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Pueblo and Mojave - Native American Indians - The hummingbird
Identifier
007077
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The Pueblo Indians have hummingbird dances and use hummingbird feathers in rituals to bring rain. Pueblo shamans use hummingbirds as couriers to “send gifts to the Great Mother who lives beneath the earth”. To many of the Pueblo, the hummingbird is also a “tobacco bird”. In one myth Hummingbird gets smoke from Caterpillar, the guardian of the tobacco plant, [tobacco in these cultures is often used as a hallucinogen]. Another Pueblo story says the bright colours on a hummingbird’s throat came after he fled through the ‘rainbow’ in search of rain clouds.
A description of the experience
A Mojave legend tells of a time when people lived in an underground world of darkness. They sent a hummingbird up to look for light. High above them the little bird found a twisted path to the sunlit upper world.