takwâkin: A Season of Preparing for Joy

Written by Jacquelyn Cardinal - Co-Founder and CEO, Naheyawin

The sage came away from the stem with a small dry snap, and by the second handful the smell was on my hands, where I knew it would still be at supper. It was a September afternoon near Viking, Alberta, and my dad, my brother, my partner, and I were out picking buffalo sage before the first hard frost.

I was lucky enough to grow up with this tradition, gathering medicines on the land before winter comes, just as my people, the nêhiyawak (or Cree people), have for millennia.

When the four of us settled into a rhythm of picking, my dad reminded us that the sage from that field needed to last through the winter: for every ceremony we would hold, every feast, every morning's smudge, and every time somebody came to the house needing it. My brother asked how much that came to. My dad looked out at the field like he was counting guests, and then shrugged. "Lots," he said with a smile, like it was good news.

It wasn't easy work, but we weren't the only ones out there. Overhead the geese were going south in long loose lines, loud about it, and the bees were busy working the last yellow flowers. The whole of the prairies around us had the feeling of a household getting ready for company.

But I doubt there was any spirit on the land that day that was more enthusiastic about getting ready than my dad: he always gathered the way some people shop for a feast, like a man with plans. When he stopped answering us, his focus entirely on the task at hand, my brother joked that we'd have to drag him from the field if we wanted to get home before dark.

The joke ended up kind of being true. Hours had passed and our bags were full to bursting with sage by the time I shouted across the field to my dad that I thought we might have enough, and that we were starting to get hungry.

He straightened up from where he had been crouching in the grey-green of the medicines, weighed his bag on his arm, and called back: "Just fifteen more minutes! We don't want to run short!"

This is harvest in my family: a few weeks each fall that an Elder taught me to call takwâkin, one of our six seasons. It's when the rivers slow before the ice, and we begin to gather what we'll need for the long nights, for the stars that come out by supper, and for the stories that wait all year for snow before they're finally told. It's a time of getting ready for the cold, sure. It's also a time of preparing for joy.

You may be in the middle of your own harvest. The garden coming in faster than anyone can eat it. Jars on the counter. Winter tires, a furnace filter, one more long walk while the river valley is still gold. All of it keeps us busy, sometimes too busy to notice the part of us still clinging to the last days of summer, dreading the cold to come.

I know that feeling well. It was heavy on my own heart as I sat down with my family later that night to prepare the sage for drying. Then my brother started talking about the fires he wanted to have every weekend, and my dad said he had a story he had been saving for us since spring. Somebody brought up soup, and then the beading that never got finished last year. All of us talked about how tired we were after a long summer of running around.

As cups of tea filled and emptied, as calendars came out and were marked with plans, and as promises were made that we would for sure go cross-country skiing this year, I felt myself let go of summer and turn not toward the cold but toward the warmth ahead.

Earlier this month I brought the first of that sage to my friends at Pro Coro, as they prepared for their Songs of the Harvest Moon concert on October 16th. Sitting in circle, I shared what I've been taught about the land and how Indigenous peoples have learned to live upon it in this season of transition, and listened to what this time meant for each of them as well.

Our time together closed with song, and as their voices rose around me, singing about everything we had talked about that morning, I couldn't help but notice that familiar feeling of being part of a household getting ready for company.

I hope you come to Songs of the Harvest Moon, and that as you leave, you feel the way I did when my family and I stood back to admire the sage we had gathered for winter. It was spilling from the table onto the spare chairs we needed to hold it all, and after a moment my dad laughed and said, "Whoa. This is a lot of sage. I think we're ready."

Jacquelyn Cardinal is sakāwithiniwak (Woodland Cree) from Sucker Creek First Nation and the Co-Founder and CEO of Naheyawin, an Indigenous-owned consulting firm in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton). Naheyawin is Pro Coro Canada's partner on Songs of the Harvest Moon.