The Green Corn Ceremony (Cherokee: ᎠᎦᏪᎳ ᏎᎷᎤᏥ) is an English term that refers to a general religious and social theme celebrated by a number of American Indian peoples of the Eastern Woodlands and the Southeastern tribes. The Green Corn festivals are also known to have been practiced by the Mississippian culture people as part of their Southeastern Ceremonial Complex.
Green Corn festivals are still practiced today by many different native peoples of the Southeastern Woodland Culture. The Green Corn Ceremony typically coincides in the late summer and is tied to the ripening of the corn crops. The ceremony is marked with dancing, feasting, fasting and religious observations.
Famous quotes containing the words green, corn and/or ceremony:
“Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds and other seas,
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade,”
—Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
“This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But ceremony never did conceal,
Save to the silly eye, which all allows,
How much we are the woods we wander in.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)