Also Known as the Paugusett Path

The Berkshire Path

     Travelling up and down the Old Moccasin Trail that became present day Route 7 twice within seven days was quite a lesson in Cultural Landscapes, even if one of the most important things I learned required nothing more than simply by looking south from the front door (or any south-facing window, as above) of the building we were staying in toward a certain mountain in the distance. The place my wife and I stayed in, right on the Stockbridge and Lenox town line was on a hillside where the view was more than just spectacular, now a Yoga Center, formerly an Ashram and prior to that a Jesuit Novitiate housed in a building that was built about the time I was born after the original Golden Age Cottage of a wealthy man whose name escapes me at the moment (Anson Phelps Stokes) was destroyed by an explosion and fire.

     From Wikipedia: “Designed by architect H. Neill Wilson with landscaping by Frederick Law Olmsted, the mansion and farm buildings were built for Anson Phelps Stokes in 1893. Andrew Carnegie acquired Shadowbrook in 1917 and died there in 1919… sold in 1917 by Potter's debtors to Andrew Carnegie for $300,000…regarded at the time to be the second largest private residence in the United States.”

"Shadowbrook, Lenox, MA" by from a 1908 postcard. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shadowbrook,_Lenox,_MA.jpg#/media/File:Shadowbrook,_Lenox,_MA.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Brook_Farm_Historic_District

   I’ve travelled that same route to Stockbridge and Lenox many times in my life and I’ve been long aware of the connection of modern highway to that Indian Trail widely known as the Berkshire Path, but it was another name I just happened upon that caused me a little surprise – more because it put into words something I’d already been thinking about that path and its relationship as a “High Place” (Place of Great Spiritual Power) to the Cultural Landscape I’m trying to gain understanding of, right outside my front door, sixty miles away. I found that the “Paugussett Path” is another name for the Berkshire path in book about Indian Paths called “Connecticut circa 1625 : its Indian trails, villages and sachendoms Published 1934 by the  National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Connecticut;Ingersoll, Elinor Houghton Bulkeley, 1893-; Spiess, Mathias.

{ https://archive.org/details/connecticutcirca00nati } The Paugussett, along with the Schaghticoke, are the Most Likely Descendants of the Indigenous People who created the Stone Features of the Sacred Cultural Landscape that I’ve been inspired to document and puzzle about as well as to be awed by its beauty and sophistication. When you get past the White Wash of the myth of the origin of stone walls in this Indigenous Homeland along the Housatonic River, see the remnants of what remains of an ancient sustainable system that is sometimes referred to as landscape domestication, you find something that should embarrass the pants off of any archeologist or anthropologist who clings to the belief that the stone walls and stone monuments along this Great River (and elsewhere in the North East) are “all and only” the result the agrarian endeavors of the last few hundred years. It is my sincere hope that these professionals, along with all those self-appointed “stone wall experts,” not embarrassed into becoming pants-less, will be careful when repeating the stone wall myths, half-truths and outright lies of the past will consider the consequences of repeating that sort of thing before audiences, knowing the danger of the old children’s’ saying, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

Monument Mountain is often mentioned by many people involved in Indigenous Stone Feature Investigations, even if it is recorded that the original Stone Monument is a pile of stones that recreates the original stone monument that was hauled away to build something else somewhere else. The stone monument remains to today, although I never have actually visited it, somewhere along the trail named for it. My friend Norman Muller seems to be the only person who has taken a photograph of it that I can easily find performing an online image search.

(Ezra Stiles wrote about this mound and sketched it in 1760, Eva Bulter refers to it in “The Bush or Stone Memorial Heaps of Southern New England,” Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut (April 1946), 2-12). Peter Waksman uses Norman’s photo in: http://indianrockpiles.weetu.com/articles/RockPileTypes.html and Norman mentions the pile in an online work called “Stone Mound Investigations as of 2009” http://www.rock-piles.com/smi/)

Norman Muller Photo: http://indianrockpiles.weetu.com/articles/RockPileTypes_files/MonumentMountain.jpg

    I don’t know exactly where I heard of the name “The Giant’s Stone Pile (Giant’s Grave) as an old name for Monument Mountain, but it’s stuck there in my memory. Was it an old book or maybe an old sign at the base of the mountain? I don’t know. Was it something my Grandmother told me as we passed by, on the way to somewhere else when I was just a kid? That possibility exists as well and I wish I could ask her, along with all the other Indian stories and legends she told me, possibly learned back when she was just a kid living near the old White Deer Rocks Road Fishing Camp where many other people have told me over many years that Indian People from all over the place would camp there during the summer, people she possibly met when she was young.

    In my mind, the Giant’s Stone Pile is the talus east facing slope of Monument Mountain, on the opposite side of that peak from the man-made pile, huge boulders that have fallen over the many years since the glaciers (huge white giants of ice?) and the passing of time have carved the taller mountain into the present day one. I’ve always figured that the giant was that cultural hero of many names who survives in Indigenous Legends across the larger landscape of the North East, sometimes related to actual geological events that survive in story and illustrate the how far back the Indigenous memory of the landscape goes (Giants on The Landscape )

    It wasn’t until just a few days ago that the story of the Giant suddenly leaped into a new perspective for me, seeing it and the other mountains in the “mountain scape” in the distance from Kripula or Shadowood (above). Similar in shape to the famous Sleeping Giant formation (below), I suddenly realized (although school children in the area may hear this early on locally) that Monument Mountain may well be another Giant, sleeping on the landscape…

Thanksgiving Everyday

CFC Performance - The Wampanoag Nation | @marioninstitute
The Wampanoag Nation Dancers and Singers from Mashpee, Aquinnah and Herring Pond, MA, will share Eastern Social Songs and Dances. 
http://www.marioninstitute.org/connecting-for-change

Forgotten and Ignored Sacred Indigenous Landscapes

     On the left: an illustration from "The  Cairnfields in New England's Forgotten Pastures" by Timothy Ives whose hypothesis is that: "Most of the cairnfields in New England’s forested hills were likely built by nineteenth-century farmers to prolong the usefulness of increasingly stony, overgrazed pastures. On the right: I've used  Ives' illustration to show that perhaps these stone monuments and long rows of stones may be related more to an older Sacred Cultural Landscape, created over the thousands and thousands of years Indigenous People lived in the same area, as has often been repeated on this blog, illustrated profusely with photographs of field observations of mine and many others, as well as other pertinent information from a wide variety of sources.

    We may indeed be Surrounded by Serpents (such as the one above), as well as other Petroforms, of a yet to be determined age using scientific methods and further research and not just by the refuse of agrarian field clearing that began just a few hundred years ago...

A bear effigy? A turtle? Both?

On Reading CAIRNFIELDS IN NEW ENGLAND’S FORGOTTEN PASTURES

       Timothy H. Ives was kind enough to email me a copy of the “Cairnfields in New England’s Forgotten Pastures.” I read it once, then twice, and then I read it once again. Each time I got the feeling that I’d read it somewhere before but I know that can’t be true. I guess that it is just sounds so much so much like so many other things I’ve read about "stone mounds" and "stone walls" presented as reminders of an “agrarian past” related to a very brief period of time (the last 400 years or so).

     Dr. Ives abstract states: Most of the cairnfields in New England’s forested hills were likely built by nineteenth-century farmers to prolong the usefulness of increasingly stony, overgrazed pastures. This working hypothesis is supported by a historical context, observations of cairnfields in Rhode Island, and a formation model that accounts for important cultural and environmental factors. Cairnfields may yield new and important insights into some of the more prosaic, historically overlooked dimensions of agrarian pasts, particularly when their study leverages a landscape approach within the context of farmstead archaeology.

     I’m not sure how, as Ives writes, “this paper presents a modest contribution toward the shared goal of distinguishing ceremonial stonework from that of farmers (Lavin 2013:296) in a region where a variety of mutually influential cultural traditions render stone piles and cairns meaningful (Ives 2013).” Every figure included in the paper, some of them obviously Indigenous-made constructions in the eyes of members of the Narragansett Tribal Nation or independent researchers, is presented as proof, such as Robert Thorson “imagines” and Susan Allport “proposes,” of how post contact agrarian field clearing might look, while neglecting to show any image of any proven/highly probable Indigenous Stone Feature of any kind anywhere as an example. While Ives wants to “emphasize that no disrespect is intended toward Native American Tribes who may ascribe sacred value to cairnfields within the context of Ceremonial Stone Landscapes (sensu United South and Eastern Tribes, Inc. 2007), he seems reluctant to mention a single Indigenous Cultural Landscape in the western hemi-sphere for comparison, including the federally recognized Turners Falls Sacred Ceremonial Hill Site in Massachusetts. Every word written in “Cairnfields” seems to deny that Indigenous Cultures in the Northeast, over a span of 12,000 years or more, could have possibly left any visible reminder of their presence on the landscape.

      Reading the paper caused me to pause and ask some myself some “If/Then” questions:

     

“If the already understudied Indigenous Cultural Landscape is ignored, particularly in the case of Ceremonial Stone Features, then wouldn’t a person be guilty of passing off Pseudoscience as Science, substituting myths for truth, and Ethnically Cleansing away evidence of thousands of years of Traditional Ecological Knowledge by claiming, without further research, that the great majority of stonework in the Northeast is the result of field clearing methods of post-contact agriculture? 

If there are many free standing stone concentrations/constructions that either contain effigies or resemble animals both actual and legendary, as well as other designs and patterns that figured highly and appear in the artwork in other media created by the Indigenous People of Turtle Island (Native Americans of North America) – the turtle, bear and deer etc. along with the Great Serpents etc, - then who was more likely to have the time and motivation to create this artwork - Indigenous People or farmers fancifully and whimsically "doodling" as Thorson calls it, "Demented Uncles" stacking stone as a sort of therapy invented by Yankee Farmers? 

If those same techniques and designs found in Indigenous artwork can be found in those longer piles of stones most often called “stone walls” then again, who was most likely to have the greater amount of time and greater motivation to create this artwork especially when the stone wall ends (begins) in what clearly resembles a snake head (as I once heard a panel member at a Round-table Discussion on Stone Features and Ceremonial Stone Landscapes at the IAIS Research Center say, as if reading my mind)?

If the Indigenous People of Turtle Island (Native Americans of North America) maintained the landscape with fire then how were those fires controlled, especially in areas of dense population? Which would be a considered the more “dire need” to justify the labor required to create that estimated "quarter million miles of stone walls" – fuel breaks to control Indigenous burning over a great length of time or animal containment fences in the brief period of time known as the Golden Age of Stonewall Building that began shortly after the American Revolutionary War and ended with the invention of barbed wire? 

If Paleo-Indians (the Ancestors of the Indigenous People of Turtle Island) made “sophisticated prehistoric stone walls deep beneath the surface of Lake Huron,” the most recent find described as “two stone lines forming a lane about 30 metres long and eight metres wide which ended in a corral-type structure” with “hunting blinds built into the sides as well as other lanes and structures,” then why not elsewhere on Turtle Island? 

 Doesn't the Law of Parsimony apply not only to the time required for the building of “stone walls” but also to the reuse of already existing stone structures – or their removal from the landscape?

Did wooden rail fences actually come first or were fence laws created to culturally appropriate existing stone wall fuel breaks and/or petroforms in a quick and simple manner, adding rails to meet a height requirement?

Will the time come when an archaeologist's reputation be in jeopardy for NOT recognizing Stone Features of the Sacred Ceremonial Landscape (such as Turtle Effigies on Turtle Island)?

Will the time come when the sanity of an independent researcher is NOT questioned when pointing out repeated patterns in Indigenous Stonework and Artwork…

My First Cairn

My First Indigenous Stacked Stone Prayer

    My first “Cairn” (Karn, not Karen), as some people insist on probable calling stacked stone Indigenous or Native American cultural features, was long gone and I knew it. I found it illustrated in a book from the town library but the author let me know it was long gone. He was sad about it too.

      That farmer was probably not being very truthful about why he dismantled the grave, not any more than he was being truthful about running a perfectly good plow into a heap of stones about the size of a cord of wood. He was probably robbing the grave for the bones of the Sachem as well as for anything else that might have been buried along with the man’s body. It occurs to me that the owner of the property may not have been a farmer, now that I think of it. It may have been tenants on the land who did the actual dirty work for the owner. 

     Or maybe someone just sneaking in to loot the grave after hearing about it at church or something...   

      Well, you know, it doesn’t matter, because every single one of those people is dead now and let that be a lesson to anyone who is thinking about digging into a possible Indigenous Grave. Bad Luck and even Death will surely follow.

      But I’m getting distracted.

      Sorry (And you’ll note in my favor that I didn’t say anything about Pomperaug’s grave, also long gone, which once sat by the bedrock outcrop right beside my cousin’s driveway downtown).

      Finding the most likely spot where the stone mounds and apple trees probably once were caused me to rethink everything I thought I knew about stones on the landscape around here and eventually other places as well. That little bit of ground was surrounded by serpentine stone walls and eventually I came to understand that in a way it was like a little island, especially after the waters of a 100 year flood put the branch of the river back where it originally flowed, down from the waterfall and right around those suspected burial grounds, scouring out a channel that revealed a second serpentine row of stones.

    I’m getting ahead of myself in my story.

    I’ll back up, back to early 1996, before that big thunderstorm, when the only double row of stones visible was to the east of the suspected desecrated burial grounds "orchard." Following a stream also connected to that stream actually led me to my first “cairns,” a few low heaps of stones but two really interesting ones on boulders, in among them that I had no doubt were Indigenous Stone Features.

(Keep in mind that I had not read or had even heard of Manitou or NEARA at this point in time...)

    I’ve told the story before many times, but I never get tired of telling it and retelling it, although typing it out over and over does wear on me just a bit. It's easier to include some links at the end of the post. In the meantime, I'll just say that I followed another stream that connects to the one that flows around the "island" - a stream that sort of had its immediate riparian zone border enclosed by stacked or laid zigzag rows of stones, until I got to where the water was emerging from the ground where there were a few "heaps of stones." 

And one flat topped boulder with what I first mistook as a cow skull on it.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here you go:

I don’t know how many words a video is worth, but probably it's more than a thousand and one:

Eventually I realized this was a similar stone, perhaps representing a deer just to the south of the bear-like stone on the flat boulder:

   These are stones to burn tobacco at, possibly for hunting, maybe to pray to the Spirit of the Bear or Deer as a personal guardian, maybe for any other number of reasons known only to the person who created them. Finding these Effigy-like Stones allowed me to be open to the possibility that this large boulder and some associated stones might be a turtle petroform:

A box turtle to be exact, sunburst designs on the shell, although you could infer that it is the Great Turtle whose shell was scratched by the Beaver who scooped up some mud from the bottom of an endless and empty sea to create Turtle Island:

     I should mention that I actually really dislike the use of the word “cairn” to describe the many types of stone mounds I come across in this place that has been called Turtle Island for a long time. Cairn sounds so European, mostly because it is European in origin. Not being a speaker of the local Indigenous dialect and able to supply the proper word, I settle for stone mounds or stone heaps because stone pile or rock pile makes me think of something just piled up thoughtlessly, like so much junk. And I say stone because a stone is a piece of some kind of rock or mineral substance.

(These days, I use the word Kahtoquwuk, or "Stone Prayer" - see below...)

   And speaking of junk and things just piled up thoughtlessly, the nearest stone mounds to where I sit right now pecking away at my keyboard, were pecked out of piles of junk over by the old chicken coop that I could see right out of this window if it was light outside. When the chickenyard was expanded many years ago, one of the men who lived in the group home we used to run started taking some of the junk away from on top of the stones as the chickens began pecking and scratching around their new territory. The chickens are now long gone, but in these mounds are stones that seem to be representations of turtles of many sizes and bear a great resemblance to many stones in many other mounds and stone walls:

Added on 4/5/2022:

Tûnuppasuonk Kodtonquag (Nipmeuw).

 - turtle effigy in (stacked) stone(s)?       

Tûnuppasuonk qussukquanesash – “Small Stones Turtle”

(from a personal communication with Al Conley)

These fragments in the photo below could be interpreted as shells around a newly hatched turtle:

Above: Accidently a turtle in a mound 18 miles away?

Take a closer look:

What turtles we find, depends on what turtles we look for.

The same goes for bears and deer and other effigies in stone mounds too.

Promised Links:

 Up There with the Bear

 Aerial Chicken yard 
Update on 4/24/2018: 

Qussuk: ‘stone’

|Qussuk|, { A Rock}. Plural: |Qussukquanash|.

|Hussun|, { A Stone}. Plural: |Hussunash|.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wampanoag/Of_a_Noun

(god, NA – manto plural mantowak/God, NA – Manto)

https://www.moheganlanguage.com//Documents/English_Mohegan_Word_Finder.pdf

Manitou

 - among the Algonquian Indians) a supernatural being that controls nature; a spirit, deity, or object that possesses supernatural power.

Manitou Hussunash / Qussukquanash – “Sacred Stones”

11/21/2021:

Fixing a dead link and adding a word:

Kahtoquwuk, allegorically, a 'stone prayer.'

"a pile, a heap, that which is heaped high, by placing one above another"● káhtôquwukansh heaps káhtôquwukanuk in the pile  https://www.moheganlanguage.org/

"You're Not in Scotland Anymore:"
http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-narraganset-man-takes-stage-and-he.html

See more about the language related to stonework at:

 https://independent.academia.edu/RolfCachat

Tumamac Hill (Horned Lizard Hill)

By: cutters43
Date: 2008-08-25

"This hill, located just north of "A" Mountain, means "horned lizard" in the Tohono O'odham language. In an O'odham legend a giant horned lizard suddenly began eating people. The O'odham prayed to their god I'itoi to help them. I'itoi heard them and turned the lizard into a rocky hill. Now Tumamoc is the home of the University of Arizona's Desert Laboratory, founded in 1903. This hill is the site of the longest continuous botanical monitoring plots in the Sonoran Desert. In additon, the hill was used by indigenous people for farming and other purposes for several thousand years and is an important archaeological site." 

Early Agricultural Period on Tumamoc Hill

 http://www.archaeologysouthwest.org/what-we-do/information/asw/24-1/ge-tummamoc-2/

The City of Tucson lies in the shadow of a major Early Agricultural period village, which is visible to anyone with a clear view of Tumamoc Hill.

At least 2,000 years ago, the top of Tumamoc hill was—literally—remodeled by ancient Tucsonans. Stones were piled along the upper crests of the slopes, creating what archaeologist David Wilcox calls “revetments.” Brush houses were then constructed on the top of the hill. This kind of settlement is called a trincheras. It represents a type of ancient Sonoran village site that is particularly common in northern Mexico. This Google Earth Model places the ancient pithouses back upon the landscape.

The Center for Desert Archaeology uses three-dimensional modeling to understand and share information about the places of our shared past. Google Earth is one way that we can share 3D models in a real-time desktop virtual reality browser.

Because Google Earth is still in a “Beta” stage of development, we cannot guarantee that all possible combinations of computer hardware, web browsers, and operating systems will function with our digital models and Google Earth.

You must download and install Google Earth to view this model!

OK, I’m ready to explore—let’s open the model of Tumamoc Hill!

More Trencheras:

Mandatory Tortoise by some trencheras:

PTSD AND NATIVE AMERICAN MEDICINE

ITM World has inspired a unique educational vision in the heart of North America's most multi-cultural city. We are committed to the integration of the world's traditional medicines and wisdom traditions with conventional and modern healthcare approaches.

Our professional educational programs span the medical arts and sciences, spirituality, ecology, end of life care, mediation and social justice, and are open to all.

We endeavour to offer the highest level of training possible in traditional and integrative medicine and interdisciplinary studies. This vision is fuelled by our long-term initiatives; to establish community-based health care options both within North America as well as abroad, which integrate traditional medical practices with conventional approaches to healthcare.

We envision societies in which Integrative Medicine is accessible and available to all.

 

    "Many Native American nations have ancient practices which can help to heal warriors from the traumas of war. This tradition continues today as Navajo/Dine Medicine man Albert Laughter works to bring his fellow veterans home - to themselves and to their communities and ceremonies.

     Albert's father did similar work with Native American veterans - using ceremony, talking circles and traditional medicine to heal wounded hearts. Albert works with veterans of many wars, setting up his ceremonial tipi on-site at a Veteran's hospital in Arizona and making site visits throughout the Navajo territory. He understands that PTSD is a spiritual afflication, as much as it is emotional and physical illness..."

Published on Jan 2, 2013
https://youtu.be/scAgN__svvY

Algonquin Pipeline Expansion (SAPE) at Blue Mountain State Park (NY)

For Immediate Release: Trees Protest Pipeline Expansion

Date: Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Location: Blue Mountain Reservation, Washington Street and Montrose Station Road entrance, Cortlandt Manor, NY 10567 (Follow trail to the left for approximately 100 feet.)

Media Contact: SAPE, Susan Van Dolsen, (914) 525-8886, http://sape2016.org

    “A grove of trees in Westchester County’s Blue Mountain Reservation in the Town of Cortlandt is staging a protest in an effort to save their fellow trees from being cut down along the 1½ mile Spectra Energy AIM pipeline route through the reservation. These trees also represent thousands of other trees to be felled along the entire pipeline route from Ramapo, NJ to Boston, MA. Public parks are everyone’s back yard, yet Spectra Energy Partners, a private corporation, was granted permission to cut down over 1,000 trees to install their 42” diameter, high-volume, high-pressure gas pipeline in the park. Blue Mountain, a 1600-acre county preserve, is a vital haven for wildlife which provides countless benefits to residents of the county. Westchester County, in providing the license to Spectra for its construction in Blue Mountain Reservation, may have illegally circumvented New York State law.

    This morning, hundreds of trees near the pipeline donned orange “Do Not Cut” tape in revolt. As Spectra expands its right-of-way to 125 feet, many of these trees may be felled and the surrounding environment will be degraded. Destruction of public parkland, along with the threat posed by the same pipeline’s proximity to the Indian Point nuclear facility in Buchanan, NY, has caused residents and elected officials to call for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to review its decision to permit the project. Although the federal Natural Gas Act requires the agency to issue a decision on appeals within 30 days, FERC can extend the deadline indefinitely by issuing what is called a “tolling order,” as it has in this situation. In some recent cases throughout the country, FERC issued its decision after the pipes were already in the ground with the gas flowing.

      The approval process for the Spectra Algonquin Incremental Market project has been fraught with unresolved concerns and irregularities. Authorities have called Spectra’s Environmental Impact Statement woefully incomplete and misleading. Nuclear safety expert, Paul Blanch, through a Freedom of Information Request, obtained documents indicating that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission provided erroneous and incomplete information to FERC, which subsequently approved the pipeline expansion plan. FERC, according to its website, “has no jurisdiction over pipeline safety or security, but actively works with other agencies with safety and security responsibilities”; however, there has never been a thorough, independent risk assessment of this high-pressure, high-volume gas pipeline 105 feet from vital structures at the nuclear facility. The new pipeline crosses the Indian Point property for 2,159 feet.

     The grassroots group, Stop the Algonquin Pipeline Expansion (SAPE), learned about the trees’ protest from an anonymous source.”

Stop the Algonquin Pipeline Expansion (SAPE) is a grassroots organization with a mission to educate our fellow citizens and elected officials about the negative impacts associated with Spectra Energy Corporation’s Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) Project. SAPE opposes the AIM gas expansion project because it may exacerbate climate change, endanger our safety and quality of life, contaminate water, air and soil, cause harm to domestic animals and wildlife, and threaten farmland and property values.

http://sape2016.org/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/sape2016/

Rob Buchanan adds: “The destruction of the natural environment due to the Spectra pipeline project has begun here in Westchester County NY. The pipeline and its 125 ft right of way will cut through a county park, Blue Mountain Reservation. There are many potential ceremonial stone landscapes within the park (see http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/search?q=buchanan+blue+mountain ). 

   Fortunately most sites are not close enough to the pipeline route to be effected but there is at least one site that might be endangered. Please be aware of new pipeline and pipeline expansion projects in your area. Recently the New England tribes and USET (as I remember) developed a protocol to examine any ceremonial stone landscapes threatened by pipeline expansion projects. Also, please support your local community activists who are opposing the pipeline expansion project…"

Native American Ceremonial Stone Landscape Sites in the Northeast

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Ojibwa

at http://nativeamericannetroots.net/

Twelve tribal representatives have been trained to identify and document ceremonial stone features as a part of an emergency avoidance plan for proposed gas pipeline projects in the Northeast. Reprinted below is the news release regarding this project.

Charlestown, RI, September 24, 2015: Under the auspices of the Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPOs) of the Narragansett, Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot and Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), individuals from the four sponsoring Tribes as well as members of the Mohawk, Shinnecock, and Passamaquoddy Tribes completed a week-long training in ceremonial stone landscape (CSL) identification at the Narragansett Indian Longhouse in Charlestown, RI, and were certified by the THPOs as CSL Field Specialists. The training was conducted on an emergency basis in response to proposed gas line development projects in the Northeast.

In October of 2002, the United South and Eastern Tribes (USET) declared in Resolution #2003:022: “[F]or thousands of years before the immigration of Europeans, the medicine people of the United South and Eastern Tribal [USET] ancestors used [ceremonial stone] landscapes to sustain the people’s reliance on Mother Earth and the spirit energies of balance and harmony”.

(http://www.usetinc.org/wp-content/uploads/mbreedlove/USET-Resolutions%20/2007%20%20resolutons/02%2007%20resolutions%20pdf/2007%20037.pdf)

In December of 2008, the National Register of Historic Places acknowledged ceremonial stone landscapes as culturally significant to federally recognized Tribes in the Northeast, pursuant to the tenants of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), which states: “The agency official shall ensure that consultation in the section 106 process provides the Indian Tribe . . . a reasonable opportunity to identify its concerns about historic properties, advise on the identification and evaluation of historic properties, including those of traditional religious and cultural importance, articulate its views on the undertaking’s effects on such properties, and participate in the resolution of adverse effects.” – National Historic Preservation Act, 36 CFR 800.2(c)(2)(ii)(A)

By law, Section 106 of the NHPA mandates that before construction, religious and cultural properties of traditional religious and cultural importance to federally recognized Tribes that attach cultural and historical significance to the project areas should be identified and documented in consultation with the affected Tribes. The Tribes, the federal agency, and the project proponents, then work together to devise a plan to avoid, minimize, or mitigate the impacts to the resources. This work must begin as soon as feasible in order for project proponents to receive the necessary permitting for construction from the lead federal agency (in this case, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission – FERC). The work cannot proceed without additional trained Tribal representation, thus training Tribal representatives was urgent.

The training at the Narragansett Longhouse was authorized by Narragansett Medicine Man/THPO John Brown, and occurred under the guidance of the THPOs and their landscape mapping partner Ceremonial Landscapes Research LLC (CLR), an entity created in collaboration with the Tribes to assist in mapping and documenting CSLs using traditional Tribal knowledge. The Tribal representatives will work with a mapping team from CLR.

According to Doug Harris, Deputy THPO of the Narragansett Indian Tribal Historic Preservation Office (NITHPO): “Through this training, the Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPOs) hope to increase private landowner, federal agency, and project proponent awareness and stewardship of ceremonial stone landscapes that are sacred to our people, and to protect these places from unknowing destruction by development.”

Federal agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers, the FCC, the FAA, the National Forest Service and the Army at Fort Drum, NY have acknowledged the significance of ceremonial stone landscapes, and have encouraged their protection. One hoped-for outcome of this project is to extend that acknowledgement and spirit of stewardship to all regulatory agencies and commissions. These ceremonial places have been identified in territories of past Tribal use from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and with the cooperation of local towns and landholders they should be protected wherever they are.

The training was initially funded by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, with additional donations requested from Kinder Morgan, and Spectra Energy. Ceremonial Landscapes Research, LLC, provided curriculum development and training personnel.

 Media Inquiries:

Doug Harris, Deputy Tribal Historic Preservation Officer

Narragansett Indian Tribal Historic Preservation Office (NITHPO).

dhnithpt@gmail.com

(401) 474-5907 or (508) 922-7673

Tribal Contacts for this Release:

 Mashantucket Pequot Tribe

Marissa Turnbull

mturnbull@mptn-nsn.gov

(860) 396-6887

Mohegan Tribe

James Quinn

jquinn@moheganmail.com

(860) 862-6893

Narragansett Indian Tribe

John Brown

brwnjbb123@aol.com

(401) 491-9459

Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah)

Bettina Washington

bettina@wampanoagtribe.net

(508) 645-9265

http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/tag/ceremonial-stone-landscape-sites