Kapenga vs Ho-Chunk

Tell Wisconsin lawmakers to protect indigenous effigy mounds and burial sites by strengthening protections for ancient earthworks rather than allowing their destruction. 

Click Here to sign the petition on Change.org

Join the Ho-Chunk Nation in Madison, Wisconsin for a rally to ask our elected officials to protect these historically significant sites. The rally will take place on the East side of the Capitol at 1 pm on January 12, 2016.

Transportation may be provided from designated areas across Wisconsin, as well as Saint Paul, MN and Chicago, IL.

Email mounds@ho-chunk.com for more information

Effigy Mounds

The effigy mounds found in Wisconsin are among the only earthen forms constructed by prehistoric American Indians. Wisconsin law has only recently protected these culturally significant features. These shapes often take forms of clan symbols, humans, or simple forms. These mounds were used for burial, ceremonial, or utilitarian purposes. The Ho-Chunk people are believed to be descendants of the Mound Builder people. The tribe views the mounds as sacred sites that should not be disturbed.

LRB−2890/1

Analysis by the Legislative Reference Bureau

This bill establishes a procedure for owners of burial sites that are currently cataloged by the director of the State Historical Society and owners of certain land contiguous to cataloged burial sites to challenge the existence of human remains in the burial site. Current law requires the director to identify and record in a catalog burial sites and, for land not platted for use as a cemetery, sufficient contiguous land necessary to protect burial sites from disturbance. Subject to certain exceptions, the disturbance of burial sites and cataloged land contiguous to burial sites is prohibited. Under the bill, the director must issue a permit for the investigation of a cataloged burial site to the owner of the burial site or to the owner of cataloged land contiguous to the burial site if the burial site was cataloged before the date the bill becomes law and the owner disputes the existence of human remains in the burial site and applies for a permit. An owner issued a permit under the bill may, at the owner’s own expense, investigate the site for evidence of human remains using investigational methods set forth in the bill. If the investigation finds no evidence of human remains in the burial site, the director is required to remove the burial site and contiguous land from the catalog. For land that is cataloged on or after the date on which the bill becomes law, the bill provides that no burial site on private property and no private land that is contiguous to a burial site may be cataloged unless the director establishes that human remains are present in the burial site based on investigational methods set forth in the bill.

http://savethemounds.com/

Todd James Rongstad to Effigy Mounds Initiative: ""WMC and Senator Kapenga's attack on the Burial Sites Law does point out a great vulnerability in the protection of Wisconsin's sacred sites -- that this landmark law from '86 was a far too narrow compromise. In the fight to come, please consider counter proposals that move beyond the burial sites justification. These sacred sites are world heritage sites that deserve honor and protection as cultural treasures above and beyond the common decency of protecting ancestor burials. Please do not allow bill proponents to focus the debate solely on ancestor remains and archaeological technology. The old law does need revision, but to expand cultural respect and protections -- not reduce them."

http://savethemounds.com/

Updating an Old Drawing

Sometimes you just have to toss out some old ideas - I mean "theories" - that you once had in your mind and had even put out there on your blog, as illustrated by the image below from one of the many sketch books I've scribbled and scratched in over the years. 

I may have acquired Kathleen Bragdon's book in 1996 when it was first published and made that pencil sketch shortly after - you see, I actually do the required reading about this Cultural Landscape business and the Indigenous People who were responsible for its creation and maintenance - but really I don't remember if I made the drawing of my own personal observation before I ever snatched that quote out of her fine book. I do see that by 1997 that the "Effigy as a Diagnostic Characteristic of Indigenous Stonework Idea" - I mean "Theory" - had occurred to me since I scribbled down in ink that little note to myself to go back and look again to determine if these "Point Stone Boulders" were in fact Testudinate in nature. I had a grand list of three possible animals I'd observed represented in stone at the time, bears, deer and turtles (all supplied by ethnography) at that time - and I suppose if I had had the words in my vocabulary back then so I could have had jotted down "Zoomorphic" or "Reptilian" then I'd have appeared to be a bit more of a smarty pants, but no I won't lie to you: the whole Great Serpent connection to the stone walls took many years of "homework" and many observations to arrive at what I know think is really obvious - and what I hope to embarrass the people who are supposed to be protecting these Snake Petroforms all around New England into recognizing them, investigating them in a scientific manner and actually start protecting them, rather than repeating a romantic myth about the agrarian practices of the last few hundred years, ethnically "erasing" Indigenous People from the Cultural Landscape of New England. I mean, come on now: this science stuff is supposed to reveal truths and contribute to a better understanding of the world around us. Read some Great Serpent Legends and some of the great work of the last 25 or 30 years that people around the world have been doing about Indigenous Cultural Landscapes!

Anyway, I updated my old drawing this morning:

That's all I have to say about it (for now)...

Links to more Chestnut Rails: Chestnut Rails

The Dreaded Sheep Fence

Some Wooden Rail Sheep Fences in Photos

http://www.southburyhistory.org/#!research_archives/galleryPage

Often, elaborate stonework in New England

 is assumed to be related to "keeping sheep."

Often, the Law of Parsimony

 is violated by assuming that assumption is true.

Often, it was easier, less labor intensive,

 and much less expensive

 to make wooden rail fences.

Or so I assume...

http://americangardenhistory.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-fence.html

principle (or law) of parsimony

The scientific principle that things are usually connected or behave in the simplest or most economical way, especially with reference to alternative evolutionary pathways. Compare with Occam's razor.

EXAMPLE SENTENCES

• He is remembered as the father of the medieval principle of parsimony, or economy, that advises anyone confronted with multiple explanations or models of a phenomenon to choose the simplest explanation first.
• Lest they fall into anthropomorphizing, many behaviorists follow the principle of parsimony, often called Occam's razor, that restricts inferences to the simplest adequate explanation of any particular animal behavior.
• Well it is taken to refer to the principle of parsimony that, from the Latin, ‘it is vain to do with more what can be done with less’, or ‘a plurality of things is not to be posited without necessity’.

Definition of Occam's razor in English:

The principle (attributed to William of Occam) that in explaining a thing, no more assumptions should be made than are necessary. The principle is often invoked to defend reductionism or nominalism. Compare with principle of parsimony at parsimony.

EXAMPLE SENTENCES

• The Faithfulness Condition is thus a formal version of Ockham's razor.
• This approach seems to apply Occam's razor to the principle itself, eliminating the word ‘assumptions.’
• That was Occam's razor, a fundamental principle of scientific reasoning.
• GET MORE EXAMPLES

wondermyway 2

More interesting photos by Leigh Macmillen Hayes, lifted from her fine blog "wondermyway"

which is just a click away here: http://wondermyway.com/

Actually these first three are part of “the mystery stones on the backside of Amos Mountain at the Heald and Bradley Ponds Reserve in Lovell," as Leigh puts it in a post from this past July:

http://wondermyway.com/2015/07/30/summer-fly-by/

I keep staring at the above photo, seeing "familiar" rhomboidal stones and others stacked in a way that reminds me of a few other places where the pattern reminds me of marks in pottery or designs in a Mohegan quillwork bag as well as other stone walls,

like some of these:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/34580529@N04/albums/72157651242120000

https://www.flickr.com/photos/34580529@N04/albums/72157657874235473

I'm trying to place just where I've seen another "niche-like" structural element as shown below:

I don't know if Leigh ever returned to the spot for more photos - or know just what she thinks about it.

There were some comments at the end of the post:

Susan said, “Reminds me of the stone crib work done on the Bradbury Mountain property in Pownal. There it is the remnants of a pen or enclosure for sheep (maybe cattle, but it is quite short). I look forward to the solution from others and you to this mystery!”

Leigh answered, “Well, I’ll take a photo from further away tomorrow. I actually don’t think it’s a pen or sheep enclosure, but it did possibly have something to do with the sheep. Stay tuned.”

    Personally, I am staying "tuned," having subscribed to this fine blog. I'd throw in my own 2 cents worth but the comments are closed for this post, suspecting Indigenous - and probably Abenaki - Stonework and a far older Cultural Landscape that didn't have much to do with sheep...

Below, this may be nearby: 

And this isn't but I just liked the photo and chuckled at how it was labelled:

I tracked down a few more images of the Mystery Walls, from the Face Book page of the Greater Lovel Land Trust, some from a post called "Revisiting the mystery structure behind Amos Mountain and some other fun finds." 

I don't know who to credit for the following - other than recognizing some from Leigh Hayes and in general saying they are taken from: 

https://www.facebook.com/GreaterLovellLandTrust/

(Much taller than I imagined - the Wall, I mean...)

wondermyway (a wordpress blog)

    This photo caught my eye, as I was “searching Google for a similar image” of something:

https://wondermyway.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/tree.jpg

It took me a minute or two, but there it was, as I opened up the photo in its own big window:

    So I made my way to "Thinking Big" DECEMBER 6, 2015 http://wondermyway.com/2015/12/06/thinking-big/

    “Wonder along with me as I wander through the woods,” writes Leigh Macmillen Hayes. “I’m a Maine Master Naturalist and a freelance writer. My happy moments are spent wandering and wondering in the woods of western Maine. And photographing and sketching what I see. And writing about the experience. And trying to find out the answers. Honestly though, I don’t want to know all of the answers.”

    I followed that kind invitation, up to the White Mountains in Maine, wandered along and saw that some “Single and double-wide stone walls line the old road and mark pastures and gardens. Miles of walls.” There’s a lot that is familiar, both in what Hayes writes and in the photo as well. I spend a lot of time doing the same sort of wandering and wondering along old Indian Trails that have become roads, some paved, but also along abandoned roads. I often look for stone walls along them – and look closely into how they are made, imagining the landscape before 1620 or 1492, when fires tended a different landscape, when perhaps it was the trails those old writers were talking about, burned both in the spring and “after the fall of the leaf” in autumn – what better and easier way to keep a trail clear or add a little more of a fuel break between some “gardens” and places that became later pastures outlined by miles and miles of stone walls?

https://wondermyway.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/road.jpg

“And dotting the landscape–piles of rocks picked from the ground:”

https://wondermyway.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/rock-pile.jpg

And then an interesting “root cellar” and a foundation (and I recognize the big birch, note more of that construction that is less like the "bricks or blocks" of Euro-American constructions than the effigy-like qualities of placement of stones) – that kind of thing that makes me wonder about what I think I might see in the way those stones placed and what might be a far older stone structure, thinking about that Upton Chamber and other places:

https://wondermyway.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/fdn-1.jpg

There's the second testudinate effigy-like possibility, cropped from the photo above:

Again, it isn't bricks and blocks as a view of the interior is shown:

https://wondermyway.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/root-cellar.jpg

      “Well...a deep subject,” Leigh writes – or is that some sort of quarry for some sort of stone?

https://wondermyway.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/fdn-2.jpg

And the link mentioned of an earlier visit shows more details:

http://wondermyway.com/2015/09/25/nature-works/

     And even includes a photo of this nearby boulder, accompanied by these words: "We explored the hillside and checked out some boulders taller than us. The ragged edges reminded us that this didn’t get rolled about by the glacier, but may have been part of a boulder field left behind. Sometimes our imagination turned from the historical nature to whimsy. I see a snapping turtle head; someone else saw a frog in this stone formation..."

          Nice wandering with you, Leigh Macmillen Hayes. I know I’ll be checking back in here again, wandering and wondering too…

Arguing with My Hero

Tim Osborne photo, used here: http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2014/05/scuppo-rd-box-turtle-surprise.html

     I wasn’t always the Crazy Turtle Man (in the hat), trying to tell the unbelievers (seemingly ranting) that New England’s iconic stone walls may be far older than we collectively are led to believe, remnants of an Indigenous Sacred Cultural Anthropogenic Landscape - a Ceremonial Stone Landscape - created sometime during that other 97% of the total time that humans were living in the region. I used to be a young boy, believe it or not, following farm paths behind my mom’s house where I could see ruins that were the heritage of our agrarian past (as I was led to believe), such as abandoned farm junk and cars, the occasional lonesome stone foundation or chimney, one even with an almost intact privy beside it. Even back then I would follow the stone walls’ courses to see where they would go, sometimes leading up to (and sometimes crossing) a big bedrock outcrop or down into a wet land swamp.

(Above: My First Zigzag and outcrop that I ever pondered about. Soon to be surrounded by condos, I believe.)

   More often than not, I could walk the edge of those swamps without getting my feet wet on stones that ringed the swamp, old zigzag stone rows that Eric Sloane in Our Vanishing Landscape, published in 1955 (the year before I was born), let me know were "a small mystery," accidental constructions he described as unintentional “Chimeras” (mythical fire-breathing beasts that resemble a lion - but with a goat's head in the middle of its back, and a tail that ends in a snake's head) winding across the land in “a crazy manner.” What a coincidence that he calls the wooden structures Virginia Snake Fences, mentioned a beast that has a snake head head at the end of a tail in a colorful turn of phrase...

   Yes, Eric Sloane is still a hero to me – about the subjects he knew well, such as those ancient tools we wonder about when we encounter them hanging up in the exposed rafters or on the walls of New England restaurants – inland restaurants anyway, away from the mounted fish taxidermy, lobster traps and assorted boat junk you find along the coastline. I learned to assign approximate dates to old furniture and old houses reading and looking at illustrations of saw marks and nail heads. Eric Sloane, often plagiarized in stone wall books and sometimes even referenced, also knew well and documented the art of wooden fence-making in what became known as the United States of America as well as the later stone fences, but he admitted somewhere in one of his books that he knew little about “Indians,” by which he meant the earlier Indigenous Cultures that lived on the very same landscapes he loved, going back to the times when the glaciers melted. Back then there were very few people who would have taken into consideration that there may have been visible stone remnants of those earlier civilizations up here in the North East, other than arrowheads and spearheads, mortar stones and pestles, and all those other stone implements that artifact collectors love.

(Chicken and Egg Situation: I'd argue with Eric about the "stones added" under the cross and rail fence. I suspect that most of the stones were already there when the fence rails were added to make it comply with the early New England fence laws that defined what was and was not considered improved property. I'd be looking for turtles and bears, "god-stones" and human-like effigies - zoomorphic and anthropomorphic inclusions - placed just so rather than just tossed or dumped. I'd be looking to see patterns of stacking found in other forms of Indigenous Artwork, as well as courses that could be the bodies of entwined snakes that begin at snake-head like stones.)

Above: Faces in Stone, below: Patterns and Comparisons

    I actually began to doubt and criticize my hero (and every stone wall expert who repeats or re-words what Sloane said) because of those zigzag stone walls. To date I’ve never found one that fits that description of how and why he deduced those sorts of fences were made. The more I look at details of how they are actually constructed, the more I continue to be surprised that no one (including myself sometimes) has ever noticed certain things before such as the large triangular stones at certain points of these “fences” and the resemblance they have to a snake’s head, the other effigy-like stones carefully placed in these rows, the artwork aspect of something that is supposed to be just a mess of tossed stones up against long gone rotted wooden rails.

   It was from the features in the zigzag rows that I learned to recognize those same features in other "linear" or straight line sorts of stone rows or mounds of stones as well. It is an ongoing learning process and there is some back and forth that recognizes similarities in all kinds of Indigenous Artwork as well as the stories, legends and myths of neighboring (and sometimes distant) Indigenous Cultures. It was neither Turtle nor Snake that was my original clue to the possibility that stone effigies even could still be found on these ancient landscapes, found by following the zigzag stone rows that bordered a riparian zone of a stream:

(Above: my first effigy)

(Above: small serpent effigy "head stone" in a zigzag stone row, below: large boulder snake-head effigy at a "gate" into a prominent first minister's property, now a land trust preserve.)

   I should talk; I’m really only beginning to grasp the great variety in all the stone work that may be Indigenous in origin. I constantly come back to those zigzags, learn a little more each time I look, surprise myself at what I’ve missed in the past that seems so obvious to me now…

   So don’t get me wrong: I always loved Eric Sloane’s artwork and always will. So does my mom. So do many other people who love the way the New England landscape looks, beautiful in every season. I wish I could be half the realistic artist he was.

    I love the way he explained things using simplified and easily understandable drawings. I should take a hint from my hero, get out the pencil and pens, start drawing and stop just arguing with him in my imagination, reverse the sequence of the accepted wisdom…

    I've been to so many places, visited a wonderland most people don't notice or deny exists, following those zigzag stone rows that it would require hours and hours to tell you about them, require days and days to take you to them.

  Click here and you will start to see what I mean:

  Older posts that are related to the word "zigzag"

Chimera - noun, (plural chimeras.)

1.        (often initial capital letter) a mythological, fire-breathing monster, commonly represented with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.

2.        any similarly grotesque monster having disparate parts, especially as depicted in decorative art.

3.        a horrible or unreal creature of the imagination; a vain or idle fancy: He is far different from the chimera your fears have made of him.

4.        Genetics. an organism composed of two or more genetically distinct tissues, as an organism that is partly male and partly female, or an artificially produced individual having tissues of several species.

T

Undulating Across an Open Pasture

     Opening a dialogue

   Great Serpent or Farm Wall??

Ancient Turtle Island or New England??

2022 Redux:

From the fine photos found at http://jackmcconnellphotography.com/, Connecticut stone walls, in some gently undulating through places that became pasture and farmland:

And a surprise – some of my great grandfather’s stonework (not undulating across open estate land):

(http://www.gardentyrant.com/2010/12/quintessential-new-england-historic.html)