Grandfather the Sun is the great luminary of the daytime sky, addressed in Osage ritual as a living person and elder kinsman. In the tribe's genesis the ancestors who dwelt above appealed to the Sun as the god of Day, and he counseled them and gave his own body as a symbol of the long life the people sought. He heads the ancestral Celestial Family beside the Moon, and the stars are reckoned their children. His token in the peace rites is the red downy eagle plume, standing for the sun in its reddening. Osage speech treats him as one radiant aspect of the single pervading power, Wakonda.