Waking Up on Turtle Island: The Names We Use

The Cultural Message Nomenclature Implies

Photos stolen from: http://hudsonvalleygeologist.blogspot.com/2013/07/north-salem-balanced-rock.html

The approval of a posting of some photos, and a message as well, set me off thinking about the names we use to describe features of a Ceremonial Stone Landscape. While this nomenclature has always been a concern with me, these days I’m paying more and more attention as more and more Indigenous People begin to talk about these Sacred Stones, these Manitou Qussukquanash, that are all too often misidentified but are also sometimes so prominent on today’s landscape. There’s an intriguing boulder in North Salem NY and it is that one I’m talking about.

The boulder has many names – and the People who lived here the longest most likely had a name for it – and even that probably changed over time – but I don’t know if it is remembered. I visited this boulder back at the end of the 1990’s, the exact date I don’t know but it had to have been after the spring 1996 because I know that was the point where I first recognized a cobble stone as a zoomorphic effigy, a bear’s head about life sized balanced on a large flat boulder while pondering the zigzag stone rows that bordered the riparian zone of a small stream. I traveled to a house in North Salem to work on some antique furniture, probably two days in a row, and somewhere I have a few photos of the boulder and maybe even one or two of some zigzag stone rows at the stream behind the house, taken from the streamside boulder I ate my lunch on the first day – zigzag rows that also bordered the stream’s riparian zone and also connected to others, possibly also zigzag but maybe not – the memory of that is a little hazy, twenty years later, but I do remember that they seemed more carefully constructed but here and there you could see more recent debris of stone and brick, trash and brush unceremoniously dumped on top of them, sometimes spilling over. I was just a few years into challenging the Euro-centric notion that these rows of stones were early Colonial constructions, properly termed “stone fences,” commonly called “stone walls.”

It was probably as I headed home the first day that I stopped by what the old sign assured me was a “Glacial Erratic,” an estimated 6 to 18 ton boulder composed of a type of rock not found in the area, most likely moved by glacial action from an original source to the north. I came across a blog post from the Hudson Valley Geologist who posts about the “Random thoughts and opinions of a community college geology professor living in the mid-Hudson Valley of New York State.” That’s his photo above that I’ve stolen, to the best of my knowledge.

Geologically speaking, I’ll have to wonder why he chose the word “rock” and I’m a little surprised he didn’t choose to call it a Balanced Boulder, a stone of a certain size known as a boulder, composed of a kind of rock, called granite but I suppose that rock is one of those interchangeable and acceptable misnomers for stone – and besides, that’s what it says on the newer sign.

In the emerging language of Indigenous Ceremonial Stone Landscapes in what is now known as northeastern North America, more than a few researchers would agrue on the term balanced. That first bear effigy is a balanced stone, unsupported by other stones and free to rock from side to side if pushed into motion. The North Salem Boulder has some supports below it and you could start an independent research argument about whether it’s Perched or Pedestaled. – and, so far, I haven’t heard a Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO) suggest a preferred term in English or an Algonquin dialect. Regarding the last sentence on the sign I will tell you that a THPO might suggest to you: “Let’s get one thing straight: you’re not in Scotland (or Ireland) anymore” and may use a term such as Manitou Hussunash or Manitou Qussukquanash depending on which river system this stone would be found on, who would be the most likely descendants of the Indigenous Peoples’ known to have occupied the area since those glaciers retreated. The THPO might tell you, just as the Hudson Valley Geologist says, “it's (not) a man-made dolmen despite its striking appearance, That doesn't mean Native Americans didn't consider it a sacred site, they may have, but I'm not aware of any archaeological evidence for ancient activity here (especially by seafaring Celts!)... If you search the web, a lot of the information you'll see about Balanced Rock is from New Agers who credulously claim it's a dolmen. Dolmens are megalithic tombs found in various places in Western Europe (most notably Ireland). They typically consist of flat rocks supported by three or more uprights. While superficially looking like a dolmen (not much, in my opinion, since the proportions aren't right), it's far likelier to be a glacial erratic.”

The inclusion of that last sentence is a cultural message, just as Eurocentric as believing Indigenous People in the area couldn’t or wouldn’t make stone constructions, create a Ceremonial Stone Landscape. There’s some implied racism in that sentence and it makes little difference if someone has made a few million writing books about a Mother Culture that originated in a sort of Atlantis in Antarctica. It’s still an imaginary Master Race and a bit of racist pseudo archaeology that has no evidence behind it, an insult to Indigenous People everywhere.

How far back that Celtic Theory goes, I don’t know. Maybe back to the 1950’s and Barry Fell.
(Editing this in 6/2019, I'll add this image of page 91 in Mantiou by Mavor and Dix, pushing the date back to the 1930's and William Goodwin's suggestion that Culdee monks from Ireland fled Vikings and were bringing Christianity to Wabenaki People in New Hampshire:)