A Stones Throw

WALKING THOUGHTS ON A FROZEN POND
BY LAURET SAVOY

 April 16, 2013  

 A Stone's Throw, Currents, Issue 32

“I often ask my students to pause and consider several questions as we explore the environmental history of this country.

What is our relationship to the past? Is the past over?

What is memory? Can it be owned?

How do we know what we (think we) know?

Who are “we”?

“Most common are rock structures built by European colonists and their descendants who, after displacing native peoples, changed a native landscape. One can find cellar holes of homes and barns, remnants of mill dams and raceways, boundary markers, wells. Most ubiquitous, though, are the stone walls that thread Leverett’s woodlands (Editorial Note: if you listen to Robert Thorson’s conjectures!).”

https://www.terrain.org/2013/currents/walking-thoughts-on-a-frozen-pond/

   One more question occurs to me: Why do we assume that “Most common are rock structures built by European colonists and their descendants who, after displacing native peoples, changed a native landscape. One can find cellar holes of homes and barns, remnants of mill dams and raceways, boundary markers, wells"?

   (A friend writes: "There is no need to question the land, the place where one finds oneself. The answers are all freely available - Creation is always speaking and being. Rather, always question oneself. Am I listening? Can I see? Am I present? Who else is here? Am I fulfilling my responsibilities as a part of the Great Mystery or have I (again) separated myself ?")

   I think about a certain stone on a certain "stone wall" that I recently photographed (again), placed in a similar way: 

Two photos, two different foci, above so the first Puritan minister's home shows,

below so that it doesn't. 

This is the gateway entrance/exit to the supposed and assumed cart path where this stone is located:

But if I travel north along the road, another entrance may be another cultural clue:

The "Uktena" overlay:

"According to Mooney (1900:458-459), the name Uktena is derived from akta, or eye, and implies being a “strong looker,” as everything is visible to it (i.e., it can see thoughts). From the same root is derived akta’tĭ, “to see into closely” which is also the Cherokee word for a magnifying lens and telescope. So the name Uktena implies that it sees thoughts and it does so in an accurate way; knowledge that comes in useful to predict enemy tactics (Jannie Loubser - E-mail communication July 21, 2015). " - Uktena "strong-looker"

     I take a look back at the webpage and find:

    Lauret Savoy writes and photographs across threads of cultural identity to explore their shaping by relationship with and dislocation from the land. A woman of African-American, Euro-American, and Native-American heritage, she is a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College. Her books include The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World (Milkweed Editions), Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology(Trinity University Press), and Living with the Changing California Coast.