Waking Up on Turtle Island: Reading Lesson 2

Friday, October 17, 2014

Reading Lesson 2

In the photo above you can see the large stones of a retaining wall I had always thought of as being an 1850 construction that made use of the stones from the original central chimney. The stones do show the marks of metal stone working tools being used to dress the stones used to build the wall...

Here's another stone construction in Washington CT that I had previously dismissed as typical of post contact stone fences numerous times. Had I paid more attention - and noticed a bit of what looks to be a lower and perhaps serpentine row of stones (or two). In the past, I may not have recognized all the patterns and effigies etc in this row of stones. Here's a Flickr Photo album that contains a few photos of this fence: https://www.flickr.com/photos/34580529@N04/sets/72157648391407148/

My intuition tells me it is an Indigenous post contact construction that manages to connect to the older stonework at a bedrock outcrop, but I don't really know for sure.

Note that the face of both constructions slope back at the same angle and remember that both may possibly connect to older pre contact Indigenous Stonework...

I took the photo below at the site above because of the diagonal striations on a rhomboidal stone, remembering my friend Peter also finds those diagonals occurring as a pattern occasionally on stones:

The next day, about to get out of my car, I glanced over at the retaining wall where I noticed there was a very similarly striated rhomboidal stone incorporated into the wall:

I noticed another sort of pattern of stacking some rather flat similarly colored stones occurs in both, a sort of side view of a possible effigy:

Maybe it does say something like "We (a rhomboid on wampum belts often signifies a band or a nation or a Central Fire) are still here" and maybe still connected to the stonework of the past...

I'm going to say it points to Indigenous People continuing a tradition, whether the newcomers saw and understood it or not. There was a Village nearby at my house around the first few decades of 1700 and I now suspect members of the Nonnewaug band built that retaining wall. The other one in Washington, I'm guessing might be much later, but if it's possible that to date that stone fence and track down the builders, I strongly suspect that they are of Indigenous ancestry.