By The Old Mill Again

On the left you might be able to make out the Mill Race, the channel that directed water to power the Undershot type of Mill that was once here.

Here's some Eric Sloane I've lifted from the internet 

and put here on 11/29/2021, 

illustrating how the "flume," "sluice," or "mill race" supplied "current" 

to the undershot mill wheel:

But back to the Stone Row on which I’m tempted to draw in eyes to show faces, Indian Cultural Motifs – even if I can’t clearly identify them. Just like I’m moved to do on other people’s photos and get in trouble for…

(Above: mandatory Turtle)

(Above: looking North)



Old Stone Row by the Old Mill

There's an old late 1600's mill near where I live, associated first with the Minor Family and then later the Atwood Family. John Minor was the Indian Interperter and Military Leader of the Pomperauge Plantation who made the first treaties or Land Deeds with the Nonnewaug Band of the Pootatuck Indians. About 1710 or so his grandchildren traded this property to the Atwood Family, descendents of Jonathon Atwood, Woodbury's first doctor.

This is a stone row on the south side of the river, opposite the mill.

Indian Gardens

Indian Gardens were more than just fields of corn, squash and beans,
They were also trees, acorns, wild plums, and sassafras,
Birch and Witch-hazel and a great number more.


They were the grasses, the herbs, the fruits like the strawberries and blueberries,
All the things on which humans survive - and thrive.


We live on an older landscape
Where every place had a descriptive name for what was found there
And when it changed, it got a new name.


Some are remembered, some are forgotten,
But the way I picture it in my imagination
Is this great big Turtle Island as one great big Garden,
Sacred Smoke rising as joyful songs were sung…

Mills-Mounds Blog

A discussion of a specific group of rock cairns in the Missouri Ozarks.

"All of the planned pages are now published and available for review and comment. Additional photos will be added to the album for the sake of completeness from time to time.Comments are appreciated, especially if you have alternate thoughts or criticism.

An example is shown below:

This image was offered by Tim, http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/ ,who sees a turtle in this image of our Valentine cairn. You have to check out his site to understand..."

Click here for Mills-Mounds: http://bmf-news.blogspot.com/2012/02/all-of-planned-pages-are-now-published.html

Zigzag Medicine Lines

"The sign for the concept conventionally translated into English as "medicine" is shown in the inset. This is not the sense of "medicine" applying to physical remedies, but the sense that expresses sacred power. [25] In sign language this concept is expressed by forming a "V" with the index and middle fingers, then moving the hand upwards in a circular, clockwise motion. [26] It may be observed that the tips of the fingers inscribe a double spiral. The advantage of the sign is that it expresses the concept in three dimensions with the inclusion of motion. The sign at once expresses duality, circularity, and vertical motion. In Hočąk thought, for instance, creation is from above. The earth itself was cast down by Earthmaker (Mą'ųna) from above, and its seas were his tears of loneliness that fell from on high. Offerings to the spirits in the other direction are made by sending the articles through the smoke hole of the lodge in which the rite takes place. Some offerings (such as tobacco) are placed in the fire, which is the "messenger of the spirits" since its smoke rises to the upper regions carrying the offerings to the spirits. So there is a double pathway of creation and effect, both upward and downward.

Sometimes, though less frequently, it is represented by several straight lines emanating from the head of a supernaturally powerful person, such as a medicine man. More usually, however, the rays take on the form of sine waves, as we see in the Lakota pictographic symbol meaning "medicine man" [inset]. [28.3.1] The term "rays" is appropriate, since such depictions attempt to capture an invisible power, a supernatural force, that radiates outwards from a sacred nodal point. It is a person's or object's holiness expressed as an invisible field of supernatural potency. The sine wave is the two-dimensional representation of a twisting motion, since it is of the nature of radiating supernatural power to configure itself in this circular form, the circle being an exemplar of perfection.

We see such a "power line" emanating from a star in the Micmac pictograph above. More importantly, we have relatively modern pictorial evidence of both the power line and the kapemni double helix that are reified in the form of concrete ritual artefacts..."
     Gottschall: A New Interpretation by Richard L. Dieterle
http://hotcakencyclopedia.com/ho.Gottschall.html

Following Medicine Trails

When I was just a kid in the early 1960’s it all started, this business that turned into what I now (sometimes) think of as following Medicine Trails. Trails of Great Mystery, you could say, Trails of Great Manitou, a word that the English language doesn’t come close to ever really defining. I was always following something or other - following the brook that ran through my parents' yard, following trails to see where they went, following what every source was telling me were “stone walls,” remnants of our agricultural past, stone fences built to mark property lines and farmer’s fields, stones tossed out of plowed fields and roads and cart paths, even zigzag stone rows that were remnants of old wooden post-less rail Snake Fences…

   In the early 1990’s, I began to question all that I thought I knew about “stone walls.” I'm the great grandson of a man who built some well known and quite impressive stone walls on the grounds of a wealthy family’s estate, much like the stone walls in front of his partially stone farmhouse, not too far from where my family now lives. My eyes were showing me something different than what all these writers had told me, so what was I going to believe: the expert opinions or my own eyes? I’d wandered into what was most likely an Indian Burial Grounds, where there once existed many stone mounds that marked graves before they were identified as such by a local historian in around the 1840’s and then soon after were robbed for the grave goods - and even possibly bones.

   That probable Burial Ground had a ring of stones around it, some of it visible as a serpentine row of stones, a later stone fence over it in one place, right along a property line of various sorts of wire fencing rusting away. I followed along the side of that serpentine row which turned into a zigzag stone row of ten foot segments that joined more stone rows and that’s how it all started. 

    I ended up looking at a flat topped boulder that had a large cobble on it. It looked like a bear’s head. It rocked when I touched it. It had a smaller stone beside it, pits worn into it by a drill type fire starter, a concave edge to it that a clam shell fit up against nicely. The bear’s head had a depression on the top of it and the clam shell fit perfectly into it. A little reading led me to the conclusion that it was a Tobacco Offering (or Tobacco Sacrifice) Stone. 

(Nearby by was a similar Deer Stone:) 

      

    Not long after, at the junction of two stone rows, I came across a large four foot long boulder, humanly enhanced to represent a box turtle shell or carapace with a cobble placed before it as the head of the turtle, that on a flat stone that resembled the lower shell or plastron.

    I used to call this box turtle a composite sculpture, but it is a petroform, an artistic arrangement of stones that resemble, among other things, animals. I had heard a Native American storyteller (Trudie Lamb Richmond)  recite the Schaghticoke version of the Creation Story not long before. The box turtle figured highly in this story, helped along by a beaver who left it’s paw prints on the shell when it crawled up on top of Grandfather Turtle to place some mud on the shell, creating the first land, the first tree, and the first people.

    I could see the claw marks on this petroform, the sunburst sort of pattern that Native People attributed to the Creation Story, that all box turtles ever since carry.

     I like to say that, even though I wasn’t really sleeping on that summer day in 1996, that’s when I woke up on Turtle Island…

The Indian Look

    Today (Winter 2012),I think I recognize cultural motifs of Native Americans in these stone rows most people think of as “stone walls.” I think there’s more of these Indian stone rows built over thousands of years than the Euro-American stone fences of the last five hundred years (at the most). I don’t understand everything about these stone rows and the “stone heaps” and the petroforms alongside them (or enclosed by them), but at least I see them for what they are, ancient constructions of a people who say they have always lived here…

   I’ve met other people who recognize the same thing, what I call “The Indian Look,” - met them in person or communicate with them electronically via this old wood-burning computer of mine. This easy access to communication and research has been made even easier with the development of affordable digital photography.

Northern California Connection

    Years ago, I read about the Yurok, Karok and other related People who have a stone building tradition. These People on the other side of Turtle Island spoke a language related to the Algonquin Language and all its many dialects on this side of the continent. Just two years ago I came across some really beautiful photography of the Mysterious Rock Walls in Northern California. The owner of the website calls them “Rock Lines,” sometimes even “Mini-Lines:” 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/47276842@N04/albums/72157642008730755

   A contributor to this website is Alyssa Alexandria. 

 Some of Alyssa’s photography:

The Tree People

T. MacSweeney drawing (1990 something) 

Adapted from the Fall
Slabsides Day Talk, October 7, 2006

By Evan T. Pritchard
Faculty, Marist College
http://research.amnh.org/burroughs/wakerobin_pdfs/WR-39-3-spring_07-4.pdf

Following the Smoke/Fish, Forests, Fire, and Freedom

Following the Smoke by Tom Leskiw (U.S. Forest Service Technician)

“Can plant communities that evolved during six thousand or more years of cultural burning be considered “natural”? Can and should a distinction be made between pristine and natural?

Since the cessation of cultural burning in northwestern California around 1910, local vegetation communities have undergone drastic changes. Conifer encroachment into historical oak woodlands is one example, and the trend is significant, because acorns — full of fats, complex carbohydrates, and proteins — are an ideal and important food for wildlife: deer and birds (and, of course, humans).

Do contemporary land managers have a responsibility to perpetuate this critical food resource? Shouldn’t the plant communities here at the time of European contact — the result of the Karuk’s long tenure and active management of this place — qualify as the most-appropriate benchmark available?

We are now seeing the consequences of disregarding traditional ecological knowledge. There is near-universal agreement that a century of fire suppression has abysmally failed to safeguard “natural” landscapes. Communities — both urban and rural — struggle with the adverse impacts of purposely excluding fire from nature’s equation. In response to these concerns, a plethora of local, grassroots fire-safe councils have formed — partnerships between private citizens and public agencies whose efforts include fuels reduction projects. Scientists now better understand that low-intensity periodic fires are vital for minimizing fuel concentrations. A number of factors, such as the urban-wild interface, accumulated fuel loads, and budget constraints, preclude quick, boilerplate solutions, but there is ample opportunity to move forward. We take the necessary first step by regarding fire as an ally, rather than a demon.

Above Art Work by Courtney Martin

Fish, Forests, Fire, and Freedom:

As unconditional members of the living systems around them, indigenous peoples masterfully sculpted these landscapes through (active) environmental management. As Margolin (1993) explains of California Indians, “By doing so they created an environment very much to their liking – one that provided the best habitat for game, one that encouraged the growth of favored food and basketry plants. The landscape of old California, in other words… was not a ‘natural’ landscape. It was created by people, in many ways as ‘artificial’ as the farmlands of Europe. Thus, when [Europeans] arrived in California… they did not find (as they fondly imagined) a ‘pristine wilderness.’ They found what was in many ways a garden, a land very much shaped by thousands of years of human history and adapted to human needs. (Margolin 1993, p. 54)”

https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/concern/theses/6m311r912?locale=en

Photos: Alyssa Alexandria

 

Stepping Stone

I’ve often found myself along some stone row that’s headed up some pretty rough and rocky slopes, off any modern path, only to find that there are flat stones almost like stair steps and suddenly the climb’s not so hard after all.


I’ve had the same experience scrambling about the many rock shelters called now after the Leather Man, formerly called “The Old Hunting Caves,” as well as climbing up to the top of Montoe’s (Manitou’s) House Rock as well as in some other places. There’s hand holds and foot holds and I wonder just how long they’ve been there -300 years or 3,000 years.

I’ve tried to photograph them, like the ones in a lousy series of photos of a stone row at the foot of West Peak in Woodbridge CT, but all I got was a blurry picture of my shoe.

But I’ve never found anything like this:

“Following an ancient foot path today: "If you want to know how to find your path in life-- just start walking." (A perfectly placed, flat rock, in the shape of a foot for stepping-- a stepping stone.)” - Alyssa Alexandria writes in a FaceBook post, quoting her Modoc father.

And sure enough, Alyssa writes that there are more steps, along the loose rocks by the stone row/rock line she was walking along near Lake Shastina.

…very near the niche where this small turtle usually resides:

Above: circular enclosure

Below: spiral 

American sacred space

By Edward Tabor Linenthal

A little stone piling described here on page 46-7:

http://books.google.com/books?id=-C9pugPeqhMC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=karuk+stone+features+on+landscape&source=bl&ots=9Lz0O5tWPf&sig=bQKpMu3GM29tZ53FT5aZ_ZRFaDg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=gqY_T7SLLcO4twfa07jHBQ&sqi=2&ved=0CG4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=karuk%20stone%20features%20on%20landscape&f=false

Shasta Stone Pile

The "crown" of Diamond Head, Alyssa Alexandria writes,  "A perfect circle of megaliths arranged in a tight circle. In between each stone is a "sight" of three great mountains; Black Butte, Shasta and Ashland. This is an extremely steep conical shaped hill (like a hershey's kiss.)"

 "It is also a small round nest of stones.

Along with the walls which lead up from the bottom and curve over the other side to another conical shaped hill nearby-- they all connect by rock walls."

More: http://www.relicsoftheancients.com/alyssa_alexandria_index.htm

Shasta Turtle

Sent by Alyssa Alexandria, found along a California Rock Wall (I think).

Actually she says, "It was inside a niche/dolmen."
Both maybe true...