If you’re looking for wedding readings, you may have come across this one in your searches. It’s often referred to as Apache wedding blessing or sometimes a Navajo wedding blessing, or Native American wedding prayer, or any number of other similar names. All of these names are inaccurate, but I’ll get into that later:
Now you will feel no rain,
for each of you will be shelter for the other.
Now you will feel no cold,
for each of you will be warmth for the other.
Now there is no more loneliness.
Now you are two persons,
but there is only one life before you.
May your days together be good and long
upon the earth.
While this piece of writing expresses a lovely sentiment, and you’re totally allowed to love it and use it at your wedding… you do need to know this: the reading has nothing to do with Apaches or Navajo Native American culture at all.
The reading is from a 1950 Jimmy Stewart movie called Broken Arrow, based on a 1947 novel called Blood Brothers. The words have no indigenous roots at all — they’re a mid-20th century white dude’s fantasy. This is what’s known as “Fakelore.”
To be blunt: this reading has nothing to do with Native American culture at all, other than that it’s something that a cisgender white dude imagined Native Americans might possibly say.
Now, do you want to use a poem from an old Western movie in your wedding? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. If you do, that’s cool!
But if you don’t, but you want something with a similar sentiment, lemme see what I can do. I’m just some lady in Seattle, but I’m not going to create some fakeloric myth to make this reading seem like anything more than what it is. I don’t believe in pretending to be anything that I’m not, so let’s just call this…
One human’s hope
Now the raindrops will not sting your skin,
for you can each be the soul umbrella the other seeks.
Now the cold will not chill you,
for your love can warm each other’s bodies and minds.
Now that very human experience of loneliness can ease,
For while you are still two people,
you’re sharing this path of marriage as one being.
May your time together be united in gratitude and grace
for as long this walk may last.
There. FIXED IT.