Notes to go with Monday Morning Meeting #1, or The Moon Name Rant
For the first Monday Morning Meeting, since it was on a full moon I discussed a brief history of the current moon names! Which is harder to source than you might think?
Basically, most searches for moon names will lead you to the Farmers Almanac, which looks to be (allegedly) a list created mainly from Jonathan Carver's Travels through the interior parts of North-America in the years 1766, 1767, and 1768, with some additions/edits based on possibly other tribes, but finding confirmation of any of this is incredibly difficult, there aren't a whole lot of sources. (And Jonathan Carver himself may have - allegedly - plagiarized chunks of Travels? It's a lot!)
On the plus side, this also led me to find a ton of Indigenous lunar calendars! If you want to find your own local calendar, I'd start with researching the tribes for your area - Native Land can be a great help! - and then search '[Tribe] lunar calendar' or '[Tribe] moon names,' as it can be hard to find them without first getting the Almanac names.
- Farmers Almanac: https://www.almanac.com/astronomy/moon/full
- Jonathan Carver’s “Travels” and related sources on Carver Travels: https://archive.org/details/travelsthroughin00incarv/page/252/mode/2up?view=theater
- Capt. Jonathan Carver, and his explorations. (Minnesota Historical Society / Edward D. Neill): https://www.loc.gov/item/18008723/
- General history of Carver where first wife Abigail and their seven children are even mentioned, and Abigail may have been one of the few ways Carver's book got treated as valid: https://www.mnopedia.org/person/carver-jonathan-1710-1780
- Plagiarism discussion for Travels (I’m personally not a fan of the final analysis, but I’m still including it for full sourcing as it’s the most complete on sources for the editions): https://hummingadifferenttune.blogspot.com/2018/03/Carver.html
- Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756-1830, Cambridge, 1996 (Found through the Humming blog)
- ISHBH: http://www.ishbh.com/
- The link from ISHBH with the snake for those curious: http://www.ishbh.com/2022/10/herpetology-in-jonathan-carvers-travels.html
And have some example sources for Indigenous moon names:
- Dakota: https://hocokatati.org/dakota-moons/
- Anishinaabe (multiple dialects): https://ojibwe.net/projects/months-moons/
- Tlingit and Haida: http://ankn.uaf.edu/curriculum/Tlingit/Salmon/graphics/moonandtides.pdf
- Samish: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/01a27caf1f414ca1aac2dfd73db1ede6