Somewhere along the Klamath

Yes indeed, Ron’s photos of Sutter Buttes and other places in Northern California I’ve never been have really gotten my attention. It’s like taking everything you might read or see on Rock Piles and putting it on a landscape without second growth trees – without bittersweet and green briar! - that hide stone rows and everything else so that you can really stretch your eyes – and take photos that show the artifacts, the petroforms, so well .


And it’s a landscape that has had less time to be thoughtlessly destroyed than many places over here in the North East, cows and people doing so right now as I write this.

And Al Kroeber wrote ethnologies back there 100 years ago that Native People (who spoke Algonquin, sometimes called Delaware) are using to continue ancient traditions on that Sacred Landscape, visiting places that, now that I’ve seen Ron’s photos, look so familiar. If I haven’t seen it myself, I’ve seen it on Rock Piles. I see repeated patterns in the photographs – Georgia to Manitoba and now to Northern California.

Sure I read Kroeber (on a trip to Baja California) and highlighted all the rock and landscape ceremony references, but to actually see panoramas of the landscape is really something else.

I finally tickled Google with the phrase “Indian Stone Fence” and got a photo of a wall that looks like many I know in a number of places, along with a bit about “hunting blinds.” Digging around a little more I found recent recognition of the older culture, certain rocks recognized as culturally important– and Spiritually important as well. I found no reference to any farmers clearing any fields for agricultural uses, and recall that barbwire was begun to be produced around 1870.

Above is a photo Ron sent me this morning, as well as a detail (or 2) that looks like a photo that would’ve fit in quite well at the post http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2008/04/indian-look.html
and what I was trying to capture with this photo:

And what is that?