Pengucapan: Indonesian Thanksgiving
Every year from June until September, the people in Minahasa, North Sulawesi, Indonesia, have celebrated a traditional thanksgiving holiday from generation to generation, called Pengucapan. It is the way the people of Minahasa express their gratitude to God for the blessings of the previous year.
The Pengucapan tradition started when the people in this remote area of Indonesia still worshiped gods. They expressed their gratitude to the ultimate god or the highest god, known as opo wanatas empung walian empung rengan-rengan.
After the harvest, Minahasa people held a kuman kan weru ceremony to eat their harvest for the first time and express their gratitude though song and praise to their gods for fertility, good weather, harvest and health. They would bring their crops as an offering to their gods.
Christianity came to Minahasa in the 1800s, and Minahasa now has one of the highest rates of Christianity in all of Indonesia.
Pastor Philep, who works with a Compassion child development center in Wiaulapi, explained that after Christianity’s arrival, the Church rejected all forms of worshiping gods as part of animism. But the Church at that time saw the expression of gratitude that Minahasa people had in this tradition and allowed them to continue it through churches.
With the presence of the Church, the form of kuman kan weru changed. (more…)
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