Inventing Constellations

This new landscape print will show an evening sky. In that sky will sparkle New World constellations that the English have never seen before.

The proper way to do this would have been to do some deep research, to see if I could find actual descriptions of the native Wampanoag people's stories and creation myths about the stars, but I wanted to use my imagination instead. These "constellations" are roughly based on some east coast Indian motifs that I found in a Dover book that I got at the library.

I wanted the Indian to be composed of some of the same stars as the European constellation "Orion." This article in Wikipedia about Orion describes how even today different cultures picture the same stars differently. In the Southern Hemisphere, Orion is oriented differently, and the belt and sword are sometimes called the Saucepan, or Pot. Orion's Belt is called Three Kings in South Africa and also in 17th- and 18th-century Dutch star charts. The same three stars are known in Latin America as The Three Marys.