Well, we were
talking about piles of stones, some stacked on some boulders that were shown on
the Larry Harrop video above, captured at a place neither of us had actually seen in person, somewhere in eastern Rhode Island. My friend expressed an opinion that he was skeptical that these particular stones were Native American in origin.
And I say in response, “I'm
skeptical that any farmer would stack up stones in general rather than
"throw down," as in fill a hole or a ditch or make a ford in a stream
or something. The Human Laziness Factor call it.”
I guess I was inferring that a Prayer in Stone, as my friend has called Indigenous-made Stone Stacks - and has created a really excellent video about (Stone Prayers Of Southern New England) - is a project that is the exact opposite of laziness, a form of sacrifice and an expenditure of energy for a Spiritual purpose, building an enduring monument "stacked up" which is much more difficult than "throwing down."
Like a spire on a church or cathedral, reaching up to the sky to "Heaven above."
Above: Eric Sloane Drawing
And I could’ve added, “Or toss them in a
cart and haul them off to use somewhere else, since if you’re going to lift
something heavy, you’d only want to lift it once, neatly stack it only when you
got to the place you want to use it” – even though that doesn’t always happen
in the real world, so it’s just as well I didn’t say it. Perhaps it was a “muscle
memory” of more than one occasion where I’d actually built a retaining walls of
stone or repaired a section of stone someone had taken apart (which is a whole
story in itself about an old man of Italian descent with dementia who kept
taking apart and rebuilding a section of stone wall when he lived at my mom’s
rest home. Old Joe died of a suspected heart attack in his sleep one night –
after a day he’d spent taking the wall section apart for the last time, my
father’s prediction about both the old man and the stone wall coming true as he
expressed his frustration about the situation.)
Above: Re-drawing of Eric Sloane's Drawing by the Awful- Oops, I mean, Author
My friend says, “I
agree with you mostly. But I also think the truth is somewhere between your
point of view and that of Timothy Ives…”
And I take that as
a compliment, the thought that I “push the envelope,” as I think my friend has
said about me at some earlier time, that I’m the other extreme from that
mythical and perhaps apologistic view about stone walls in the “New England”
that is thought of as the land of the Pilgrim’s Pride and not the ancient
Homeland of Indigenous People that was plundered after 1620, their stone
constructions ethnically erased from the landscape since that might imply that
the lands weren’t actually vacant and improved, not the “proper fences” that
those Puritan magistrates were quick to include in hastily written property
laws.
My friend had also
said, “The pines around them are all of roughly the same age. Coupled with the
stone wall, this appears to have been a pasture. No, that alone does not rule
out a native origin. But...”
And that led to
the title of this little opinion piece, The Process of Pasturization.
See, I contend
that this hundred mile wide swath along the present coastline of what has
become known as Southern New England was just full of Indigenous People happily
and respectfully maintaining a Sacred Landscape by use of fire and constructing
fuel breaks shaped like Great Serpents over a long period of time that is the East
Gate of Turtle Island human made and stone built Cultural Landscape version of
other known and sometimes even studied stone landscapes in other places – the Great
South West of North America, all those cities in South America, but without the
stone houses, more of a wigwam culture you might say.
Above: Two Tims' Views on Pasturization
And as far as
pastures go, I think they were second hand acquisitions of Euro-Americans, re-purposed
or “pasturized” (yes spell check, I know – it’s my own term I just made up that
has nothing to do with Louis Pasteur) for cows, oxen, sheep,
goats and horses, originally Indigenous fire protected ecotones or resource
zones – or “whatever Indians wanted to use them for” zones - surrounded by fuel
breaks that were those intermediary spiritual creatures that more resembled
snakes or eels or even inch worms (the Foot Snake) who shape shifted and had
families, the enemies of those Thunder Beings who shot lightening from their
eyes, causing the rare lightening fires some unimaginative (and ill-informed) scientists
insist were responsible for all the fires on the continent.
So, yes I’m the
Other Tim, quite happy to be the Tim who sees that he is surrounded by serpent
walls. I’m formally untrained in the sense that I have no degree, but I’m free
to not be bound by that training, free to question the authority of the
documentation, free to interpret what I think I see and speculate rather than homogenize
about it “until the cows come home from the Euro-American pasture,” you could
say, and see how it makes sense in a Traditional Indigenous Knowledge sort of
way – just like other imaginative researchers like Nancy Turner or M. Kat
Anderson or Clark Erikson are finding in other places such as California or the
Pacific North West or the Bolivian Amazon (Bill Gammage in Austrailia).
I see
those same stone walls, but I observe patterns that aren’t in the stone wall
identification books and I’m not embarrassed by what I perceive as a snake’s
head at the end of a row of stones, or by what I think I see in the cranberry
bog a snake’s tail dips into, or in the stream that two serpents (or a series
of entwined serpents) zigzag around, a burial ground at the low end, a quarried
milky quartz boulder with a hammer stone resting on it in the middle, and a
Tobacco Sacrifice Stone that looks like a bear’s head and a base of a fire
starter stone at the high end -
– or the section of land around the stone piles,
where like my friend I find who I quote again here “…boulders…stacked with
cairns (stacked with stones that)…typically have unique qualities-- they might
look like a human face...
...or an animal, have quartz inclusions, or hematite, or
they have deep splits, concavities, depressions, or holes that are filled,
wedged, or otherwise covered with stones. And the cairns themselves have unique
qualities-- they have built-in niches, or a single head-like stone protruding,
or they are particularly well-made...
...or they are a very large, or they are
marked with a standing stone or Manitou stone (such as this one above from my friend's video), or they have single unique
colored stones built into them, usually quartz but sometimes other colors, or
obviously foreign stones built into them (strikingly beautiful stones of
unusual shape or color).”
I banter with my
friend, disagree and then sometimes either agree or disagree some more with
him, but most often we are laughing and joking while we do it, both of us
marveling about these stone features and cherishing them and the time we’ve put
in walking, seeing and observing,
delving into what people have written in both the distant and recent past and
just plain enjoying being open minded enough to appreciate the wonderland
around us – but not so open minded that our brains fall out, like a wiser man
than I once said…
So, as industrious as a no-nonsense Yankee farmer is said to be, I have to ask again, "Who had more time to construct an estimated quarter million miles of stone walls? Who had the more "dire need" for all those (fire-proof) walls on a Landscape that was fire-tended and most likely pretty densely populated. Who in the long run would have have saved labor (travelling less for a more dependable and abundant resource outcome, not burning up your firewood or all the ecotones, pruning and maintaining just one of your blueberry fields or cranberry bogs, instead of all of them at once)? Who is more inclined to make images of turtles, bears, deer and large Great Serpents on a Sacred Cultural Landscape?"
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