I was
looking at an old blog post of mine from last fall: {http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2013/11/ancestral-landmarks-in-southern.html}.
I was re-reading this part: “When the people scattered from Ekvo Temeko,
Temecula, they were very powerful. When they got to a place they would sing a
song to make water come there, and would call that place theirs; or they would
scoop out a hollow in a rock with their hands to have that for their mark as a
claim upon the land. The different parties of people had their own marks. For
instance, Albafias's ancestors had theirs, and Lueario's people had theirs, and
their own songs of Munival to tell how they traveled from Temecula, of the
spots where they stopped and about the different places they claimed.
Wasimul, one of the Temecula people, who is now a small flat
rock at Rincon in the field below the store, was one of Pio Amago's ancestors,
and he has a song about it. It mentions Temecula and mentions Wasimul. Lucario
cannot sing this song because it does not belong to his family.
Piyevla, the man who scooped out a rock on the hill near
Albafias 's house at La Jolla, was one of Lucario's ancestors; and the turtle rock in the same locality
was brought from Temecula by one of Lucario's ancestors and left there…”
And that
last part of the sentence made me kinda jump off into a Turtle Rock Google
image search in which I found yet another Turtle Rock I hadn’t seen yet in Ramona CA, pictured above and below:
The better
photo was found here:
"Turtle Rock
Ridge Winery – Well Hello There Gorgeous"
“A windy (perhaps
the author means winding?) Ramona
road led us to an extraordinary family run winery tucked away on a hillside. A
huge boulder in the shape of a turtle, the winery’s namesake, stands guard over
the grounds; perhaps providing good luck for the winemakers for the years to
come. I, for one, truly hope this is the case; in 2007 the Witch Creek fire
swept through Ramona, burning up homes, farms, trees and even dreams…”
Posted by Shannon McCollough on Feb 25, 2013 in Winery
Spotlights:
There’s a lot more, I suspect, to be found about this Stone
or Rock – or maybe not.
That text from Kroeber also says: “In
those days they used to sing songs to kill each other by witchcraft, and
Lucario knows these songs. He has one of them which mentions the turtle rock,
and tells how it was left there.2" The large flat rock is divided by
cracks which resemble the marks on the turtle's back.
Lucario is the last of his line, party, or clan, and everything
sacred will be lost when he is gone, as the succession in these things ends
with him. He is dispossessed from his ancient home place, which was allotted to
another.” (Kroeber, 158-9)
Little fragments from
all across Turtle Island hint that just about everywhere, on all those Cultural
Landscapes considered Sacred Homelands to many different groups Indigenous
People, every place had a song or story, all features of the landscape, seen
and un-seen, had names of that the
children were taught as they learned the oral histories of pre-contact times.
Some are remembered
and some are forgotten.
Where I live there is
so much more of the latter, and very little of the former.
I think I see Stones
that might have un-remembered stories to them around me – and I’ve driven
through Landscapes in Southern California that look much like this photo below,
and felt a “tingle” inside me that says “Here’s another Special Place.”
“Ramona
Grasslands: Hundreds of years ago, grassland covered more than a quarter of the
planet. Today only a fraction remains and less than 8 percent of those areas
are protected…” it says in the article I stole that photo from...
What it doesn’t say is “Indigenous People maintained and
expanded those grasslands with fire.”
It also doesn’t say that there were many other resource
zones, if not created by Indigenous People, then they were places tended by
Indigenous People for thousands of years, with songs and ceremonies, also
sometimes remembered and sometimes forgotten, some as recently as the 1940’s
(in Northern California) or some places where it never stopped and continues still,
according to Dennis Martinez:
Perhaps someone might have “sang to make water come here," perhaps sculpted some stones into perhaps a desert tortoise, perhaps into some
underwater or underworld Serpent whose name, songs and stories as well, might
or might not be remembered…
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