Raining Deer
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“Punctuating your purpose” is what T-Time - A Rites of Passage Manual for the Adolescent Female is about. This initiation guide book for women who desire to give young females a powerful spiritually charged, emotionally invigorating welcome into womanhood was born from a fusion of Native American and West African customs. This marriage has created a celebratory ritual, which puts rites of passage initiates and participants on a spiritual journey to illuminate their souls for a lifetime. Historical references used in T-Time (“transition time”) regarding various cultural rituals allow the reader-turned-facilitator to define the process young girls experience as they go from grade school to middle school -- from baptism to praise dance -- and from daddy’s little angel to a budding princess. This generally occurs with little fanfare and no outstanding life-altering ritual. T-Time will change that. In this book women are encouraged, through a series of cleansing rituals, aromatic meditations, vigorous prayer, laying on of hands, libation, charges and divination to boldly declare to their flowering girls, “You are now a woman!” The upward movement from “Girl” to “You-go-girl” to “Woman” should culminate in an intense but exhilarating T-Time ceremony not to be missed.
Raining Deer Harjo is a free-lance writer and former arts administrator for the African American Caribbean Cultural Arts Commission in Miami, Florida. She was the coordinator of the annual Pan-African Bookfest and Cultural Conference for many years and co-hosted weekly prayer vigils at the renowned Miami Circle with Trinidad & Tobago’s Carib Tribal Queen, Catherine Hummingbird Ramirez. Raining Deer served on the Board the Diaspora Arts Coalition as well as the M Ensemble Theater Company in Miami. Under her American name, she created the format for and served as editor-in-chief of Southern Dawn Magazine in the late 1980s. She attended Miami-Dade College where she worked closely with the Distinguished Visiting Professors Series and Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society. After receiving a McKnight Scholarship for academic excellence, she was awarded the Language Arts Most Outstanding Student Award. While engaged in metaphysical studies at the University of El-Eastmoor, she co-founded the Imani Um Nommo Writers Workshop in 1981. Many of Raining Deer’s articles appeared (also under her American name) in prominent South Florida newspapers such as the Miami Times, Fort Lauderdale’s Westside Gazette, The Miami Herald, and The Miami Weekly. A Leadership Miami Graduate and nominee for the Price Waterhouse Up & Comers Award, Raining Deer served as publicist and public relations specialist to many performing and recording artists, including Philip Michael Thomas (star of NBC’s Miami Vice), and personalities such as (King) Oba Oseijeman Adefunmi I of Oyotunji African Village, and his wife HRG Iya Orite Olasowo. Raining Deer has produced musicals featuring former Alvin Ailey dancer Desiree S. Vlad and L. Maurice White. A member of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Oglawaha Band of the Cox-Osceola Seminole Reservation at Orange Springs, Florida, Raining Deer was wed to the tribe’s medicine man, Thunder Horse Nokus Harjo (a/k/a Wayne Bowen) in 1990 by the late Chief Little Dove Buford. During their three-year union Raining Deer served as Iyeska (spiritual interpreter) for Thunder Horse. A son was born to them, Sage Harjo, and both mother and son currently reside in Moorestown, New Jersey. Raining Deer recently survived a challenge with breast cancer and chronicles that experience in her soon-to-be published, Rites of Passage for Breast Cancer Victors.
Among many Native American tribes, when a young girl had her first menstruation it was seen as a joyous occasion and one of solemn promise. Because she was now becoming imbued with the strength of the female, the young teen or pre-teen girl was, for the most part, isolated and only allowed to come in contact with other women. It was believed that females were too powerful during their menstruation period to be out in the villages as their blood flow might affect the outcome of wars and hunting -- both of which greatly impacted their survival.
For the Apache, the White Painted Woman survived an enormous flood to become the first of all humans, unlike the biblical Genesis account wherein Adam -- a man, was the first human. For the Navajo, it was Changing Woman (Esdzaanadleehe), a Holy Person instrumental in the tribe’s creation, who had the first kinaalda (menstrual period). The legend is that the Holy People sang her into a new level of her life. These rites of passage ceremonies last four days but there is at least a month of preparation to bring the budding pubescent girl into womanhood. Her fertility is celebrated with dancing and body painting, feasting, and she is seen as the incarnate Changing Woman or White Painted Woman during that time.
The Apache commence their four days with a Sunrise Ceremony. During this time the young woman is said to take on the healing powers of White Painted Woman, signifying a critical moment in her young history. Each day she must run to the four directions of her village at sunrise and the attendants who are participating and facilitating the rites of passage must also run with her. The elder medicine woman sings special songs for her and she is blessed with sacred cattail pollen by villagers as she passes through, and they in turn ask her blessing upon them, as she has been imbued with healing powers. At night, the Ga’an or Crown Dancers, believed to be powerful protector spirits of the Apache, come down from their mountain homelands and dance with the candidate. Much like the Gelede Dancers or Egun-gun of the Yoruba, masked dancers arrive to lively drumming, bells ringing, chanting or singing, and they are adorned in elaborate and sometimes fierce-looking, brightly colored costumes. The intense energy they exhibit and generate among the villagers alone indicates the awesome nature and largess of the power of the protector spirit or ancestral spirit, which has materialized on the earthly plane to commune with the candidate and villagers. The air is charged with contagious excitement and it is an impressive site to witness -- a fitting beginning to the ceremony as anticipation mounts during the preparation time and as the days begin to unfold.
On the fourth day of the Apache ritual, the candidate is painted with white clay -- symbols of the White Painted Woman are reproduced all over her body. Her attendants, facilitators and guests join in a dance procession behind her as the holy people sing or chant a song that signifies she is now a woman. The vibration is such that it’s as though the Earth Mother herself hallows the ground as she gives her blessing upon one of her daughters.
