Weddings in India

Most of what I know about Native Americas is because Helen, my wife, teaches a course Native American Literature in the English Department at California Baptist University, so through her passion, I feel like I have been to many other Native American events, if through literature.  Together we listen to John Chancellor, when he was a young commentator; forty years ago, on public radio gave a weekly program among which the Hopi were considered.

Let’s take a trip back on the space\time defying vehicle to a time before Columbus sailed, I would wish to be able to live among the Hopi Tribe along the Colorado River Basin where we discover that the bride in a Hopi wedding wears a robe which was woven by uncles of the groom.  I thought how unlikely I would ever have been to win the heart of a Hopi girl with the lack of talent in weaving in any of my uncles.  So valuable is the work of the uncles that the wedding gown is seen as a “rehearsal for, or an enactment of, the rest of the bride’s life, even to the detail of a robe she carries for a later ceremony—her burial” (Gourse, 54)
       
Several days before a Hopi wedding the bride grinds corn with her mother-in-law to be.  For nothing is more important for survival of Hopi people than corn, blue corn especially.  Meanwhile outside the dwelling the groom’s aunts on his father’s side come with buckets of mud to throw at his aunts from the mother’s side of the extended family.  Then the bride’s aunts on both sides arrive with buckets.  The latter group begins to insult the groom and the former group insults the bride.  Sometimes the father of the groom is captured and has his hair cut as if a mock scalping.  “At the end of the fight, everyone is exhausted, filthy and hungry, but everyone joins together to enjoy a feast, and the bride and groom are supposed to lie happily every after”  (Gourse, 56).

While in the same century let’s go to the Cherokee Tribe in the mountains of what would become North Carolina in a future century.  There we discover another wedding taking place, for on the day before the wedding the relatives of the groom gather outside the house of and consult with the brothers and uncles on the maternal side, then, if things work out then the bridegroom gets a blanket and other objects of clothing and sends them by his female relatives to those of the bride.  If they accept them, the “match is made” Then the groom can go to the house until he builds his own house and on a hunt finds food for her to eat.  (Noss, 32 using a manuscript of William Bartram).