Monday, December 16, 2013

Rhomboidal Stone on White Deer Rocks Road

I had posted about a Rhomboidal sort of stone or two here: http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2013/10/rhombus.html.
       Then I just happened upon another from a series of photos taken around March 2010 from one of my Grandmother's favorite places to drive along a dirt road with one of the best names for a road around here, White Deer Rocks Road. There's a local legend about a herd of Sacred White Deer, never hunted by the Indigenous People, that lived in the area that lends the name to the road - which I've heard from many people but have never seen written down anywhere (that I can remember right now, although Cothren mentions the white deer that hid by the rocks and sneaked over to the lake nearby to drink water).
A similar legend does pop up here and there across Turtle Island, always saying never shoot a white deer, and is even captured in an illustration or two like the one above from Wigwam Evenings; Sioux Folk Tales Retold by Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman {http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28099/28099-h/28099-h.htm}
Sometimes you will see a Ceremony Exception to the hunting ban, such as this Hoopa White Deerskin Dance pictured below:
from the group found at:
Along the "Redwood Highway" White Deerskin Dance, Klamath, Cal. (University of California)
I used an image of a possible white deer's head stone from this area not too long ago here:

Timber and stone walls were long ago harvested from along White Deer Rocks Road, but I did stop at a place where I thought I saw some hint of stone rows across an outcrop, one of those wilder "can't be quite sure" spots where it's difficult to tell what's natural and what's human enhanced: 
If you open up that photo in it's own window or tab, you just might spot a possible bird effigy, but that Rhomboidal Stone stands out on the right hand side:

You could call it a small perched rhomboidal stone...





Saturday, December 14, 2013

Aerial Chicken Yard

Curt mentioned being able to see the Chicken Yard Mounds on Google Earth. I once lifted and cropped a 1934 aerial photo from 1934 at the CT State Library site (above). Opening the image in a new window will give you a better view than right-clicking it. below is a simple circle:
Here's some more, red is some visible stone work still existing, yellow now gone. Covered by trees in the river to the right, the Stone Weir that gives it's name to the area is disappointingly not visible:
2006:
2008:

2010:
2011:

2013:




Friday, December 06, 2013

(Very Quite) Erratic Bear



Tuesday, December 03, 2013

doodle notes and drawings

Usually I'd be walking on a Tuesday, but I had a work related training.
Luckily I can escape boredom by doodling...

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Wonderland

Grey Fox Trail Stone Rows (2013)

Leaves fall from the trees and a Wonderland appears
You can see the long distance stretch of rows of stone
Snake through the wounded forests of this part of Turtle Island
And I wonder, “What was gathered there?”
And I wonder, “What song was sung in Thanksgiving?”
And I wonder, “Who lit the sacred fire
That sent prayers to the Creator and the Spirit of the Deer
Gathered in that Sacred Circle of that Sacred Fire?”
Nonnewaug Deer Tobacco Sacrifice Stone (1996)

      I am reading a work called Tending the Wild by M. Kat Anderson that describes the wonderland that was California – as an anciently created and well tended Cultural Landscape, a picture of sustainable horticulture that goes beyond the simple notion of “hunter/gatherers,” beyond the simple notion of “slash and burn.” There’s so many more ethnologies recorded out there, out west, where that European Contact was delayed or less intense for a time than around here, where the burning wasn’t outlawed until the 20th Century, where people remember details of the methods and reasons that burning was considered part of Caring for the Land.
      There’s so many more survivors as well, fighting for Federal and even State Recognition, fighting to protect those Sacred Places, to resume and sometimes continue to celebrate ceremonies thousands of years old perhaps.

Alyssa Alexandria (2013)
Ron Smith Photo

       I’m only halfway through but so far there is no mention of stone rows, but I’ve seen my friend Alyssa’s photos – and Ron Smith’s as well – of Northern California’s ancient pre-contact stone rows that are very similar to those here in what’s now referred to as New England, so I am beginning to wonder (not for the first time), “What was inside those spaces between the stone rows?” – on both the Wonder Land here as well as there.

      And I guess I already know some of the answers around here:

      There were strawberries and raspberries that thrived after a burn. There were fields and fields of low bush blueberries, burned over every four years. There were wild plum groves and hazelnut groves and all those useful shrubs in all the places they prosper naturally, helped along by another burn, on another schedule. There were great groves of great Oaks and chestnuts –and all those other trees called the Mast Forest. And there were great groves of pines, also tended with fire (or by protection from burning or perhaps just on a different schedule - I don’t really know, but I wonder).
Remnant Lowbush Blueberries along Remnant Zigzag Stone Row (2006)

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Taking Care of Nature

Above: before; below after (almost) from:

     At this point you may be wondering, “Why is this Connecticut boy (as if some silver haired grandpa could use the word “boy” to describe himself) going on and on about California on a blog that was really started with field observations about a site in his Connecticut neighborhood?”
    
Alyssa Alexandria photo
I guess it’s just because of the familiar feeling I get looking at photos of what’s described as “settler’s rock walls” and the broader landscape that they occur on – much different from Connecticut as locales but familiar in construction. I think I see what could be effigies and patterns in the artistic stacking of stones, linking outcrops and boulders – boulders that could be effigies and “stone baskets.” I think I see how some of these “rock walls” could be fuel breaks around different resource zones, just as I see them around here, maybe game drives and yet some are so perplexing, sometimes spirals and other non-rectangular shapes that make you think of them as Ceremonial, which really means you can’t think of anything else to call that shape or guess a function.

Alyssa Alexandria photo


    And I guess that it’s a “California Re-Charge” that I’m experiencing after a week-long visit, a couple drives out of the suburban and urban congestion of LA, passing through the Laguna Canyon and driving up above Irvine and seeing some signs of the older Cultural Landscape, finding they are places that First People are saying are Sacred Sites and are actively fighting to preserve.
…..Or sacrifice one to save four others.
  I really do enjoy diving into the literature, surprising myself with what I find about “donation piles,” described almost word for word as the ones in this corner of Turtle Island. I like being surprised about named boulders, seeing a one hundred year old photo of one of them that has stones placed on top of her that were there for as long as the oldest living elder could remember, although they could be knocked off “with the sweep of a hand.”

    I like to read about the burning off of the land, since I read about it so often in those old local histories from all those towns around mine (and beyond).
    It’s no surprise that I liked the surprises I came across yesterday and in the early hours of this morning, thinking I could easily substitute the name “Connecticut” for the word “California” in this fourth chapter of “Tending the Wild.” There was a great bonus to this work that couldn’t happen here – First People remember the landscape being burned over and are actively working to be allowed to do so again, to be able to “take care” the plants and animals, to be able to “renew the world.” Take a look:

     “Indigenous peoples have been pigeonholed by social scientists into one of two categories, “hunter-gatherer” or “agriculturist,” obscuring the ancient role of many indigenous peoples as wildland managers and limiting their use of and impacts on nature to the two extremes of human intervention. The image evoked by the term hunter-gatherer is of a wanderer or nomad, plucking berries and pinching greens and living a hand-to-mouth existence; agriculturist, at the other extreme, refers to one who completely transforms wildland environments, saves and sows seed, and clears engulfing vegetation by means of fire and hand weeding. This dichotomous view of nature–human interactions has shut out the fact that Indian groups across California practiced many diverse approaches to land use, and it has led to a focus on domestication as the only way humans can influence plants and animals and shape natural environments.
      Recently anthropologists have learned about the complexity of traditional ecological knowledge and the extent of indigenous peoples’ management of wildlands by going to other parts of the world to study more intact cultures (e.g., Darrell Posey’s work with the Kayapó Indians in the Brazilian Amazon and Henry Lewis’s fire management work with Australian Aborigines).But a reassessment of the record in California reveals that land management systems have been in place here for at least twelve thousand years—ample time to affect the evolutionary course of plant species and plant communities.
     These systems extend beyond the manipulation of plant populations for food. Traditional management systems have influenced the size, extent, pattern, structure, and composition of the flora and fauna within a multitude of vegetation types throughout the state. When the first Europeans visited California, therefore, they did not find in many places a pristine, virtually uninhabited wilderness but rather a carefully tended “garden” that was the result of thousands of years of selective harvesting, tilling, burning, pruning, sowing, weeding, and transplanting.
Much of the rich material disclosing the ancient management of wilderness lies in the dusty diaries and handwritten notes of anthropologists and the eyewitness accounts of early European settlers. For example, Kroeber’s 1939 field notes, housed at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, record that the Yurok of northwestern California practiced burning at a frequency that was appropriate for each cultural purpose: burning of hazelnut for basketry occurred every two years; burning under the tan oaks to keep the brush down took place every three years; burning for elk feed occurred every fourth or fifth year; burning in the redwoods for brush and downed fuel control occurred every three to five years. These observations did not change his thinking about “hunter-gatherers,” nor did he publish them. Other early anthropologists found examples of hunter-gatherers saving and sowing wild seeds, pruning wild crops, and managing wildlife and vegetation with fire (page 125)”
“… Burning is the application of fire to particular vegetation areas under specified conditions to achieve select cultural purposes. The use of fire entails a number of important considerations, such as seasonality, the frequency of burning in a particular area, and the aerial extent of the fire… It has been shown that pruning or burning vegetation increases the forage value for certain wildlife and that the number of larger game animals increases after fire…”

Courtney Martin

     “Today elders from a number of tribes substantiate that the practice of burning is highly beneficial to wildlife. The Sierra Miwok elder Bill Franklin learned about burning from his father and grandfather: “They said the Indians used to burn in the fall—October and November. They set the fires from the bottom of the slope to decrease the snowpack, get rid of the debris so there’s no fire danger and they burned in the hunting areas so there was more food for the deer. They burned every year and in the same areas” (pers. comm. 1990).
Fire was also used in hunting many kinds of animals. Often, burning carried out for the immediate purpose of securing food had secondary ecological effects noted above. The methods used for hunting were ingenious and numerous. Tribes employed fire to attract animals, to drive them in certain directions, to create smoke for killing rodents in their burrows, or, in the case of insects, to reveal their nests or disable or kill them so that they could be collected. Alfred Kroeber recorded among the Yokuts: “When the geese traveled, inflammable brush was piled up, and when the birds were heard approaching on dark, still nights these were suddenly lit. The birds swooped down to the flare, and in their bewilderment were easily killed.”
     The Owens Valley Paiute stalked deer in disguise, used a surround with people and trained dogs, and sometimes fired brush. The Sierra Miwok set small fires in the hills around a meadow, into which deer went. These men then kept building new fires. As the deer descended to the meadow, they approached the fires out of curiosity and concealed hunters shot them with bows and arrows. A Hupa man described how fire was used to capture deer: “Two fires set in canyon so as to burn toward bottom. Some hunters drove with the fire; others awaited game at bottom.” Fire was a tool used often for driving rabbits. For example, brush was fired for driving rabbits on the floor of valleys by the Tubatulabal between July and the middle of August. Twenty or more men stood in a circle outside of the burning brush and as the rabbits fled, the men shot them with bows and arrows. The historian Thomas Fletcher said, “In late summer and early fall the Kuzedika [Mono Lake Paiute] held rabbit drives around the lake flats. The drives required the participation of many people, some to hold the long nets into which the rabbits were driven, others to light fires in the sagebrush and force the rabbits into the nets.”
Above Ron Smith photo; below "Game Drive Turtle Vision"


Colonel Rice described game hunting in the forests by the Cosumnes Indians (Plains Miwok) in 1850: “A whole settlement would turn out and begin operations by starting a number of small fires at regular intervals in a circle through the woods, guiding the flame by raking up the pine needles, and stamping out the fire when it spread too far. When the fires burned out there was left a narrow strip of bare ground enclosing a circular area of several acres, within which the game was confined. A large fire was then kindled at a point inside of the circle, taking advantage of the direction of the wind, and allowed to spread unchecked. The men, armed with bows and arrows and accompanied by their dogs, kept to the windward in front of the fire and shot down the rabbits and other small animals as the heat drove them from cover, while the women, with their conical baskets on their backs, followed up the fire to gather up the grasshoppers, which merely had their wings singed by the fire, but were not killed.”

Many elders in the Sierra Nevada foothills recalled how their ancestors set fires to clear the brush. Several examples are included below.
     Mother and Grandmother used to talk about burning the brush. The fires were set up around Cascadel [North Fork, California] in the ponderosa pines. The fire would creep along because it was late in the fall when the winds have stopped that they would set the fires. They’d burn coming out of the forest, usually late fall before the storms start, about September, October and November. The fires would just go out. It wasn’t covered like it is now with pine needles, old limbs and stuff that is all dry. Wherever the brush or trash was, they would set fires. But there wasn’t the brush like there is now. Every year fires were set and they never got hot enough to burn the big trees. In 1913 we could ride straight in the saddle and not knock the brush out of the way. It was open country. Then they came with their fire restrictions. (Nellie Lavell, North Fork Mono, pers. comm. 1991)

     I’m going by what the elders told me happened in the 1800s. Burning was in the fall of the year when the plants were all dried up when it was going to rain. They’d burn areas when they would see it’s in need. If the brush was too high and too brushy it gets out of control. If the shrubs got two to four feet in height it would be time to burn. They’d burn every two years. Both men and women would set the fires. The flames wouldn’t get very high. It wouldn’t burn the trees, only the shrubs. They burned around the camping grounds where they lived and around where they gathered. They also cleared pathways between camps. Burning brush helped to save water. They burned in the valleys and foothills. I never heard of the Indians setting fires in the higher mountains, but don’t take my word for it. (Rosalie Bethel, North Fork Mono, pers. comm. 1989)

     My parents talked about the old-time Indians burning. All the elders talked about the Indians burning as they came down the mountains in the fall to the lower elevations. It was common knowledge. They’d burn in October or the last of September. The fires didn’t burn out of control.
Nacomas Turner said they let Yosemite National Park go to heck because they let the trash stay on the ground for so many years.Walking in the forest is like walking on foam rubber. The litter must have been a foot deep. Everything our people did 50 years ago they don’t dare do today. My dad and mother used to burn on their properties. (Sylvena Mayer, North Fork Mono, pers. comm. 1991)


Courtney Martin

Taking Care of Nature

We have learned that native plants were tended with a variety of resource management techniques, including pruning diseased parts of favored plants, weeding around plants to decrease competition and aerate the soil, replanting the smaller bulblets of harvested plants, and scattering seed. Many different habitats were burned to heighten the amount of forage and its nutritional value for various species of wildlife. Today California Indians often refer to these practices as “caring about” the plant or animal. Traditionally, Indians did not consider their actions management per se; “management” is a Western term implying control. Rather, caring for plants and animals in the California Indian sense meant establishing a deeply experiential and
reciprocal relationship with them.
For millennia native people used the vast diversity of California’s flora and fauna as sources of food, medicine, basketry, weapons, tools, games, shelters, and ceremonial items. Numerous plant and animal species were integral to every facet of Indian culture—religious festivals and life events such as childbirth, puberty, and death. Plants and animals were talked to, prayed for, and thanked with offerings. When they gathered or hunted, Indians adhered to ancient rules and techniques that allowed for resource use while keeping the resource base intact. As a result, some traditional gathering and hunting sites are very, very old.
By virtue of their daily use of plants, California Indians acquired extensive and special knowledge of the life histories of plant species, and they understood how different harvesting strategies affected natural regeneration.
Their concern about replacement and return means that their gathering may be called “judicious,” because the act is conducted with calculated temperance and restraint. Many of the gathering and management strategies are potentially sustainable, allowing for repeat harvests. Potentially sustainable harvesting strategies included harvesting plants for their tubers after seeding, cutting shrubs during the dormant period, sparing individual plants for future regeneration, granting plant populations rest periods, and using appropriate, nondestructive technologies.
As horticulturists, California Indians tilled the soil, pruned shrubs, sowed the seeds of wildflowers and grasses, and, in some cases, set the fires that nourished their food and basketry crops. These techniques had subtle yet important ecological impacts at the species, population, community, and landscape levels within a multitude of habitats in different parts of California.
In particular, the development of fire as a vegetation management tool enabled women and men to systematically alter the natural environment on a long-term basis and at a massive scale. What becomes clear is that California Indians had a profound knowledge of the plants, animals, and ecological processes around them. When historical indigenous interactions—both harvesting strategies and resource management practices—are investigated in depth, we find that by keeping ecosystems in a modest or intermediate level of disturbance, in many senses Indians lived in ecological harmony with nature.
From Tending the Wild; Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources Chapter Four “Methods of Caring for the Land” by M. Kat Anderson

Originally accessed from the now dead link:



This seems to work presently: 

A review:


          And then there's all those turtles:

                                             Courtney Martin







Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Tending the Wild


Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources
M. KAT ANDERSON
(Quoting  Powers [1877] 1976:109–10.)
Stephen Powers, a pioneering anthropologist, wrote about how intimately the Mattole of northwestern California and other tribes knew their homes—their places in the world:
    "The boundaries of all tribes . . . are marked with the greatest precision, being defined by certain creeks, canyons, boulders, conspicuous trees, springs, etc., each of which has its own individual name. Accordingly, the squaws teach these things to their children in a kind of sing song. . . Over and over, time and again, they rehearse all these boulders, etc., describing each minutely and by name, with its surroundings. Then, when
the children are old enough, they take them around . . . and so faithfull has been their instruction, that [the children] generally recognize the objects from the descriptions given them previously by their mothers.
Page 39




I'll add that Roger Williams said much the same: “The natives are very exact and punctual in the bounds of their lands, belonging to this or that prince or people, even to a river, brook, &c.” - Roger Williams, in his Key (CHAP. XVI. Of the Earth and the Fruits thereof).

Monday, November 18, 2013

testaments to the ancestors

     (Chief David Belardes) interprets ayelkwi as “ the power in all things, animate and inanimate. Everything living… rocks, trees, mountains, ranges…all have power. And there are places of power, where you can go and pray and talk to the creator and listen to the spirits.” David explains to me that these places of power have special names that, like the village of Acjachema, commemorate the stories that have unfolded there. Most of these stories are grounded in rocks…Oftentimes when a place or object is named, it is recognized as a place of spiritual significance. David’s grandfather gave names to many of the trails and places he encountered on horseback, names that signified important landmarks. The Belardes Trail, which David’s grandfather rode, is known in Acjachemen as Pala Soya, Pala for water and Soya for a type of alder tree that grew at a spring there. The name refers to the spot’s valuable asset: water.
     Even though naming a place brings it into the realm of human experiences, sacred places whose names have been lost—perhaps due to disruptions in oral tradition—are still part of the human experience. They are places where the ancestors walked, places of power.
      “You can feel you are in a sacred space, even when you may or may not know the story of it or the name,” David says.
      “What do you mean?”
       The phone line is silent as David mulls over the question. The static rushes forward, crackling like a hundred candy wrappers rubbed between the palms. “Well…when I was a kid, see…” he pauses. “My grandfather, he was a cowboy on the Rancho Santa Margarita.” I later read that many Acjachemen were employed as vaqueros (ranch hands) throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Phillips). They knew the best canyons for fattening up the cattle, and where springs were.
David continues, “I went out into the hills all the time with my grandfather and my father. And my father and I would hunt. Sometimes, we would be hunting, and we’d come across a hilltop with a stone circle on it.”
     “A ring of rocks?”
      “Yeah. Two, maybe three feet high. My father would say to me, ‘go stand up on that hill.’ And I would, and I’d come back and say ‘what’s going on up there?’ He’d tell me, ‘the ancient ones are here. Look at this circle.’”
      “What did you feel up there?”
        “A lot of people say it was a hunting blind, and maybe it was at one time. But if you ever go walk there…you know there is something else going on out there. The ancestors lived there. You can look out from that hilltop in all four directions. You can see Kalapwa.” Kalapwa is Chinigchinich’s sacred abode.


      When he takes in that commanding view, David explains, he can feel that the ancestors were just as moved. He can sense this when he looks out at all the sacred sites in all directions.
“And there is water there,” David says of the canyon. Water is sacred for its lifegiving gifts; it nourishes the oaks and leaches the tannic acids—and thus the bitterness—from mano-mashed acorns. Springs are very sacred places, often said to hold curative powers in their dripping waters. The Lobos record that “in the Old Stories, rocks are associated with water and as natural markers” (Lobo and Lobo 120). The stone circle on the hilltop may have served to mark the springs and to convey that the site was sacred. Not only are the stones themselves sacred, but also the shape that the ancestors placed them in. The circle is sacred in indigenous cultures.
       As indigenous elders in Gayle Kelly’s film A Circle of Women—which Kelly presented for the 2012 Humanities Institute—share, the power of the world works in circles. Everything tries to be round (Kelly). In his 1932 book Black Elk Speaks, John Neihardt learns from Black Elk, an Oglaga Sioux ceremonial specialist, that “[. . .] the power of the world always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. The Sky is round . . . and so are all the stars. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round” (Neihardt). Hector Perez-Pacheco, a Quechuan Indian from Peru who started the Harmony Keepers (a group which helps with the annual Ancestors’Walk), came to my class at Pitzer College this spring. He shared, “my grandfather told me that everything is circular. Whatever energy you put out there, you get that back. You eat what you plant. You plant good seeds, you eat good foods.”
      The Ajcachemen dance in a circle around the ceremonial fire during the Eagle Ceremony, just as the stars wheel around Tukmishwut, the North Star. Circles permeate Acjachemen ceremony. Perhaps cogged stones and stone spheres—which we will see in the last chapter—speak to the sanctity of the circle?
    “But why stones?” I press. “Why were stones used to make that circle?”
      David tells me that it all comes back to ayelkwi. Rocks possess a spirit, an energy that draws people. They are sacred beings, he explains, and they carry the weight of cultural memory in their very molecular bonds. The deceased individual is buried alongside their other belongings as well, belongings that symbolize who he or she was and what he or she did and which, interestingly enough, are mostly made of stone. Dave shares that “we had a fisherman buried with their fishhooks and weights and sinkers.” He and Joyce took me to the site where this fisherman and his belongings rest. A freeway now roars alongside the burial ground. The ancestor is still in the earth with his fishhooks, only much deeper, where he won’t be disturbed.
      “We had ceremonial people that were healers buried with a cache of stream washed rocks, shiny and smooth, like a totem of some sort,” David continues. Could these stones have similar spiritual significances as Bolsa Chica Mesa’s ritually cached cogged stones?
      An ancestor pole stretches skyward at Puvungna. The pole is surrounded at the base by a pile of rocks; a wide ring of rocks encircles it. Louie shares that the ancestor pole at Puvungna is a ‘modern take’ on a traditional pole. It is a contemporary manifestation of tradition, a physical representation of the fluidity of ceremony. “In the past when someone passed away,” he tells me, “the people took all their personal belongings, things they used in life, and tied them to a big pole. If they were a basket maker you tied some of their baskets. And then one year later it was burned. It was a way of saying goodbye to the person. You’ve marked one year of grief. It takes your grief to another stage.” I ask him about the rocks piled at the base of the pole. He shares that people bring rocks from their travels and place them there as tangible memories, as living manifestations, of their wanderings…
       The ancestor pole still stretches skywards, with its rocks piled at its base.
Every day Timét’s rays seep into those rocks, warming them with energy and heat.
       The rocks will carry the day’s heat long into the nightfall, just as they hold ayelwki.
They are sentinels on the site, testaments to the ancestors.
        They are carriers of power, of wisdom, and of cultural memory.

They quiver with energy. 
       They are a heap of moving matter. 
They are Acjachema.

condensed from: Rigby, Julia Edith, "A Celebration of Ceremony Among the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation" (2012). Scripps
Senior Theses. Paper 78.
http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/78

A Celebration of Ceremony Among the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation

By Julia Edith Rigby

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.686.7664&rep=rep1&type=pdf


Friday, November 15, 2013

Riprap

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
 placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
 in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf or wall
 riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
 straying planets,
These poems, people,
 lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
 and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
 four-dimensional
Game of Go.
 ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
 a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
 with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
 all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
           
 
 
 
Gary Snyder

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

"Turtlequakes"

Tremor Tales - The Turtle Story

This is a story the Gabrielino Indians used to tell. These Indians once lived in San Gabriel Valley in Southern California where earthquakes are common. They told this story to explain the cause of earthquakes and how California was made:Long, long ago, before there were people, there was hardly anything in the world but water. One day, Great Spirit looked down from heaven. He decided to make a beautiful land. But where could he begin? All he saw was water. Then he spotted a giant turtle. The turtle was as big as an island. Great Spirit decided to make the beautiful land on the turtle's back.
One turtle was not big enough. The land Great Spirit wanted to make was very large. So he called out, "Turtle, hurry and find your six brothers."Turtle swam to find them. It took him a whole day to find the first. It took another day to find the next. After six days, turtle had found his six brothers. "Come", he said. "Great Spirit wants us."
Great Spirit called down. "Turtles! Form a line, head to tail, north to south. Umm, you three to the south, please move a little to the east. Hmmm. There, that's just right. What a beautiful land you will make! Then Great Spirit reminded them, "It is a great honor to carry this land on your backs. So YOU MUST NOT MOVE!"
The turtles stayed very still. Great Spirit took some straw from his supply in the sky. He put it on the turtle's backs. Then he took some soil and patted it down on top of the straw.
Great Spirit cleaned his hands on a fluffy white cloud. "I'll use these clouds to make mountains", he said.
Then Great Spirit made trees and lakes and rivers. When he was finished, he looked at the beautiful land he had made. Great Spirit was very pleased. But soon trouble came. The giant turtles grew restless. They wanted to leave.
"I want to swim east," said one. "This beast goes EAST."
"West is best. I"ll swim toward the setting sun," said another.
The turtles began to argue. They could not agree. One day, four of the turtles began to swim east. Three turtles began to swim west. THE EARTH SHOOK! It CRACKED with a loud noise! But after a minute, the shaking stopped. The turtles had to stop because the land on their backs was so heavy. They had only been able to swim a little way from each other. When they saw that they could not swim away, they stopped arguing and made up.
But every once in a while the turtles that hold up California argue again. Each time they do, the earth shakes.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

ANCESTRAL LANDMARKS in Southern California


Cover of DuBois’ book and Plate 19 (referred to on pages 158, 159, as PI. 4) of Kroeber’s “A mission record of the California Indians.”
Fig. 2.—A painted rock, once a woman, on which two sacred stones are poised.
 TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE.
ANCESTRAL LANDMARKS AND DESCENT OF SONGS.
“After the water dried, the people went on to Kalaupa,290 and killed a bear there, and held a council whether they should go any further. They decided to go on, and went to Elsinore where the lake is. From there they scattered, north, south, east, and west, in parties as they are now. The people of La Jolla stayed in one place; those of Rincon in another, and so on. When they scattered in this way they composed the songs about their travels and the different places where they stopped. These are the songs of Munival.
When the people scattered from Ekvo Temeko, Temecula, they were very powerful. When they got to a place they would sing a song to make water come there, and would call that place theirs; or they would scoop out a hollow in a rock with their hands to have that for their mark as a claim upon the land. The different parties of people had their own marks. For instance, Albafias's ancestors had theirs, and Lueario's people had theirs, and their own songs of Munival to tell how they traveled from Temecula, of the spots where they stopped and about the different places they claimed.
Wasimul, one of the Temecula people, who is now a small flat rock at Rincon in the field below the store, was one of Pio Amago's ancestors, and he has a song about it. It mentions Temecula and mentions Wasimul. Lucario cannot sing this song because it does not belong to his family.
Piyevla,291 the man who scooped out a rock on the hill near Albafias 's house at La Jolla, was one of Lucario's ancestors; and the turtle rock in the same locality was brought from Temecula by one of Lucario's ancestors and left there. The oak tree growing on this rocky knoll was called long ago Pecheya, sacred feather headdress. (Pl . 4, fig. 1.) The place itself is called Popikvo. The sliding place on a large rock in Trujillo's field adjoining Popikvo, was made smooth by Lucario's ancestors sliding on it.
One of the most striking rocks in this locality of ancient monuments is the painted rock, Exwanyawish which was one of the Temecula people, a woman, who turned into this form. Indians suffering bodily pain rub against the rock to obtain relief. It is not known when the painting on the hollowed side was done, nor when the sacred stones, wiala, were poised on top. The oldest man remembers that they were always there, though the touch of a hand might overturn them. Pl . 4, fig. 2.)
In those days they used to sing songs to kill each other by witchcraft, and Lucario knows these songs. He has one of them which mentions the turtle rock, and tells how it was left there.2" The large flat rock is divided by cracks which resemble the marks on the turtle's back.
Lucario is the last of his line, party, or clan, and everything sacred will be lost when he is gone, as the succession in these things ends with him. He is dispossessed from his ancient home place, which was allotted to another.” (Kroeber, 158-9)
 “Record 394. Toloache ceremony march song. By Lucario Cuevish. Tamyush noya kwoya, etc., Tamyush marches by twisting.116 The power of motion a (DuBois, )ttributed to tamyush, the sacred v stone bowl, and this song, have been mentioned in the account of the toloache ceremony.”


http://www.pauljprice.com/oldsite/portfolio/indian/BtamyushAlarms.php

http://www.pauljprice.com/oldsite/portfolio/indian/indians.php

THE WALKING TAMYUSH

“The Tamyush, sacred stone bowls, were never made. They were among the first people, born of the Earth-mother. If the chief in whose charge they are, does not take good care of them they go away.
They have been seen going along the road, and one can follow their track in the dust. It is like a rattlesnake track, but broader.
At Pichanga one lately came there. A raven was seen flying along above the road, and every now and then he swooped down as if following some object. A man went to see what was there, and found the Tamyush. It had been coming along the road to Pichanga. He took it to his home and they had a big ceremony over it. The man is dead now.” (DuBois, 156)

“This is the outcropping often referred to as "Turtle Rock". It is held sacred by the Gabrieleño Indians, and is located in the northern part of the Turtle Rock neighborhood, near Concordia University, Irvine.”
“Record 396. By Lucario Cuevish. Song of Munival, landmarks. This mentions the turtle-rock on the land now occupied by Albanas, but owned by Lucario's ancestors from time immemorial. There is a large flat rock there marked with cracks like 1 the markings on a turtle's back. This used to be a turtle and was left in this shape as a track of possession. The song means that he is singing to his ancestors. He is singing about the rock. It is his. They left it here to claim the land which was theirs.” (DuBois, quoted by Kroeber, page 115)
...Some Turtle Rock Photos by Anthony P. Tran

The base of the Pala Bell Tower resembles a stone mound – "The San Antonio de Pala Asistencia was founded on June 13, 1816 in what is today the Pala Indian Reservation located in San Diego County (some twenty miles inland) as an asistencia ("sub-mission") to Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, upstream from the mission on the San Luis Rey River. Its official title is now Mission San Antonio de Pala. Pala (a derivation of the native term Pale, meaning water) was essentially a small rancho surrounded by large fields and herds…”
(Adobe mound, stones and finish coat of adobe plaster.)
(I found references to documented Stone cairns, often Donation Piles, in Central and South America, topped with crosses in something called Cairn Trail Shrines in Middle and South America but can't seem to find a link to the free online version.)