Astronomy of Native America 2025

Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered what someone standing in the same spot in the past saw and thought when they looked up?

500 years ago contact between Europeans and Indigenous Americans of the time changed the world, resulting in the collapse of Aztec and Inca empires and triggering a hemispheric pandemic that may have caused the Little Ice Age which ensued. Prior to this contact, indigenous American conceptions of the sky had no input from the astronomical ideas circulating in the rest of the world.

On Tuesday, November 26, in a series of short, five-to-fifteen-minute presentations by UW-Parkside students currently enrolled in the Astronomy of Native America course, we will explore the range of astronomical understanding and beliefs among indigenous groups of the Americas from the Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes region to the Guaraní of the Río de la Plata basin of South America.

Presentations begin at 7:00 pm and proceed until completion, estimated around 9:30 pm. Questions are welcome at the end of each presentation. Weather-permitting, the presentations will be given outside the Heide Observatory dome, and the observatory will be open afterward for a brief tour and night-time sky viewing. In the event of rain, the presentations will be held inside the Hawthorn Hollow Nature Center.

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