Pawnee Star Chart: Map in front of elk skin used by indigenous priests to tell stories of origin

The Pawnee Star Chart is a series of crosses scattered around oval fragments of elkskin. It may have been created in the early 17th century by a band of Skili (also known as Skidy) Pawny Nation, but while this chart is a rather accurate representation of the night sky, the meaning of the chart is still debated.

It was discovered in sacred bundles in 1902 by James Moorley, a ski-ri anthropologist who passed on to the Chicago Field Museum in 1902, according to amateur astronomer Ralph Buckstaff, who published his research on the charts in 1927. At the time, the chart was estimated to be at least 300 years ago. The tanned elk skin fragment measures approximately 15 x 22 inches (38 x 56 cm) and is covered with hand-painted stars.

Buckstaff interpreted the chart as a depiction of the night sky, divided into two halves by a very small star centerline that represents the Milky Way. On the left, the stars line up in winter signs in the Northern Hemisphere, while on the right is the summer signs. This suggested to the backstaff that Pawnee was aware of the seasonal shifts in the stars.

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Buckstaff tried to show that Pawnee had identified patterns of stars like the Pleiades and Ursa, similar to European astronomers, but this claim was countered by the 1982 book “When the Stars Come Down to Earth: The Cosmology of the Skiddy Pawnee Indians” (Ballena Press’s Cosmology). Chamberlain looked into Mully’s early 20th century journal and discussed the potential connections of the chart with Skiri Pawnee’s “Star Cult,” first reported in a 1902 study. Chamberlain writes that the chart was not likely to be used as a star map, but perhaps as a conceptual depiction of heaven used by the priests of Skyri.

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In his 1985 response to Camberlain, Pawnee expert anthropologist Douglas Parks agreed with Chamberlain that the star chart was most likely made as a kind of mnemonic device. The charts may have been used by priests and guardians of knowledge and not to accurately record the position of the stars, but to tell the myths of the origins of Skiri World, Parks writes.

The exact meaning of the Pawnee Star chart and its production date are still under discussion. However, as Parks writes, “as a portrayal of heaven, it is unique to Aboriginal North America,” it remains an object of deep interest to anthropologists and astronomers.