Effigy mounds and rock art of midcontinental North America: Shared iconography, shared stories

The effigy mounds of the Upper Midwest and the Ohio Valley long have been regarded as distinct and independent cultural developments. A review of effigy mound iconography in both regions reveals similarities suggesting that they are elements of a shared cultural tradition. Comparisons with rock art imagery from the Upper Midwest and Missouri, the inferred centers of this artistic and ceremonial florescence, reveal co-occurrences of specific motifs and provide additional evidence of cultural connections among the Late Woodland to early Late Precontact societies inhabiting the lower Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio river valleys. Oral traditions of Native American groups with documented connections to these regions allow this rich corpus of imagery to be understood as key episodes in their genesis stories.

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The Star-Beings and stones: Petroforms and the reflection of Native American cosmology, myth and stellar traditions

Journal of Lithic Studies ◽

10.2218/jls.v0i0.1918 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 4 (3) ◽

pp. 79-118

Author(s):

Herman E. Bender

Keyword(s):

Native American ◽

Great Plains ◽

Mirror Image ◽

Oral Traditions ◽

Summer Solstice ◽

South Eastern ◽

The People ◽

Early Migration ◽

Effigy Mound ◽

Ancient Times

Native American myths, legends and oral traditions are rich with stories of giant beings existing in ancient times. They all talk of giant Thunderers or Thunder-beings, giant snakes and great Thunderbirds. Even the first humans were said to be giants, some half man, half animal. The Tsistsistas (Cheyenne) have a name for the giant beings that their ancestors encountered during the early migration to the grasslands of the Great Plains. They called them haztova hotoxceo or “two-faced star people”. Other Plains tribes such as the Black Feet, Gros Ventres and Lakota have similar stories.These old stories may have real world counterparts. Discovered in a prehistoric effigy-mound group (the Kolterman Mounds) in south-eastern Wisconsin (U.S.A.) is a human-like petroform or lithic effigy with a serpentine body and wing-like arms known as the ‘Star-being’. Configured in stone, it is approximately 20 metres in length with a red coloured, bison-shaped headstone aligned to face the summer solstice sunrise. However, it is not a lone or singular occurrence. The ‘Star-being’ is but one of two human-like petroform effigies discovered in south-eastern Wisconsin. There is another of almost the same size called the Starman which also has a red coloured, bison-shaped headstone aligned to face the summer solstice sunrise. Both the Starman and Star-Being lithic complexes are codified by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin as archaeological sites of Archaic age.Each giant lithic effigy appears to be a reflection of certain constellations and stars. The ‘Star-being’ is a mirror-image of the (western) constellations of Scorpius and Libra (with Sagittarius); the Starman is an almost exact representation of Taurus and the Pleiades. Both giant effigies are estimated to be 3500-6000 years old, embodiments of ancient legends and traditions writ large in stone and connected to ‘The People’ through ceremony and acts of cosmic renewal.

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The Star-Beings and stones: Petroforms and the reflection of Native American cosmology, myth and stellar traditions

Journal of Lithic Studies ◽

10.2218/jls.v4i4.1918 ◽

1970 ◽

Vol 4 (4) ◽

pp. 77-116

Author(s):

Herman E. Bender

Keyword(s):

Native American ◽

Great Plains ◽

Mirror Image ◽

Oral Traditions ◽

Summer Solstice ◽

South Eastern ◽

The People ◽

Early Migration ◽

Effigy Mound ◽

Ancient Times

Native American myths, legends and oral traditions are rich with stories of giant beings existing in ancient times. They all talk of giant Thunderers or Thunder-beings, giant snakes and great Thunderbirds. Even the first humans were said to be giants, some half man, half animal. The Tsistsistas (Cheyenne) have a name for the giant beings that their ancestors encountered during the early migration to the grasslands of the Great Plains. They called them haztova hotoxceo or “two-faced star people”. Other Plains tribes such as the Black Feet, Gros Ventres and Lakota have similar stories. These old stories may have real world counterparts. Discovered in a prehistoric effigy-mound group (the Kolterman Mounds) in south-eastern Wisconsin (U.S.A.) is a human-like petroform or lithic effigy with a serpentine body and wing-like arms known as the ‘Star-being’. Configured in stone, it is approximately 20 metres in length with a red coloured, bison-shaped headstone aligned to face the summer solstice sunrise. However, it is not a lone or singular occurrence. The ‘Star-being’ is but one of two human-like petroform effigies discovered in south-eastern Wisconsin. There is another of almost the same size called the Starman which also has a red coloured, bison-shaped headstone aligned to face the summer solstice sunrise. Both the Starman and Star-Being lithic complexes are codified by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin as archaeological sites of Archaic age. Each giant lithic effigy appears to be a reflection of certain constellations and stars. The ‘Star-being’ is a mirror-image of the (western) constellations of Scorpius and Libra (with Sagittarius); the Starman is an almost exact representation of Taurus and the Pleiades. Both giant effigies are estimated to be 3500-6000 years old, embodiments of ancient legends and traditions writ large in stone and connected to ‘The People’ through ceremony and acts of cosmic renewal.

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Weighing the Evidence for Ancient Afro-Arabian Cultural Connections through Neolithic Rock Art

Human Interaction with the Environment in the Red Sea ◽

10.1163/9789004330825_007 ◽

2017 ◽

pp. 89-129

Keyword(s):

Rock Art ◽

Cultural Connections

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FEMALE IDENTITY AND MAGICAL REALISM IN NATIVE AMERICAN AND AFRO AMERICAN WOMEN WRITING: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LOUISE ERDRICH’S TRACKS AND TONY MORRISON’S BELOVED

Scholedge International Journal of Multidisciplinary & Allied Studies ISSN 2394-336X ◽

10.19085/journal.sijmas041102 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 4 (11) ◽

pp. 108

Author(s):

Mumtaz Ahmad ◽

Kaneez Fatima

Keyword(s):

Women Writers ◽

Native American ◽

Female Identity ◽

Oral Traditions ◽

Discursive Construction ◽

Fourth World ◽

American Women Writers ◽

American Women ◽

Sweeping Generalization ◽

Discursive Field

<p>This research article is an attempt to evaluate the Native and Afro American women writers ‘sustained efforts to articulate a continuous and internal cultural female identity by constructing re evaluative narratives that deconstruct institutionally supported universal female images inflicted upon the third and fourth world women by the first world feminist intelligentsia. To do so these women writers radically depart from the conventions of Euro American stylistic, formal and structural modalities of the narrative and use instead a stylistic mosaic allowing the native and black oral traditions to imbricate with the white normative models. Since literature and arts have always been an effective medium, an expansive domain, and a discursive field where writers have been voicing the aureate human feelings, conflicting passions and the continuous struggles of the different societal segments, especially of deprived strata against those who maintain and perpetuate their cultural and political hegemony by suppressing the subalterns, the women writers from the fourth world ethnic communities have expressed whole range of the intensely personal and communal human emotions that radiate from the springboard of social, cultural, historic and political practices One of the significant features that the Native American and Afro American women writers often demonstrate include the use of magical realist strategies that express, on one hand, their efforts to indigenize narrative and, on the other hand, help them construct female identity from their own perspective since, within main concerns of contemporary fourth world feminist criticism, the (re) construction of female identity merits special attention and analysis. The stereotypical discursive construction of the Native and Afro American women by the dominant Euro American discourses bracketed them into essentialist categories glossing over the medley of vital differences that these women reveal in their social, cultural, anthropological and sexual strictures. Tackling the issue of the discursive construction of female identity that involves conceptual and perspectival problems, both Native American and Afro American women writers deconstruct the sweeping generalization of the fourth world women by challenging and subverting the clichéd images replacing them with empowered and agentive subjects who are no more subjected to, what Gyatri Spivk conceptualizes, subalternity and “epistemic violence”.</p>

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Tecumseh’s Legacy: The Enduring Enigma of the New Madrid Earthquakes

After the Earth Quakes ◽

10.1093/oso/9780195179132.003.0006 ◽

2005 ◽

Author(s):

Susan Elizabeth Hough ◽

Roger G. Bilham

Keyword(s):

Native American ◽

Oral Traditions ◽

Night Time ◽

Central United States ◽

New Madrid Earthquakes ◽

To Come ◽

White Settlers ◽

The One ◽

Indian Lands ◽

New Madrid

Like any proper mystery, the tale of the New Madrid earthquakes begins on a note of intrigue. According to legend, the earthquakes were predicted—even prophesied—by the great Shawnee leader and statesman Tecumseh. Concerned over continued encroachment of white settlers onto Indian lands in the mid continent, Tecumseh traveled widely throughout the central United States in the early 1800s, striving to unite diverse tribes to stand against further land cessions. According to legend, Tecumseh told his mostly Creek followers at Tuckabatchee, Alabama, that he had proof of the Great Spirit’s wrath. The sign blazed across the heavens for all to see—the great comet of 1811, a dazzling and mysterious sight. As if to emphasize Tecumseh’s words, the comet grew in brilliance through October, dimming in the night time sky in November just as Tecumseh left Tuckabatchee for points northward. Also according to legend, Tecumseh’s speech at Tuckabatchee told of an even more dramatic sign yet to come. In an oration delivered to hundreds of listeners, the leader reportedly told the crowd, “You do not believe the Great Spirit has sent me. You shall know. I leave Tuckabatchee directly, and shall go straight to Detroit. When I arrive there, I will stamp on the ground with my foot and shake down every house in Tuckabatchee.” The Creeks counted the days until the one calculated to mark Tecumseh’s return, and on that day— December 16, 1811—the first of the great New Madrid earthquakes struck, destroying all of the houses in Tuckabatchee. Tecumseh’s Prophecy, as it has come to be known, strikes a chord with those inclined to see Spirit and earth as intertwined. But it can also capture the imagination of those who see phenomena such as earthquakes as the exclusive purview of science. What if Tecumseh’s Prophecy was born not of communication with the Great Spirit, but instead of an ability to recognize signs from the earth itself? According to the renowned English geologist Sir Charles Lyell, Native American oral traditions told of devastating earthquakes in the New Madrid region prior to 1811.

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