The Green Corn Ceremony, called the busk in some English language sources, is documented in its fullest recorded form among the Muscogee (Creek) of the Southeastern woodlands, and in related forms among the Cherokee, Seminole and other neighboring nations. Held when the corn crop first ripens, typically in late summer, its documented elements include extinguishing the community's sacred fire and ceremonially rekindling it, a period of fasting and ritual purification, and the redistribution of the new fire to individual households, marking the ceremony's harvest as both agricultural and religious.
This atlas describes the ceremony's general documented Muscogee pattern rather than a single generic Native American harvest rite; naming and specific content vary considerably from nation to nation among the Southeastern peoples who observe some form of it, and this entry should not be read as describing a practice uniform across all of them, let alone across Native nations generally.
The English name busk derives from the Creek word boskita, to fast, underscoring that the period of abstinence from food and from ordinary activity, rather than the feasting that followed it, was understood by participants as the ceremony's religious center. Accounts collected by nineteenth and twentieth century ethnographers describe the ceremony lasting between four and eight days depending on the community, with distinct phases for men and women and specific roles for the town's civil and religious leadership throughout.