and to participate in its renewal. Unfortunately, the surviving information about many of these ceremonies is sparse. But we do know something about “Gamwing,” or the Big House Ceremony, a post-harvest festival that has some features similar to our own Thanksgiving.

Some authorities believe that Gamwing was only created after the arrival of the white man, as a traditionalist backlash against the religious and cultural pressures of European settlers. But others agree with Jay Miller of Simon Frasier University, who wrote that long before white settlement, Gamwing was the Lenape’s “ancient integrative ritual, held to mark the conjunction of men and women, hunt and crops, and Creator and creation as a world renewal celebration of universal thanksgiving.”

The eponymous Big House in which the ceremony took place was, accordingly, built to be symbolic of the entire universe, which the Lenape believed had been fashioned by a creator god who made a giant turtle, then put a cedar tree in the center its back, from which in turn man and woman sprouted. An oval dancing floor represented the back of the giant turtle, and a central pole represented the cedar tree at the center of the world. Within this house, participants during the 12 days of the ceremony moved through the 12 layers of creation between earth and heaven, finally reaching the abode of the creator on the final night.

When it came to food at Gamwing, the focus was not plants, which were the highlight of the Green Corn rite. According to Miller, Mother Corn was considered to be “extremely jealous,” so only plant food would have been consumed at her festival. In contrast, Gamwing marked the transition from the time of year that food that grows from the earth, associated with the female principle, can be harvested, to the time of hunting for meat, associated with the male principle. And when it came to meat, the star of the feast was venison, not turkey.

Smaller game was eaten too, but according to the late Lenape James Revey (Lone Bear) as quoted in a 1981 New York Times article, “There were turkeys then, of course, but deer was the main dish. A deer was hunted and brought in as part of the ceremony.” The Lenape did not domesticate animals for meat before the arrival of the Europeans; at Gamwing, no meat from domesticated animals was allowed—until the last few decades of its celebration, during which beef was served, in Miller’s words, “with regret.”

Though the ceremony emphasized the bounty brought by hunting, the Lenape plant staple of corn was also present. The eating of hominy (dried corn kernels soaked in a mineral lime bath) is specifically mentioned in some of the recollections of the ceremony that have been preserved in writing. In fact, the word “pone” in “corn pone” is thought to come from the Lenape word “ahpone,” which referred to a dish made with ground corn and water and then fried. Another plant-based food that was popular with the Lenape, and is likely to show up at modern Thanksgiving tables, though we found no mention of it at Gamwing, is cranberries (called “pakihm”).

An Internet search for traditional Lenape recipes does not prove especially fruitful; the most common recipe online seems to be for fry bread which, since it is made using wheat, is not one of the oldest recipes and certainly would not date back to pre-Colonial Gamwings. All the recipes we could find for corn pone include milk or buttermilk and/or eggs, likewise modern innovations.

But if you want to set a Thanksgiving table that in some way acknowledges the people who lived in this river valley and, as we do, had good reason to be grateful for its bounty, you might consider adding a cut of venison, some wild turkey, a polenta or corn-based bread and perhaps some cranberries—try sweetening them with maple syrup, another gift to our cuisine from the Lenape.

More important, instead of rushing out to an orgy of consumerism on Black Friday, we might stop and think about what it might mean to be, as the Lenape felt they were, co-responsible for the renewal of creation. According to Miller, the Lenape believed that the re-enactment of creation at Gamwing was necessary to keep the world going, and when the ceremonial began to die out (the last one was celebrated in 1924), some believed it meant literally the end of the world. That obviously turned out not to be true. But the end of the world, as far as human life is concerned, might be closer than we think unless we learn that we cannot always be just the consumers of the feast. We must also, in the spirit of the Lenape and their Big House Ceremony, participate in its renewal.

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