Sage Frank (left) with his little brother Bluestar Frank, his dad
Cameron Frank and his mom April Carmelo outside their family home in the City
of Shasta Lake. Sage was allegedly attacked by an apparent self-proclaimed
white supremist.
Is it just me, or
does there seem to be a thread of White Supremacy running through all this
"truth about Ancient America" stuff?
Let me explain a
little:
By coincidence, via
the Face Book Phenomena, at about the same time, I “met” three different people
in three different parts of Turtle Island who had begun to realize that they
were seeing stones and stone constructions atypical of the works of Post
Contact people. Call them colonists or settlers or Europeans - call them people
who arrived here and there after a specific time, depending on where we’re
talking about, places where European diseases spread after October 12, 1492 and
decimated a whole hemisphere of Human Beings.
They were posting
some amazing photographs and were searching for answers as to who built them,
why hadn’t they heard of them, and perhaps questioning whether or not it was “real,”
and not just their imagination, some sort of delusion. I can relate to that.
I’m lucky, I guess.
It’s a lonesome feeling to have something like this happen to you.
I’m lucky, I guess,
to have early on, about twenty years ago, met and talked with a Schaghticoke
Elder who was not very surprised at the photographs I showed her of stones I
thought might be effigies or petroforms.
I’m lucky, I guess,
that she told me about book about The Sacred Landscape of New England’s Native
Civilization, which in turn led me to a friendship with the author of a well
known blog about (and called) “Rock Piles,” and several people that I met
through him. We don’t always agree on things, but we persevere and forgive each
other’s grumpiness at times, but mostly we share discoveries, in the field and
in the literature, among other things. We celebrate small victories and grieve
great losses together, which are what friends are for.
I’m lucky to be just
where I am, by a Contact time Village by a Sacred Site. I’m lucky to have an
artist’s eye and a great love of reading
So my three new “online
friends” are each in unique places. All three friends find themselves in
similar situations, seeing similar constructions, all seeking answers to
questions that may or may not ever be answered. We all think we know a little
bit for sure, think we learn a little more each day, and try to be open about
it in our thinking, sifting through a dizzying amount of contradictory information,
complicated by bias of all kinds, and in the end really relying on intuition
and imagination that some times more important, a wiser man than I once said,
was more important than information.
I am the odd person
out in the fact that I have no Native American Ancestry. My other three friends
do. Two of them have come to embrace that Ancestry, tracing family genealogy,
one living in the original territory (or at least pretty close to it), very
much involved with his relations in the area.
Meanwhile the other friend tracked down her roots, finding her Grandfather was Tsalagi/Tsalagi as these people seem to have called themselves but as Wikipedia puts it: “…Cherokee (which) may have originally been derived from the Choctaw word Cha-la-kee, which means "those who live in the mountains", or Choctaw Chi-luk-ik-bi, meaning "those who live in the cave country"…The earliest Spanish rendering of Cherokee, from 1755, is Tchalaquei.[8] Another theory is that "Cherokee" derives from a Lower Creek word, Ciló-kki, meaning someone who speaks another language.[9] The most common derivation, however, is an Anglicisation of their autonym, or name for themselves: Tsalagi in their language.” This ancestry was a surprise to her; she’d thought that her Grandpa Den was a Modoc living on the Hoopa Reservation in Northern California, where she spent many summers with Grandpa Den. She also turns out to be a great niece of the naturalist John Muir, crucially responsible for the establishment of the Natural Park System of the United States of America who eventually came to respect Native Ways, hunted the high country with Native Americans in the landscape where the management of the landscape by burning became illegal somewhere in the mid 1900’s, encroached by the Gold Rush only 50 years before that.
These first two people are very selective these days
with whom they share information, moving slowly and cautiously, thinking long
about what they see entirely open about what they say, and honoring me with
questions they think I may have some opinions on and sometimes “gathering wood”
for them, a concept that come from Yurok, Kurok, Maidu , Wintu, and Anishinabe/Ojibwe/Chippewa
ethnologies,
ethnographies, and other sources that include those peoples fights to continue
to follow tradition ways, once outlawed and punishable sometimes by Christianization
or a slow or quick death in the past – and present.Meanwhile the other friend tracked down her roots, finding her Grandfather was Tsalagi/Tsalagi as these people seem to have called themselves but as Wikipedia puts it: “…Cherokee (which) may have originally been derived from the Choctaw word Cha-la-kee, which means "those who live in the mountains", or Choctaw Chi-luk-ik-bi, meaning "those who live in the cave country"…The earliest Spanish rendering of Cherokee, from 1755, is Tchalaquei.[8] Another theory is that "Cherokee" derives from a Lower Creek word, Ciló-kki, meaning someone who speaks another language.[9] The most common derivation, however, is an Anglicisation of their autonym, or name for themselves: Tsalagi in their language.” This ancestry was a surprise to her; she’d thought that her Grandpa Den was a Modoc living on the Hoopa Reservation in Northern California, where she spent many summers with Grandpa Den. She also turns out to be a great niece of the naturalist John Muir, crucially responsible for the establishment of the Natural Park System of the United States of America who eventually came to respect Native Ways, hunted the high country with Native Americans in the landscape where the management of the landscape by burning became illegal somewhere in the mid 1900’s, encroached by the Gold Rush only 50 years before that.
Some links, with other
links (and even more links) could start with:
