Reading Notes W2 Summons to a Mourning Ceremony (Miwok) , Part X

This text was a calling for people to prepare for a mourning ceremony. It begins by telling people all around to wake up, because visitors are coming to celebrate the life of a friend, and they need to prepare for the occasion. They tell the men to go out and hunt deer and squirrels, while the women go out to gather acorns, onions, and potatoes. They tell them to make bread and soup, and a lot of it because they have many visitors coming. They then explain that the visitors have arrived, and they must give all of the food that they can to the visitors, so that everyone is able to eat and get ready to cry. Everyone cries at this sad occasion, and then the time for sadness is over.

I liked this poem for one reason, they made a very sad occasion happy. I want my funeral to be more like a party and less like a depressed group of people gathering. I like the idea of celebrating someone's life with happy memories, instead of just being sad that they will no longer be here. I like how, in this poem, they are very focused on gathering as much food as they can, not for themselves, but for the visitors that they have coming for the occasion, and they give these visitors everything that they have.

The story ends with "Everybody get up! Everybody get up! All here, very sad occasion. All cry! All cry! Last time for you to be sad." (Miwok 68). I like how this passage ends with "Last time for you to be sad", because as much as it hurts when you lose someone, every single person that has ever lived on this Earth has died/ will die, so once you have a celebration of life, you need to be able to move on with your own life and continue to make the best of it. Death is a part of life, and without one you wouldn't have the other, so although I think that mourning is a very important process to go through, it should not consume the rest of a person's life.

I really liked this story because although it is about mourning, it has a very positive and upbeat vibe throughout the entire reading, they make it into a happy occasion, and I really like that positive outlook on the relationship between life and death.