Bear Clan Gigua

The Beloved Woman/Gigua

Bear Clan

The Beloved Woman of the Bear Clan taught us one of the greatest lessons this society has great need to learn. How to use only what we need to live with. She taught that in order to have an abundance of anything for the future we had to learn not to take more than we could use and also to use what we take wisely.

It was important for us to never kill more than what we needed to survive with. Never harvest from the forest more than we need. We would not take every plant ! we found. We would search and take the fourth plant and leave the first three to grow and seed the earth to have others take the place of what we took.

We learned not to cut down the entire forest, but a small area to grow crops and live. Often trees graced the area where our crops grew. Forests came up close to our towns and villages.

She taught the younger people how to save seeds of corn, squash, pumpkins, beans and other crops for the next year's planting. She was the on! e who helped guard against the destruction of all growing things.

She also taught the lessons of why it was not desirable to have many material possessions, reminding us of our past when we honored our possessions more than ourselves, our people and other life in this world. Along with the Adawehi she told the story of how our people developed and honored only the gathering of possessions. How even the priests had become greedy for possessions and power. That in the end all were punished and the people suffered from hunger that caused the death of many. Greed and the desire for many possessions caused strife among families and clans. It was undesirable.

Her voice was gone and silent when the European arrived. The knowledge she taught was passed to the remaining clans to be safe guarded but it was not adhered to. The lessons were not brought as a reminder and in time our people became greedy to own what the European brought. We lost to them because of turning away from the ways our ancestors taught and disregarding the lessons we learned more than once. History repeats itself because lessons are often not stringently taught so that things do not repeat themselves.