Hehlkik kiti ni nu hegok'

(Thinking of stones in Northern California: http://www.relicsoftheancients.com/The%20Rock%20Lines.htm )

Hehl-keek kee-tee nee nue he-gok'.
I'm going to the high country.— Reference: YLCB108 | Yurok audio: GT3-28-04.mp3

The Supreme Being of Yurok mythology is called Card; he created all things, and gave them their language, and now lives in the mountains. Anyone who will for the space of ten or fifteen days eat only acorn soup and think only of him will have good fortune and get rich, and when he goes out hunting will find a white deer—the highest earthly object of desire to a Yurok. (Powers 1877 [1976]:64)

"It would be virtually impossible to list every feature of the natural environment which was regarded as a spiritual entity according to aboriginal belief. All of nature was thought to have been shaped through incidents that occurred in the period before humans existed, and in their modern form not only the plants and animals but even the trails were believed to have "feelings" and power to influence human life...all over the region, walking trails were regarded as conscious beings, and in traveling the Indian had to observe certain rules in order to avoid insulting them. It was considered wrong, for example, to step out of a trail and in again without making some gesture of respect, and indeed the traveler had to observe many such customs. There were certain places where it was expected that a person would stop and rest while using a trail, whether he was tired or not, and there the Indian was often supposed to speak a prayer. There were other places where the traveler was expected to make a certain offering. In some instances, this meant dropping a twig or branch where trails crossed one another, while in others the Indian was supposed to shoot an arrow into certain sacred trees so as to assure good luck.

The twig dropping is best described by Powers, who writes,

They have a curious custom of dropping twigs and boughs at the junction of trails, which sometimes accumulate in heaps several feet high, like the nests of woodrats. Every Indian who passes deposits a twig on the pile, but without observing any method that a white man can discover. No one will explain the custom, though it is probably observed, like so many other things, merely "for luck." (Powers, 1877 [1976]:58)

The annotated maps in Waterman (1920) identify a number of special locations that were known as places where a Yurok person could pray or ask for help, and the following examples give an indication of their character:

1. A certain place on Bald Hills where there is an echo. One goes there to shout for help and the response tells whether or not the spirit will help (1920:197).

2. A rock offshore from Wilson Creek (False Klamath Rock). One of the wo'gey came to live in this rock, and he invites people to cry and ask for money while looking at the place (1920:230).

3. A place on the coast near the village of Omen. People would look around in the saltwater here for rocks to make arrowheads. After shaping them, they would "cook" the points by speaking a formula over them, after which they would be strong enough to shoot right through an elk (1920:233).

4. A submerged rock in the Klamath River (Posir Rock), just upstream from Ah Pah Creek. This rock was a "charm" for snaring deer. The hunter would dive underwater to touch it, and then he rubbed his hands upon the snares, which guaranteed a catch (1920:238).

5. A large rock in the Klamath River below Pekwan. Pelintsiek ("Great Dentalium") used to live in the water here. In passing the rock by canoe, one stops alongside it in midstream, there clapping the hands and speaking a short prayer for luck (1920: 243).

6. A certain rock formation near the village of Merip. Arrowheads were placed in a cleft in the rock, and there they became "rusted" or covered with a poison that made them certain to kill (1920:250).

7. A point of rocks on Trinidad Head. The Yurok name for this rock formation is translated "He Sits Forever." A man went there to cry for luck and ask for money. Then he saw dentalium shells in the water, numerous as sardines. He sat there looking and refusing to leave until he gradually turned to stone (1920:270).

8. A cave at Trinidad Head. Its Yurok name has been translated "Where it Drops (or Trickles)." People went inside this damp cave to pray for money. If one drop fell on a person, then he would soon become wealthy. But if two fell upon him, then the rock would close up and he would never escape (1920:270).

Waterman felt that the Yurok had an unusually large number of named places within their territory, by comparison with other North American Indians, and he said that his monograph contained only about one half the places that might have been indicated if there were adequate time or space to include them clearly on the maps (1920:195). This very intensive view of the surrounding landscape was something which also impressed Powers, who commented on the care with which this information was transmitted from one generation to the next.

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 faithful has been their instruction, that [the children] generally recognize the objects from the descriptions given them previously by their mothers. (Powers 1877 [1976]:109-110)

Of all the spiritual beings recognized by the Yuroks, none was more important than the wo'gey , for it was they who had originated nearly every form of medicine making and whose continued help the Indians needed if public and private rituals were to be effective...When Indians came, the wo'gey took refuge in trees, rocks, springs, and other places. Because humans built homes along the river, many of the spirit-persons went into the upper ridges to live, and this is why Indians traditionally go to the high country to make medicine...It was mainly the aristocratic Indians who trained in the sweat-house and made medicine in the high country. These were often intellectuals who traveled widely to gain knowledge of other Indian peoples and took pride in speaking languages other than their own.

This identification with the sacred landscape is revealed in a remark made by Florence Schaughnessy (Yurok) in describing the beauty of the high country.

You come across a place you've never seen before, and it has awesome beauty. Everything above you, below you, and around you is so pure—that is the beauty we call merwerksergerh , and the pure person is also merwerksergerh . (Matthiessen 1979:62)

If a person wants to tell me something, let him come up into the hills in the evening and stay all night. Let him take tobacco with him, and angelica root, only those two. And he must be careful of himself before he does that: he must get sweathouse wood, and drink no water, and go with no women. Then, I shall answer him if he calls my name .
        Instructions from a wo'gey on how to pray in the high country ( Kroeber 1976:291)

As noted previously, it was believed that the wo'gey went to live in the hills when Indians arrived, for the humans built their villages at lower elevations close to the rivers. A person had to make special preparations for praying in the high country...When a person finally made this lonely journey and built a campfire up on the ridge, he or she would have to stay up all night, because it was considered dangerous to sleep up there. There was a wind, some said, which could suck away the body of a person who fell asleep, leaving only the skeleton (Matthiessen 1979:61).

Beliefs concerning the high country are splendidly illustrated in a story told by Robert Spott, who was Kroeber's main source for information about Yurok spiritual practices (Spott and Kroeber 1942:167-169). The narrative begins with a lengthy description of Sregon Jim, a man who seems to have personified Yurok ideals of wealth and fierce manliness in the eyes of Sport.

These were the things that made Sregon Jim a man of substance, by Yurok standards. However, this account really concerns an ancestor of his, probably his great-grandfather.^[2] He was reputed to have had ten wives, and through praying in the high country he not only received wealth for himself but also a miraculous power through which his descendants could obtain money for generations to come.

This patriarch used to train on a sacred mountain about one and a half day's hike northward from Sregon. On the peak of this mountain there was a stone enclosure^[3] with this highly unusual property: if a person sat inside the enclosure he would hear water dripping, as if he were inside a cave. The water would drip and strike the ground with a ringing sound, and yet it was hard to tell exactlyherbs. Sealing the crevice, they also covered the rock with dead leaves, and spread leaves around to hide their footprints as well.

where the ringing came from as drops struck the ground. The man had been coming here for many summers until finally the following incident occurred:

Then, the last time, as he was sitting there, he heard the water drip and ring twice, seemingly in front of himself. He wiped his tears away—because they mostly cry on such an occasion, cleared off the grass, and saw a shiny gray rock. He began to rub this, and it slid to the side like a cover. Underneath it was a hole about the size of a can, with blue or green water in it. He felt around in the water with two fingers and there was something very slippery, like a lamprey eel but smaller. . . . Finally, he got hold of it, took it out, and laid it in some manzanita-limb shavings . . . which he had in a keyem basket. Then he saw that the thing was of stone and shaped like a deer, with horns. (Spott and Kroeber 1942:168)

Later, when they were by themselves, the young man and his grandfather went together up to the oak tree. After examining the thing carefully, they then took it to a certain rock formation, about three-fourths of a mile back from the river. They placed it in a crevice along with angelica root, shredded manzanita, and other

They cried all the while, and did not tell the other men what had happened for many days afterward. According to Spott, this was how Sregon Jim's ancestor had assured the family wealth. The thing that he had found was called a tsemmin ,^[4] and it had many lucky properties. Not only would it tend to attract valuable property ("as if it came of itself"), but it also brought deer close by where they lived, and because of this tsemmin the doctors in the family were summoned often and handsomely paid for their services.

Actual use of the tsemmin was described as follows:

Sometimes he would go to where it was and smoke. He would strike his tobacco pouch, wish for luck, fill his pipe, and blow the crumbs of tobacco out of his palm toward the tsemmin . . . . All this he did before he was married. After he was married he did not go near it anymore, except sometimes when he lost his luck in hunting; then he would stand in front of the rock where the tsemmin was hidden and would clap his hands. This hand-clapping is called we-terkterpterwerk . This was something a woman may not do, except a doctor who is seeking power. When he had done this his hunting luck always returned. It was this same young man who later had ten wives. (Spott and Kroeber 1942:169)

...the Indian went up to the mountains in order to shout and cry for help, and the goal in both instances was to establish a permanent connection with the wo'gey world. For the Sregon man, this meant bringing back the tsemmin and placing it in a rock close to his village...

The high country has a special importance in this relationship, and during the late 1970s an elderly Yurok woman named Ella Norris described its significance in these words:

Red Mountain? Doctor Rock? That's our Holy Land. Everything we done, we went there, for prayer. They'd go there for different things. If you wanted to be a good stick player, or a gambler, [or whatever]. Different places, too. Not just right on Doctor Rock. Doctor Rock is just a place for Indians, for a woman or man that wants to be a doctor. Just like a white man doctor [there are different kinds of doctor]. Some of them is for surgery, [and] some of them is for something else. Well that's the same thing. They go there [to Doctor Rock], and they get their degree. Not only for Indian doctor. Some of them got a special prayer for boils, or for choke, and some of them used to get poisoned. Their stomache would swell up. They got a special song for that. Or a prayer. Or your eyes get sore. Or just a million things. They learn that up there. (interview at Crescent City, November 13, 1979)

...tsekteya or tsekwel in Yurok (Kroeber 1976:381)...known in English as "stone seats" or "stone chairs." They are semicircular walls built of unmortared stones, piled about three or four feet high. These were made as places to cry and shout for help, especially for female Indian doctors seeking to obtain their power-enabling vision. There are photographs of a similar structure in Kroeber and Gifford (1949:143)."

http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8g5008k8&chunk.id=d0e1239&toc.id=d0e310&brand=eschol

Keeling, Richard. Cry for Luck: Sacred Song and Speech Among the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok Indians of Northwestern California. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1992 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8g5008k8/

Mysterious Stone Spheres of Costa Rica

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread559828/pg1

It’s called a Disquis ball or Disquis rock and it’s a part of a magical Costa Rica history. No one knows who made them, or when they were made, or why.
That’s the fun. Keep reading to see about space-travelers, Atlantis, world-wide wireless communications thousands of years ago. It’s all here. And if you want to see the Lost City of Costa Rica click here!
http://www.costarica-discover-it.com/costa-rica-history_disquisball.html

Miwok Sweat Lodge & Basins

Miwok Sweat LodgeThe ceremonial house was a very large structure in the center of the village. The roof was carefully laid in a certain fashion. The first layer had willow brush laid sideways on top of the horizontal roof timbers. Over it was placed at a right angle a second layer of willow brush. After it a layer of thick shrub then a layer of earth. And after it was all finished it must measure 5inches thick. The structure was built over a large pit.

http://www.greatdreams.com/native/nativehsg.htm

Hand-hewn granite basins at Native American saltworks, Sierra Nevada, California

“…the relatively uniform size, lack of overlap, and smooth hemispherical shape indicate that the (369) basins are not of natural origin, as reported in previous work.

Making these basins was challenging and required concerted effort by this group of Native Americans, though the exact techniques used to excavate so many basins in this glaciated bedrock are not known.

“Fire was probably used to heat the rock reducing its strength and making it easier to grind,” said Mike Diggles, USGS geologist and co-author of the report. “To deepen the basins just one centimeter, they had to build and maintain a hot fire on the rock, let it burn out, and then pound the bedrock with stone tools.”

The Miwok had to repeat this process about 100 times to carve a basin three feet deep into the stone. It would have taken several workers nearly a year to make just one basin.

The full report (http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2009/5225/), titled Hand-hewn granite basins at Native American saltworks, Sierra Nevada, California, was published in the beginning of November (2009).

http://puvungna.blogspot.com/2009/12/native-american-salt-basins-in-sierra.html

Details of photos from relics of the ancients:

Just Another "Mysterious Chamber"

    I found these photos of "Indian Cave," as it is locally known, just the other day. I must've taken the photos of this particular "Mysterious Chamber" sometime before the summer of 1997 when several severe thunderstorms dramatically changed the river beds of the tributaries to the main river.
     I would have eventually put this up because I found the pictures, but was prompted to do it today because I read http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2010/09/well-written-article-on-stone-chambers.html this morning.

      If you ask me, the real mystery is why Native Americans are always the last people mentioned.
      And if you venture a little Google search on the Middletown Archaeological Research Center, you find they support the old Mormon Lost tribes of Israel Theory:


    "Archaeologist Salvatore M. Trento (Director of the Middletown Archaeological Research Center in New York) summarizes the finds and history culminating in the Book of Mormon’s literary setting:

The Book of Mormon tells the tale of ancient settlers who came from Jerusalem to America. Around 600 B.C., the prophet Lehi led a tribe of Israelites to the New World, where they established an advanced civilization. There were a series of wars and cultural upheavals over the next several generations. In 421 A.D., the Nephites, descendents of the original settlers, were wiped out by the Lamanites, a dark-skinned people who supposedly were ancestors of the American Indians. This is an astonishing tale that fits in very well with the general outlook in the early 1800s on the American wilderness. As American settlers pushed west into New York State and into the Ohio River Valley, they actually did see evidence of an ancient civilization – although not one from Jerusalem. These people saw giant earthworks, massive burial mounds, and stone forts sitting above streams and rivers. These structures, now believed to have been constructed by an early American Indian people collectively called the Mound Builders, were thought to be definitive evidence of an ancient white race. The general theory of the time was that the Indians had killed off this sophisticated white race. The Book of Mormon describes this myth in great detail. The point here is that most of the mounds were constructed by American Indians and not by immigrants from Jerusalem – but early settlers and antiquarians didn’t know that. Two things spoke of ancient contact: the similarity of the mounds to those in prehistoric Europe, and the “fact” that the contemporary Indians knew nothing about the earthworks..." 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology_and_the_Book_of_Mormon

    A more diligent reporter might have been prompted to actually ask an Indian person - or at least read another wiki entry about the Nipmuc People:

     "Coming from the southwest, Paleo Indians settled New England over 10,000 years ago, hunting the animals that inhabited the subarctic environment. Archeological records prove their presence dating back some 15,000-20,000 years ago. During the Archaic Period (8000 BCE–1000 BCE) the climate slowly warmed, bringing new plants and animals as well as changes in human culture and lifestyle.
During this period, the Nipmuc's ancestors were producing stone bowls, making bark, woven and wooden containers, and developed a written language, which remained in use until the historical period.

  Pesuponcks (ceremonial stone sweat lodges) were used for purification rituals and many of these ancient chambers can still be found near the sites of Nipmuc villages.

      During the Woodland Period (1000 BCE–1000 CE) and later, trade and with other peoples brought the "three sisters" (maize, beans, and squash), encouraging an agricultural based society. In time, Nipmuc territory was at the hub of the "Great Path" to all parts of the northeast (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipmuc)."

Remnant of clay mortared "stone wall" at Indian Cave

Bethlehem Ct

    I once wrote, "I’ll suggest that a very likely use of some Stone Chambers some of the time might be as sweat lodges. It seems to be the simplest explanation of one aspect of the mystery of Stone Chambers."

http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2007/01/indian-cave.html

There's another possible stone sweat lodge I occasionally visit:

http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2008/06/quartz-stone-rows-heaps-and-bear-again.html

http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2008/06/blog-post.html

Game Drive

A Ron Smith photo of a landscape in Northern California above http://www.relicsoftheancients.com/images/Sutter%20Buttes/West%20Buttes%20Road/DSC_0113.JPG

And my enhancement to the photo below

Here I think I see Rock lines/stone rows perhaps forming what many people consider a “deer run” or a “deer drive.”  Setting fires on the inside edges of the wide area to the right, an upland prairie, Indians would send game running from the fire into a kill site by a water source on the left. The green represents a resource zone just above the spring. The small black dots are people scattered along the stone rows, perhaps scaring the deer and other game (the brown dots) into the “chute.” There are more black dots that represent hunters at the kill site, with other people behind them by the water, waiting to butcher the deer and other animals killed. The prairie would be maintained at the same time, just one section burned over, all the others protected by the stone firebreak.

In Northern California, the burning by Native People didn’t stop until about 1940. Harold Lewis, a then 60 year old Karuk man, told anthropologist Dr. John F. Salter in November, 2003:

     “I think about when I was a kid, we had a ranch down below Martin’s Ferry and every year in the spring time when the new grass come up, when the new vegetation started coming up, when the sun would come out it would fry the old stuff, we would control burn…I can still see them spots of where it was clear but there was nice hazel sticks and our cattle would be down in there eating grass and there were deer there. That’s because we were able to burn it at the right time of year and nobody was afraid of fire getting away because it was done at the right time. I remember when I was a boy I’d be scared and look out and it would be backing right down there and everybody else would be asleep. But the old man and everybody else knew that it was just going to back right down to that trail there and stop right by the house…”

http://www.mkwc.org/publications/fisheries/Karuk%20White%20Paper.pdf

Consider that the present day Hoopa, like other nearby Native Peoples, want to incorporate controlled burns into their landscape management design.

http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr217/psw_gtr217_39.pdf

Those Rock Lines (or stone rows or “Real Long Rock Piles”), connecting “landscape features,” are not merely firebreaks but they are also Spiritual Expressions of the people who built them, maintained them and knew the cultural symbolism of them. The stone rows are also paths to the prairies and places on the landscape that were Sacred Sites, places of power, camp sites at resource zones of many kinds, and perhaps much more - places to be visited during World Renewal Ceremonies or at harvest times, the “right times,” as Lewis says. “The old man” reference could be either his grandfather or perhaps the person who conducted the World Renewal Ceremonies. Details of the Ceremony, from many sources, mention that when the old man emerges from ten days in the sweat lodge, he starts a fire with a traditional drill (in a stone fire place made for the Pikiavish?), and goes to numerous places in the hills accompanied by at least one  or sometimes two firewood gatherers.

There is a lot of documentation that as part of the ”Boy’s Puberty Rite,”  stones would be piled and stacked at remote places “in the hills,” for many days at a time. How many feet of “stone fence” could a boy build during that time? How many thousands of years was this repeated? If a person could estimate the number of lost portions of the rock lines, add that to what still exist, there might be a better estimate of how many people had lived there – and a better estimate of how long as well…

…and my thoughts wander back East, where similar stones are explained away as “colonial constructions” built over the past few hundred years – passing over the Bannock Point  Petroforms  http://www.manitobaphotos.com/petroforms.htm  on the way. And  I wonder about certain places I thought I knew so well as stops along the way (in a sun-wise circle) around this floodplain where the “Wigwams” were located from 1672 until around 1740, during a possible similar Ceremony…

…and then to stone rows as hunting fences, once again.

Old post about older post: http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2009/10/old-post-from-rock-piles-indian-bars.html

Winter at a stone row: http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2009/10/old-post-from-rock-piles-indian-bars.html - hunting alone without burning.

A Spring in My Zip Code

I wonder if, out in Northern California, there might be stone worked springs, connected to stone rows - or rock lines. Here's one in my zip code that makes me wonder...

The closest I can come to a clear picture, like one of Ron's panoramas, is through some aerial photography:

The 1934 aerial shows many stone rows - I've followed one or two of them...

Looking South at the Spring

Looking North:

COYOTE STEALS FIRE: A KARUK MYTH

[The following is the Karuk text of a story that was tape-recorded with Julia Starritt at Orleans in summer 1950. It is presented in here in the "ethnopoetic" format of measured verse pioneered by Dell Hymes in his book In Vain I Tried to Tell You (Philadelphia, 1981). An English version was published as "A Karok myth in measured verse", in W. Bright, American Indian Linguistics and Literature, 91–100 (Berlin, 1984). The present interlinear analysis was prepared for a lecture at the Free University, Berlin, Germany, in November 1999.]

Act 1: The center of the world.

Scene 1. Coyote.

Coyote went upriver long ago to bring back fire.
They had stolen the fire, the upriver people.
And people were all just freezing,when it was gone here, the fire.
“Let me bring it back, the fire.
“I know how I can retrieve it.”

(The Karuk speaker said, “pa ni (kupa—) p ûukeev ish.”

“ the ethnopoetic:" DET 1S REP retrieve FUT)

Scene 2. Coyote and the runners.

And so then he arranged them, the people, he arranged all the swiftest people.
And he told them:“You sit a little bit upriver, and the next one sit a bit farther upriver”
finally they arrived upriver, they arrived at the upriver peoples’ country.
And to the first, Frog, he said, “Sit on the riverbank.”
And uphill—on the mountain-top, he said, “Turtle, sit here.”

Act II. Recovering the fire.

Scene 1. Traveling upriver. Coyote and the children.

And so that’s how they went upriver.
And Coyote arrived upriver.
And he saw it was deserted.
And he saw there were fires, there were forest fires, up in the mountains.
And he went in a house.
And he saw only children were there.
And he said:“Where are they?
“Where are the men?”
And the children said,"They’re hunting in the mountains.”
And he said,“I’m lying down right here,
“I’m tired.”

And he said to the children, “Let me paint your faces!
“Come on, let me paint your faces!
“You’ll look pretty thatway!”
And the children said, “Maybe he’s Coyote.”
They were saying that to each other.
And they said to him, to Coyote,
“Maybe you’re Coyote, your ears are pink.”

And he said, “No.
“I don’t even know that, where Coyote is.”
And he said:“Let me paint your faces!”
And he painted their faces.
And when he painted all
the children’s faces then he said,
“See, I’ve set water down right here, take a look in there.”

“But I’m lying down right here, I’m tired.”
In fact, he had stuck fir bark in his toes.
And then he stuck his foot in the fire.
And then finally it caught fire, it became a coal, it turned into a coal.
And then he jumped up back up.

Scene 2. Coyote returns downriver.

And he jumped back outdoors.
And he ran back downriver,
And when he got tired, then he gave the fire to the next person.
And that one too began to run.
And up in the mountains, where there had fires, then they all went out.
And then people said, “Why, they’ve taken it back, “our fire!”

Act III. Returning to the center of the world.

Scene 1. The runners.

And so the (upriver) people ran downhill.
And (Coyote’s) people ran down from upriver; one gave it to another, he gave it to the next.
Whenever a person got tired, he gave it to another one.
Finally they ran back here from upriver.
And they ran back here behind them, the upriver people did.
And so Turtle, where he sat at the end on a hilltop, then they gave it to him, the fire.

Scene 2. Turtle and Frog.

And so he began to roll, he rolled down to the river,
he rolled to a stop on the riverbank.
And there where Frog sat, then he gave it to her, the fire.
So they ran downhill just above her, the upriver people.
And then where did she go?
Frog was nowhere to be seen, where had she run to?
In fact she had dived into the river.
And suddenly, across river, then there was smoke, suddenly the dogs barked.
There humans had come into existence; dogs were howling.

http://www.ncidc.org/bright/karuk.html
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=kt1r29q2ct&doc.view=content&chunk.id=ch05&toc.depth=1&anchor.id=0&brand=eschol
"Traditional stories of related tribes like the Shasta and Yurok tribes are very similar."
http://www.native-languages.org/karok-legends.htm
http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/ca/ric/index.htm

Somewhere along the Klamath

Yes indeed, Ron’s photos of Sutter Buttes and other places in Northern California I’ve never been have really gotten my attention. It’s like taking everything you might read or see on Rock Piles and putting it on a landscape without second growth trees – without bittersweet and green briar! - that hide stone rows and everything else so that you can really stretch your eyes – and take photos that show the artifacts, the petroforms, so well .


And it’s a landscape that has had less time to be thoughtlessly destroyed than many places over here in the North East, cows and people doing so right now as I write this.

And Al Kroeber wrote ethnologies back there 100 years ago that Native People (who spoke Algonquin, sometimes called Delaware) are using to continue ancient traditions on that Sacred Landscape, visiting places that, now that I’ve seen Ron’s photos, look so familiar. If I haven’t seen it myself, I’ve seen it on Rock Piles. I see repeated patterns in the photographs – Georgia to Manitoba and now to Northern California.

Sure I read Kroeber (on a trip to Baja California) and highlighted all the rock and landscape ceremony references, but to actually see panoramas of the landscape is really something else.

I finally tickled Google with the phrase “Indian Stone Fence” and got a photo of a wall that looks like many I know in a number of places, along with a bit about “hunting blinds.” Digging around a little more I found recent recognition of the older culture, certain rocks recognized as culturally important– and Spiritually important as well. I found no reference to any farmers clearing any fields for agricultural uses, and recall that barbwire was begun to be produced around 1870.

Above is a photo Ron sent me this morning, as well as a detail (or 2) that looks like a photo that would’ve fit in quite well at the post http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2008/04/indian-look.html
and what I was trying to capture with this photo:

And what is that?

Turtle Specific

Peter Waksman photo from Massachusetts: 

http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2007/04/strolling-on-patch-hill-in-boxborough.html

As seen in turtle vision:

There's even a Loggerhead stink pot ( I once thought one was a snapper in the road so I grabbed him by his tail and the turtle let out his defense mechanism - the stink part) but below is the Common Variety:

 Ron Smith photo:

http://www.relicsoftheancients.com/KR053_Wide_mouth_rock_001_crop.jpg

Turtle on a turtle???

Species specific:

W. Pond turtle???

In my turtle vision, the small one climbs up, the extends his left fore leg back

to bask in the sun,  so he looks like the Stone in California...

Indian burning in Northern California

       "They stopped burning by Indians. The latest Indian burning in Northern California and Southern Oregon was in the 1940’s. When Henry Lewis did his 1973 study of the patterns of Indian burning in California, there were people living who remembered why they burned. Now their children, who are in their 60’s and 70’s, remember burning, but they don’t remember the control techniques or the objectives. So we may have lost that knowledge...If the elders were to come back now from the spirit world, they would look around and say, “There’s nobody taking care of this place.”

Dennis Martinez from http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/gtr63/gtrwo63g.pdf

Maidu Turtle (Anosma)

This photo is from a a bunch taken by Ron Smith in the Sutter Buttes area of California:

Native American Wiki-lore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutter_Buttes)

).

"The Sutter Buttes figure prominently in the creation stories and other traditions of the indigenous Maidu and Wintun peoples. The Maidu (or Nisenan) lived to the east of the Buttes and the Wintun (Patwin) to the mountain's west. No tribe claimed ownership of the Buttes and there are only season encampments in the mountain. Native Americans did visit the mountain regularly to gather acorns and other foods or to hunt game. The Buttes were also a center of regional Native American religion. According to anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, the Patwin village where the city of Colusa now stands was the “hotbed” where the Kuksu Cult was established. This religion spread through much of northern California. Ceremonies were performed in earthen dance lodges where spirit impersonators would re-enact ancient mythological events. The Maidu, who lived in their shadow for thousands of years, called them Esto Yamani, which means "the Middle Mountain", the Wintun called the Sutter Buttes Onolai. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutter_Buttes).

Ron also posts a map of other rocklines on Sutter Buttes: http://www.platosatlantis.com/sutter_buttes_rock_line_map.htm

I also found: “The Maidu people of California had a loose tribal organization with no visible expression of totemism. Their main occupation was hunting and gathering in a rich semi-forested area… The myth reported here has points of connection with the stories of the Wintum and Yana Indian groups located nearby in the Shasta and Pit River areas. The Algonquin, in the northeastern United States, have a creation myth that also speaks of an animal diving for earth, hence this was a widely distributed point of view on the North American Continent. Indian tribes in Southern California, however, sometimes spoke of God as thinking the world into existence from a void. So creation theories were also present. 

According to the Maidu:

In the beginning there was no sun, no moon, no stars. All was dark, and everywhere there was only water. A raft came floating on the water. It came from the North and in it were two persons -- Turtle (Anosma) and the Father-of-the-Secret-Society (Peheipe). [3] The stream flowed very rapidly. Then from the sky a rope of feathers (pokelma) was let down, and down it came the Earth-Initiate. When he reached the end of the rope, he tied it to the bow of the raft and stepped in. His face was covered and was never seen, but his body shone like the sun. He sat down and for a long time said nothing.

At last Turtle said, "Where do you come from?"

And Earth-Initiate answered, "I come from above."

Then Turtle said, "Brother can you not make for me some good dry land, so that I may sometimes come up out of the water?" Then he asked another time, "Are there going to be any people in the world?"

Earth-Initiate thought for a while, then said, "Yes."

Turtle asked, "How long before you are going to make people?"

Earth-Initiate replied, "I don't know. You want to have some dry land: well how am I going to get any earth to make it?"

Turtle answered, "If you will tie a rock about my left arm, I'll dive for some."

Earth-Initiate did as Turtle asked, and then, reaching around took the end of a rope from somewhere and tied it to Turtle. (When Earth-Initiate came to the raft, there was no rope there: he just reached out and found one.)

Turtle said, "If the rope is not long enough, I'll jerk it once, and you must haul me up; if it is long enough, I'll give two jerks, and then you must pull me up quickly as I shall have all the earth that I can carry."

Just as Turtle went over the side of the boat the Father-of-the-Secret-Society began to shout loudly.

Turtle was gone a long time. He was gone six years; and when he came up he was covered with green slime, he had been down so long. When he reached the top of the water the only earth he had was a very little under his nails: the rest had all washed away. Earth-Initiate took with his right hand a stone knife from under his left armpit and carefully scraped the earth out from under Turtle's nails. He put the earth in the palm of his hand and rolled it about till it was round; it was as large as a small pebble. He laid it in the stern of the raft. By and by he went to look at it: it had not grown at all. The third time he went to look at it, it had grown so that it could be spanned by the arms. The fourth time he looked, it was as big as the world, the raft was aground, and all around were mountains as far as he could see. The raft came ashore at Tádoiko, and the place can be seen today.

What shall we make of this story? It might be described as a creation narrative with Earth-Initiate as the creator figure. However, as already noted, it would be better to describe it as a formation story. There is the Father-of-the Secret-Society who shouts out loudly both here and later on at other key points in the story, which we have not been able to include here. There is a third figure, Turtle who announces that he wants a rock tied to his left arm before he goes over the side for six years to search for land to multiply. He manages to bring up a little bit from the bottom of the sea – so that the earth is primordial. Finally there is the mundane reality of Tádoiko, a place that you can see to this day if you know where to look (http://www.solaspress.com/mythch2.htm).”

Quoted from Roland B. Dixon, "Maidu Myths," Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, xvii 39 Pt. 2, (N.Y. June 30, l902) pp. 39-40

The Huntington Expedition first gathered Maidu stories in 1902 and published them in 1912 in the publication American Ethnological Society Ed. Frank Boaz.

A Maidu man, Maym Benner Galligher, recognized the voice of the speaker in the recordings as that of Tom Young (Hánc’ibyjim) the last of the great Maidu story tellers. See The Maidu Indian Myths and Stories of Hánc’ibyjim, Edited and Trans. William Shipley, Berkeley, Heyday Books 1991. Shipley’s book has a somewhat different Maidu origin story. In it two figures, Earthmaker and Coyote, are in a raft looking for earth in a world where there is only water. A small meadow lark’s nest came floating on the water. Under Earthmaker’s direction the nest is stretched in all four directions by Coyote until it is big enough to sustain Earthmaker and eventually all other animals. Note that in the Shipley and Dixon accounts more than one figure is required to form the world.

Harlem Plains NYC

Native American Village In Manhattan

Original caption: An Indian village of the Manhattans prior to th occupation of the Dutch. lithograph, 1858.  LOCATION: New York, New York, USA

IMAGE © Bettmann/CORBIS

William T. Bean and Eric W. Sanderson in 2007 wrote something called: "Using a spatially explicit ecological model to test scenarios of fire use by Native Americans: An example from the Harlem Plains, New York, NY. " Published in Ecological Modelling 211 (2008) pp. 301–308.

Full text here: Harlem Plains NYC

Why Mt. Shasta Erupted

or

"who should come along but Grandfather Turtle"

To this day, the Shasta Indian tribe likes to conclude this tale saying, "This is how volcanic eruptions began long, long ago on Mount Shasta," the whole story at Why Mt. Shasta Erupted.

Q: How long before I spotted a turtle at Ron’s rock lines?

A: Not very long. Ron’s photo:

http://www.platosatlantis.com/images/Rock%20lines/Rock%20lines_%20Barbed%20wire%20fences/20080831_20_DSC_0402.JPG

Detail plus photos stolen from San Diego Turtles & Tortises:

http://www.sdturtle.org/turtle_rescue.htm and
(And some Flickrs) http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3190/2965229297_2697b8d4c8.jpg

http://image53.webshots.com/53/7/73/30/2839773300086463701qyQVvh_ph.jpg

I hear the collective groan, but I think I see a resemblance.

I expect I’ll see big ones and little ones in the stone lines, as I go back to look at Ron’s excellent photos at
Rock Lines...

Forgotten Fires

Forgotten Fires: Native Americans and the transient wilderness
Omer Call Stewart, Henry T. Lewis, Kat Anderson
University of Oklahoma Press, 2002 - History - 364 pages

"A common stereotype about American Indians is that for centuries they lived in static harmony with nature, in a pristine wilderness that remained unchanged until European colonization. Omer C. Stewart was one of the first anthropologists to recognize that Native Americans made significant impact across a wide range of environments. Most important, they regularly used fire to manage plant communities and associated animal species through varied and localized habitat burning. In Forgotten Fires, editors Henry T. Lewis and M. Kat Anderson present Stewart's original research and insights, written in the 1950s yet still provocative today. Significant portions of Stewart's text have not been available until now, and Lewis and Anderson set Stewart's findings in the context of current knowledge about Native hunter-gatherers and their uses of fire."

Midwest Book Review:

"First presented in the 1950s, yet just as relevant today, Forgotten Fires: Native Americans And The Transient Wilderness by Omer C. Stewart dispels the longstanding cultural myth that Native American communities had no impact on the natural environment surrounding them. Taking a close look at the effects Native American civilization had upon nature's ability to incorporate them into the ecosystem, with an especial eye toward how some regularly used fires to manage plant and animal communities through localized habitat burning, Forgotten Fires is a thoughtful study about mankind's true interaction with the environment, presenting straightforward facts instead of romanticized legend. This highly recommended edition for Native American Studies and Environmental History reference shelves and reading lists has been collaboratively edited by Henry T. Lewis and M. Kat Anderson for the contemporary reader."

Google Books:  Forgotten Fires