The ecological and cosmic calendar of the Izzi people

Community stories / Historias de comunidades
#1

I would like to take this opportunity to share a documentation and knowledge transmission project implemented with the Izzi people (Ȯra Ebonyi, Nigeria), to reinforce and boost the use of ecological and cosmic calendars, a practice that is now well-established among different Indigenous groups.

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From having participated in this process, I found powerful the making of the calendar at all levels of participation and contribution. I am not sure in what form, but as a tool of social technology, perhaps it could be included in the toolkit (actually case studies and literature would need to be organised to create a small guide?). I don’t know what you think.

I remember @rudokemper and some of you had started working on Stellarstories. I find these calendars really connected. In the case of the Izzi people, much knowledge about connections between practices and movements of celestial bodies has been lost. Only a few associations between lunar cycles and main rituals are transmitted. But it occurs to me that the calendar can be a tool to visually display certain relationships to which a stellarstory can relate.

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#2

Really interesting, @chiroxiphiacaudata; thanks for sharing this! I recently did bring Stellarstories to an operational proof-of-concept. The library for the celestial bodies used here can be adapted with your own formations and names, and it does have support for temporality (e.g. what the heavens look like at a certain timestamp). I wonder if it could be connected to an ecological / cosmic calendar, which I’ve also seen created by Amazonian communities in Colombia in Brazil, usually in the context of articulating a plan de vida. I think a case study on the value of creating such a calendar would be really valuable and worth profiling in the toolkit for sure.

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