Complied by Sonya Weir

To understand the concept of Native American medicine, one must redefine medicine as anything that improves one’s connection to the great mystery and to all life. This would include the healing of body, mind and of spirit. This medicine is also anything which brings personal power, strength and understanding. It is the constant living of life in a way that brings healing to the Earth Mother and to all of our associates, family, friends and fellow creatures. Native American medicine is an all-encompassing “way of life,” for it involves walking on the Earth Mother in perfect harmony with the universe.
Our fellow creatures, the animals, exhibit patterns that will relay these messages of healing to anyone astute enough to observe their lessons on how to live. When you call upon the power of an animal, you are asking to be drawn into complete harmony with the strength of that creature’s essence.
Hummingbird is associated with the Ghost Shirt religion, which taught that a certain dance done properly would bring about the return of the animals. Once again the Original People would know the joy of the old ways. In Mayan teachings, Hummingbird is connected to the Black Sun and the Fifth World. Hummingbird can give us the medicine to solve the riddle of the contradiction of duality.
The song of Hummingbird awakens the medicine flowers. Hummer sings a vibration of pure joy. Flowers love Hummingbird because nectar sucking brings about the reproduction of their families. Plants flower and live because of Hummingbird.
Hummingbird can fly in any direction – up, down, backwards and forwards. Hummingbird can also hover in one spot and appear to be motionless. Great Spirit created Hummingbird to be slightly different from other feathered creatures.
Because of their magical qualities, Hummingbird feathers have been used for a millennium in the making of love charms. It is said that Hummingbird conjures love as no other medicine does, and that Hummingbird feathers open the heart. Without an open and loving heart, you can never taste the nectar and pure bliss of life. To Brother and Sister Hummingbird, life is a wonderland of delight – darting from one beautiful flower to another, tasting the essences and radiating the colours.
Hummingbird holds the Bow of Beauty, which is delicately inlaid with gold and silver flowers, pearls and precious jewels. Hummingbird disdains ugliness or harshness, and quickly flies away from discord or disharmony.
Hummingbird hears celestial music and is in harmony with it. Hummingbird energetically embraces the highest aesthetics. Never be coarse in front of Hummingbird, for this is a fragile medicine, which may have no understanding of worldly affairs. Beauty is the target, and Hummingbird’s mission is to spread joy or to be destroyed. Hummingbird quickly dies if caged, caught or imprisoned.
Follow Sister Hummingbird and you will soon be filled with paroxysms of joy and experience a renewal of the magic of living.
From Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power Through the Ways of Animals by Jamie Sams and David Carson. Copyright 1999 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC,www.stmartins.com
 Legends
The northern Paiute Indians say that Hummingbird once filled his pants full of seeds and started on a journey to see what was beyond the sun. He ate only one seed a day, but had to turn back because his food gave out. He didn’t see anything.
Since pre-conquest times, the hummingbird has been considered by many Central American peoples to have supernatural powers. There is a common, widespread belief that hummingbirds hitch a ride in the feathers of much larger birds – Canada geese and the like – during their migrations. A brief account in the Argentinean legend One More Point Than the Devil shows that the belief, or a related belief, also exists in Argentina.
The tale tells the adventures of the three sons of a poor farmer. Tired of being poor, the boys, starting with the eldest, go forth to seek their fortune. One by one, they enter service with the Devil only to be dismissed for being unable to accomplish the tasks set them. Eventually Sulca, the youngest son, succeeds but expects to have a battle of wits with the Devil. One of the battles that transpires entails shapeshifting, and when the following account opens, Sulca is in the shape of a horse.
“The horse jumped into the water and changed himself into a catfish. The Devil jumped after him and changed himself into a gilthead. The gilthead set to work to chase the fish, and was about to seize it when the catfish, having reached the other shore, turned into a deer that began to run over the mountain.
The gilthead came out of the lake and turned into a hound, which started running at full speed after the deer, but when the hound was on the point of catching it and tearing it to pieces, the deer changed into a dove. Then the hound became a hawk, which soared up into the sky after its prey.
When the dove tired, it turned into a hummingbird and took refuge in the feathers of an eagle flying by. The hawk then turned into a condor, and the condor, lifting himself up to the clouds, followed the eagle until he overtook him.
The two began to fight, and as they passed over a very high tower, the hummingbird slipped away from the eagle’s feathers and flew into a window. When the condor tried to squeeze after the hummingbird, Sulca, returning suddenly to his normal shape, shouted, ‘The cross, Devil!’ and the enormous condor vanished like smoke in the wind.” Which is not the end of the tale, the whole of which can be found in Folk Songs and Stories of the Americas published by the Pan American Union, Washington, 1937.
Reprinted with permission from The British Columbia Folklore Society, 7345 Seabrook Road, Saanich, BC, 250-652-7614.
www.folklore.bc.ca/Hummingbirds.htm/.
Facts
Hummingbirds are restricted in distribution to the New World, where the greatest variety and number of species occur in South America. About 12 species are found regularly in the US and Canada. Only the ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) breeds in eastern North America, where it is found from Nova Scotia to Florida. The northernmost hummingbird is the rufous (Selasphorus rufus), which breeds from southeastern Alaska to northern California.
All hummingbirds are small and many are minute. Even the largest, the giant hummingbird (Patagona gigas) of western South America, is only about 20 cm (eight inches) long, with a body weight of about 20 g (2/3 ounce), less than that of most sparrows. The smallest species, the bee hummingbird (Mellisuga, sometimes Calypte, helenae) of Cuba and the Isle of Pines, measures slightly more than 5.5 cm, of which the bill and tail make up about half.
Hummingbirds have compact, strongly muscled bodies and rather long, bladelike wings that, unlike the wings of other birds, articulate (connect) to the body only from the shoulder joint. The architecture of the wing permits hummingbirds to fly not only forward, but also straight up and down, sideways, backward and to hover in front of flowers as they obtain nectar and insects. The rate at which a hummingbird beats its wings is the same during directional and hovering flight. The ruby-throated hummingbird has a wing-beat rate of about 70 per second in the male and about 50 per second in the female.
The sexes are alike in appearance in only a few species; males display a variety of brilliance and ornamentation rivalled only by the bird-of-paradise and certain pheasants.
Most of the species that have been adequately studied do not show pair-bond formation. In the violet-ears (Colibri) and a few others, pair bonds are formed and both sexes assume parental duties. In the majority of other species, the male defends a territory, where he displays in flight to passing females with swoops, dashes and sudden stops and starts. Often, he hovers in front of the female, oriented so that the light reflects the colour of his gorget. Most hummingbirds, especially the smaller species, have scratchy, twittering, or squeaky songs. In many species the tail feathers produce the sounds.
The hummingbird’s nest is a tiny cup of plant fibres, spider webs, lichens and moss that is attached to a branch, a forked twig, a large leaf, or a rock ledge.
The two elliptical white eggs (rarely, one) are the smallest laid by any bird, although, proportionately, they are equal to about 10 percent of the female’s body weight. They are incubated for about 15 to 20 days. The young, hatched blind and virtually naked, are fed by regurgitation and fledge in about three weeks; the time from laying to fledging apparently is correlated with food supply.
Reprinted with permission from Greenway Blooming Centre and butterfly conservatory, 2000 Shantz Station Road, Breslau, Ontario, 519-648-2328. www.greenwaybloom.com/HUMMING BIRDS/hum_didyouknow.html