This page is in its infancy. I am trying to compile on this web page as much information as i can from various sources on what form an American Indian wedding would be like. Please keep in mind that true traditional weddings would be performed by the society of the tribe responsible for celebrating the rite of marriage between two people. This information is more for those who would like a blend of a contemporary wedding with the American Indian culture.

Cherokee Prayer
Taken from: http://www.manataka.org/page25.html on 9/13/2001
"God in heaven above please protect the ones we love. We honor all you created as we pledge our hearts and lives together. We honor Mother Earth and ask for our marriage to be abundant and grow stronger through the seasons. We honor fire - and ask that our union be warm and glowing with love in our hearts. We honor wind - and ask we sail through life safe and calm as in our father's arms. We honor water - to clean and soothe our relationship - that it may never thrust for love. With all the forces of the universe you created, we pray for harmony and true happiness, as we forever grow young together. Amen."

Matrimonial Customs
Taken from: http://www.manataka.org/page25.html on 9/13/2001
Members of the same clan were considered to be near relatives who were not allowed to intermarry. This law was strictly enforced with death or public whipping of the offending families. In ancient times, Indians seldom married a second time. The only second marriages considered honorable were those involving a brother's widow.

Permission to marry was essential from the family of the woman. Many times the priest must give his permission as well. The bride's brother would exchange gifts of clothing and ornaments with the groom as a symbolic act of joining the two families. Among many tribes, the suitor would supply the woman's family with food or provided services from the time of the marriage proposal to the time of the wedding. Often times, a maiden could not refuse if the parents approved the match and the suitor gave gifts or services.

A young woman experiencing her first menstrual period was separated from the family and all others and placed a vacant lodge a short distance away. During this time no person was allowed to touch her, and she was not allowed to prepare her own food. At the end of seven days she washed herself, her clothing and everything she touched and returned to her family. She was now eligible to be married.

Indian marriages were considered a contract for life. Although divorces were not common, they did occur. The only formality required was the dividing of the marriage blanket. If person was disloyal, the offending person was usually publicly whipped the women. In the case of an offending wife, all her possessions were removed and she was turned out of the lodge. When separations were mutually agreed and the marriage blanket was split, the couple's property was equally divided and the children were provided for by the mother.

A priest or shaman could not marry a widow, a divorced woman or a woman of bad character. Among many tribes, the marriage of a priest was approved by seven counselors. The wife of the priest must be a virgin of unblemished character. The position of wife of a priest held great honor and often times she was expected to take his place in case of his death until another priest could be appointed.

It was a common practice among many indigenous people that the groom went to live in the lodge of the brides' family after the wedding ceremony. Some clans built a new lodge for the couple in the village of the bride near her mother's lodge.

The groom was subservient to the bride's mother and obeyed her every wish. It was his responsibility to provide food, shelter and protection for the wife's family.

Honeymoon trips were not common. However, families of the couple often provided food and plenty of space and time for the newlyweds to be alone for a period of time after the wedding.

Newlyweds were expected to perform certain acts of charity and service for the village to reinforce the habit of giving between themselves and the larger family. Gifts of food for and clothing for widows and children were common. Gifts of tools, adornments and weapons were expected by some societies.

Wedding Ceremony
Taken from: http://www.manataka.org/page25.html on 9/13/2001
A priest escorts the groom to one end of the open space in the Council house. Another priest escorts the bride to the opposite end. The couple meets in the center of the Council house, near the sacred fire. The priest stands facing to the East - toward the door of the Council house.

The groom's mother stands by the groom. She holds his gifts of venison and a blanket (sometimes leather and fur were also offered). The bride's mother stand beside the bride holding gifts of corn and a blanket (sometimes leather and fur).

The brother, by his presence, accepts his role in being responsible for his sister and her children. The bride and groom wear blue blankets representing their old life and ways. The officiating priests said a prayer blessing the sacred fire and the union of the two.

As he prays he asks for a long and happy life for the couple. The bride gives the groom a red blanket and black belt that she has made herself and he puts it on. The mothers give the gifts to their children who exchange gifts with each other. They join together their blankets symbolizing their mutual support within the marriage.

They each sip a corn drink from a double-sided wedding vase. They drink from east to west, then from north to south giving their blessings to all the earth. The vase is thrown down and broken to seal their wedding vows as now being united as one. The broken fragments are returned to mother earth.

A white blanket is placed around their shoulders symbolizing their union. A wedding feast is held by the entire town. The couple walk silently and alone to their dwelling place among the clan of the bride's mother.

Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other. Now there will be no loneliness for each of you will be companion to the other. Now you are two persons but there is only one life before you. May beauty surround you both in the journey ahead and though all the years. May happiness be your companion and your days together be good and long upon the earth.

Treat yourselves and each other with respect and remind yourselves often of what brought you together. Give the highest priority to the tenderness, gentleness and kindness that your connection deserves. When frustration, difficult and fear assail your relationship - as they threaten all relationships at times - remember to focus on what is right between you not only the part which seems wrong. In this way, you can ride out the storms when clouds hide the face of the sun in our lives - remembering that even if you lose sight of it for a moment the sun is still there. If each of you take responsibility for the quality of your life together, it will be marked by abundance and delight.

Planning An Indian Wedding
Taken from: http://www.manataka.org/page26.html on 9/13/2001
STEP 1: Determine those customs and traditions that have meaning to you and make them a part of your special day.

STEP 2: Select a site to hold the ceremony. Possibilities include chapels, or other spiritual places, historical landmarks, Indian monuments or reservations. Don't forget, nature provides some of the most spectacular and beautiful wedding chapels on Mother Earth.

STEP 3: Choose a prayer that you would like to have read at the ceremony.

STEP 4: If desired, couples may write their own wedding vows. Do not wait until time of the wedding to do so. Begin now to think about the perfect words that will bind you together for eternity. The words should be well thought out, heartfelt and agreed to by both parties.

STEP 5: Arrange a date and time with the officiating elder(s) (holy man) or civil official far in advance. If necessary, send a letter confirming arrangements and check back occasionally.

STEP 6: Arrange to have someone play an Indian Love Flute. Legend says that this flute, which is carved out of cedar wood, holds the power of attraction and was used to enhance courtship.

STEP 7: Arrange to have someone play traditional Indian drum(s). In lieu of live music, Native America Indian music CD's are readily available today. Keep the music soft and earthy. Powwow drum music is great, but not at a wedding until the wedding party begins. Make sure electricity is available or strong batteries are installed in the CD player.

STEP 8: Invite everyone from the extended families of both bride and groom, along with the community to celebrate the marriage. Usually, an officiating elder is at the center of the group.

STEP 9: Prepare decorative baskets to hold gifts.

STEP 10: Determine and prepare wedding attire.

STEP 11: Arrange to have three blankets available (two blue and one large white).

STEP 12: Arrange for gifts for the officiating elder(s), mothers and other special people attending.

Remember, Indian weddings were simple, yet elaborate ceremonies. Simple because not a lot of preparation was necessary for the location. Nature provides its own flowers and beauty. Elaborate because the importance placed on tradition, and prayer.

Cherokee Weddnig Attire
Taken from: http://www.manataka.org/page26.html on 9/13/2001
As relatives and friends followed, the couple entered the sacred council fire area. The bride wore a white dress and white moccasins, usually made from deer or elk skins. The groom wore a roe-colored ribbon shirt, black pants and moccasins.

In colonial times, Cherokee homes had no scissors so women tore pieces of fabric into either squares or rectangles to make their dresses. As calico and other fabrics became available to the Indian ribbon shirts and "tear" dresses became popular.

The couple were wrapped in blue blankets that represented their old ways of weakness, sorrow, failures and spiritual depression. Relatives followed them to the sacred fire.

A holy man blessed the union and all those present. The couple exchanged baskets. The groom's basket contained meat and skins representing his promise to feed and clothe the bride. The bride's basket was filled with bread and corn representing her promise to nurture and support her new husband.

The couple then shed the blue blankets and were enveloped by relatives in a white blanket representing their new ways of happiness, fulfillment and peace.

Stomp dancers performed for the couple and a prayer of continuance was said to end the ceremony.

Note: In today's wedding ceremonies, if the holy man blessing the wedding is not licensed by the state in which the ceremony takes place, a civil ceremony following the Indian religious ceremony is required. ceremony is required.

Ceremony of the Rings
Taken from: http://www.manataka.org/page26.html on 9/13/2001
Traditionally, the marking of the passage to the status of husband and wife is marked by the exchange of rings. These rings are a symbol of the unbroken circle of love. It is doubtful ancient indigenous people used rings in their wedding ceremonies, but the practice has found favor among many today.

Navajo and Pueblo Baskets and Pottery
Taken from: http://www.manataka.org/page26.html on 9/13/2001
For traditional weddings, along with extended families of the bride and groom, the community gathers together with an officiating elder at the center of the sacred circle. Decorative baskets holding corn (a fertility symbol as well as a traditional food) are presented to the couple. Both Navajo and Paiute weavers create willow wedding baskets to hold corn meal for blessing or prayers. The opening of the ceremonial baskets is always directed toward the East, a sacred direction from which no harm is supposed to pass. The Navajo family system is traditionally matrilineal, so, in the past, when a man is married, he went to live with his wife and her parents.

The use of the double-spouted pottery wedding vessel may be a relatively recent addition to the traditional ceremony. In Pueblo wedding ceremonies, one spout of the vase represents the husband while the other represents the wife with the looped handle symbolizing the unity that is achieved with marriage. In a traditional ceremony, to help consummate the marriage, the Pueblos would drink a nectar from either spout. Traditional pottery made by the people of the Southwest are among the best quality in the world. The intricate detail, beauty of design, quality of craftsmanship, artistry, and creativity would make a wonderful, lasting wedding gift.

American Indian Wedding Tips
Taken from: http://www.wedcon.com/tips/wedtraditions/americanindian.htm on 9/13/2001
Representative to the four corners of the earth, traditional colors are woven into the brides dress, White for east, Blue for south, Yellow for west and Black for north.

There is a symbolically washing of the hands of the bride and groom to rid themselves of evil and loves from their past.

To symbolize their bonding ,the couple will share during their ceremony, a meal of corn mush, made of both white and yellow corn. The white represents male and yellow female, joined together.

Marriage Customs and Symbols
Taken from: http://nativeamculture.about.com/library/weekly/aa011701a.htm on 9/13/2001
These days, there are many different types of Indigenous weddings, ranging from traditional ceremonies to modern marriages. Here are a few customs and symbols from different Nations.

• Tribes like the Navajo and Paiute made wedding baskets. The Navajo filled the wedding baskets with cornmeal for blessings and good luck.
• Music and singing are common elements of weddings. Indigenous love songs are often played on flutes. In times past and present, men used flute music to win the hearts of their loved ones.
• A wedding vase was and is used in some ceremonies. In a traditional Eastern Cherokee wedding, as well as in a Pueblo wedding, a couple drinks from a wedding vase at the same time. The wedding vase has two openings so that the couple can drink together. In some Southwestern tribes, the bride and groom hold the two-necked wedding vase in their hands as a blessing is offered. At the end of the ceremony, the couple smashes the vase and counts all the larger shards of the pot as a way of foretelling how many children they will have.
• A blanket is used in some weddings. Usually the couple is wrapped in a blanket as a sign of their union. For example, in the Eastern Cherokee ceremony, the bride and groom had separate blankets at the beginning of the wedding, but were covered with one blanket during the ceremony to signify the union of their lives.
• In some ceremonies foods were exchanged, much the way rings are exchanged today. This was a way of saying that each would provide for the other.
• The Cherokee had a sacred fire that was made with seven kinds of wood. This fire was kept burning at all times. When it was time for the marriage ceremony, the couple would go to the sacred fire in order to receive a blessing from the priest. For some Nations, fire was also seen as a symbol of love.

Hopi wedding traditions survive one more generation: Modern couple follows old trail
Taken from: http://www.azcentral.com/culturesaz/amindian/hopiwedding.shtml
The bride walked up the hill, barefoot in the dusty driveway, wearing a manta, the black one-shoulder dress of the Hopi maiden. Her eyes downcast, Delight was beautiful, dignified, somber; a modern woman following an ancient tradition.

She carried a basket of blue corn meal tied in a cloth. With her were her two daughters, Mariah, 3, and Miranda, 5, and her female relatives.

According to custom, the aunts and cousins of the groom formed a noisy blockade to try to turn back the bride. To symbolically fight for their man, they held signs humorously mocking the bride, such as one urging her to "Speed on by."

"Chill out!" little Mariah yelled at the protesters, not understanding.

Delight Dalton and Frank Poocha grew up on the Hopi reservation. She is from the most traditional area, Third Mesa, and speaks the Hopi language. Frank's mother, Idella Poocha, a fifth-grade teacher, is Pima. His Hopi father, Fritz Poocha, was a day school principal at Polacca and Moencopi.

"I have three brothers, and for a long time my dad wanted us to have Hopi weddings, to keep the tradition alive," Frank said.

When Frank's father died, he left each son a cow for their weddings. But there were to be no Hopi weddings for Frank's brothers; they all married Navajos and didn't have the ceremony. When Frank and Dee were joined in a civil marriage at Phoenix City Hall a year ago, Frank's mom gave them a dinner. Dee's family arrived with multiple truckloads of food, in the traditional way.

And the two families began planning the wedding Frank's late father wanted.

Delight, 35, and Frank, 34, have been together for six years. They live in central Phoenix with their daughters, a chow named Buffy, and Hopi baskets on the walls of their home.

Delight has worked for 12 years at American Express, where she is a telephone customer representative. Frank plays trumpet, keyboards and acoustic guitar in a Native American band, Clan/Destine. The band performs all over the Valley and many other parts of the country. Clan/Destine has traveled to Germany twice to represent the state on behalf of the Arizona Office of Tourism, and to Australia as part of an exchange of indigenous peoples' arts.

So why a Hopi wedding?

"It's good for us," Frank said. "We are in that era where our culture is the connecting link. Either we learn and continue the religion, or it's gone." The realization makes him feel almost desperate, he added.

Just in their parents' generation, Frank said, many of the traditions have been lost. He said the next two generations are crucial.

"We grew up on the reservation doing all the things little Hopi boys and girls do. But now we have to teach our little kids how to be as Hopi as they can, trying to teach them a way of life."

Frank and Delight's wedding was part of the teaching, and it involved many family members. Idella's godparents, who live in Moencopi near Tuba City, worked with Dee's mother, Sylvia Dalton, and aunts to plan the events.

Once the couple agreed to the wedding, they had little say in it. Almost every weekend for a year, they made the five-hour trip from Phoenix to Hopiland, helping get ready.

The work seems endless.

"We more or less have to prove that our family is worthy of having him," Delight said of the massive food exchanges that are central to Hopi weddings. "In Hopi tradition, when the man gets married, he belongs to me."

By tradition, during the opening part of the wedding, the bride grinds corn at her mother-in-law's home while the men weave her wedding robes in the kiva. Corn is sacred to the Hopis.

No one in Frank's family weaves anymore, so his family members divided the responsibility of hiring weavers. Each family provided some of the special clothing for Delight and her daughters. And Delight's duties were lightened.

"My aunts told me I was so lucky I don't have to grind corn for four days," Delight said before the wedding. "They said, 'Your arms hurt, your back hurts, your knees hurt.' "

The ceremonial parts of a Hopi wedding usually last at least a week. This one was compressed into three days over a long weekend.

On Friday afternoon, the arrival of the bride at the home of the groom's mother was the first major event of the Hopi wedding - not counting the mud fight earlier in the day, when the women from both sides of the families pelted each other with wet dirt, a muddy mock battle over Frank.

Frank was waiting, still wearing his work gloves. He had been chopping wood and doing strenuous preparation, waiting anxiously. He hadn't seen his wife and children in almost two weeks. They had been in Hotevilla, working just as hard.

In procession behind the bride were a line of 20 pickup trucks stretching down the highway. The bride and daughters entered her mother-in-law's home and were seated to one side.

The house, a double-wide mobile home in the shadow of First Mesa, had been cleared of almost all furnishings in anticipation of the arrival of the bride's family from Hotevilla, on Third Mesa.

Delight's family was ready to pay for Frank.

Her family paid two years' worth of corn harvest to Frank's family, and there is more to come to pay off the debt of her robes.

"We think it'll take three years," said Delight's sister, Lynn Nuvamsa, who was one of the family members who kept track of donations. "We're shooting for a year and a half."

Thus do Hopi weddings stretch backward and forward in time, forming a complex web of obligatory preparation and payback.

The trucks following Delight backed up to the front porch. Unloading began with piki bread. The traditional tissue-like bread of the Hopis was folded in the square style for weddings, instead of the usual rolls. So much piki was stacked against one wall under plastic that the mound was the size of a tall single bed. Several of Delight's female relatives slept in the room with it that night to safeguard it.

Next came ten 30-gallon barrels of blue corn meal, and enough five-gallon buckets of corn meal to fill three-quarters of the floor space of the room where Delight stayed. Each barrel and bucket represented weeks of backbreaking work over the past year. Delight's family had divided up the work: the harvesting, shelling, washing, coarsely grinding, roasting the corn in big cauldrons, and finally grinding it into blue cornmeal.

Next came "lazy flour," as one auntie called it, smiling as she said it. Sack after 25-pound sack of Blue Bird white flour was passed down the chain of men unloading it, 35 sacks to each truck. There were seven or eight trucks full.

The flour was too heavy to store in the mobile home, but it had to be passed through the home.

With each item that came into the house, the men said, "Kwa kwai," and the women said, "Askwali." Both expressions mean "thank you."

The sacks of flour emitted puffs of white as they were tossed down rows of hands, out a window and into trucks belonging to the groom's relatives. After the trucks were full, the flour was stacked on palettes in a big tent.

Last were the baked goods, a boggling array of cakes, pies, yeast breads, cookies, doughnuts, brownies, quick breads. Goods filled waiting shelves in the back room, top to bottom, stacked.

The food was Delight's dowry, donated by her immediate family and clan family members. It would be divided up among Frank's family members who helped with the wedding.

"Askwali, askwali," Delight said. The unloading of 20 trucks took an hour. There was a palpable sense of quiet pride.

Delight was now me-we, the in-law. She had been accepted by Frank's family.

In a Hopi wedding, the bride's family brings the hearth-oriented goods, showing their prowess as homemakers with huge amounts of flour, cornmeal, baked goods. The groom's family takes back to her village the supplies a hunter would bring: meat, firewood, clothing, groceries.

At least 12 sheep died for this wedding, plus a cow left by Frank's dad.

Frank's family fed massive quantities of food to guests. After the unloading and stacking the first evening, Friday, the big meals commenced.

Behind the house, 20 feet of cooking fires and a windbreak had been set up. A fire pit was dug, and an outdoor kitchen constructed. The kitchen included shelving from the family's piki house up on the mesa, where the women bake piki bread on flat stones.

An outdoor dining tent sheltered seating at tables for about 45 people. Indoors, guests sat on the floor around tablecloths covered with food, including mutton stew cooked outdoors in huge cauldrons. Frank's family brought a potluck array of salads, macaroni and cheese, ham, meatloaf, stew with squash, red and yellow watermelon, chili beans. The aunties in charge were as organized as a drill team.

As the sun set, lights twinkled on the mesa above.