CT group shot Access
Fund Blog: June 2014 www.opengate.org 2048
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There are trails I walk and even trails that I often drive
along. You probably do too, drive them I mean. Connecticut to California, the first roads followed
Indian Trails that have changed over the last few centuries or perhaps a bit more,
depending on where you are, but chances are, if you look back far enough, that
highway or back road may have been a moccasin made pathway at one time, going
from somewhere to somewhere…
The road I live on retains its Indian Place Name – and even
some of the stone borders on each side. Once a year, twice a year, was that
pathway between those sometimes zigzag or Serpentine borders burned to keep it
clear? I don’t really know – I wasn’t there back then but I imagine it was the
easiest way to do it…
Sometimes the names remain, at least as they were known
during Contact Time when things began to be written down on paper. The names
flow like music or poetry, describing the place, perhaps a lake or a village, a
fish weir or a mountain, or by what grew and was “gathered” there, in a place
with a boundary of stones sometimes too, another “hearth-like creation only
bigger,” fuel breaks to control a burn, sustainable horticulture on a huge
scale, a system of management developed by thousands of years of practice and
traditions of world renewal…
And then there are those trails to the mountain tops, and sometimes
those out crops along the way, some of them still with that Indigenous name or
its corruption, sometimes with a story behind it, sometimes true and sometimes
not, sometimes marked and sometimes not, sometimes rough and sometimes
maintained…
(Note the old wooden rails in the right hand corner in the photo used here:
Where wood was plentiful, wooden rails are said to have preceded stone walls,
but that may not be actually true:
Just as I worry about the road crew destroying old stone
walls on the roadside thoughtlessly – or someone driving a machine over them
elsewhere - from mountain bike or ATV to land-clearing or lumber harvesting monster
– I worry about trail maintainers who may be taking apart some unrecognized “Cultural
Resource” that to the Original People is something Sacred, a stone heap that
could be a grave or a similar memorial or a stone wall that could be a (geoglyph
or perhaps a petroform?) Great Serpent connecting the Upper World of the Sky
and the Lower Under(water) World below, a common Indigenous worldview from
Connecticut to California, Manitoba to Mexico, similar to all the other
accepted constructions found elsewhere and well documented if you care to
search for it and read it…
Maybe it could be a whole new gig for me – Consultant for
Stones Along the Trails, Call Before You Maintain – you might be destroying
Something Sacred to Someone – and once it is gone it is gone – and gone forever.
And, sadly, it is one time that Google Search For Similar
Images doesn’t let me down, there's just so many images that come up:
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