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Rise and Fall of the City of the Gods (PDF)

Rise and Fall of the City of the Gods
by John B. Carlson

Teotihuacan (Tay-oh-tee-Wah-kahn)… To millions of visitors each year, it is known simply as “The Pyramids,” a vast ruined city whose brooding grandeur fills most of a tributary valley 30 miles northeast of Mexico City. I first visited the site in the summer of 1973, when I was a young graduate student in astronomy. Stepping out of an air-conditioned bus into the dry heat and bright blue sky, I was quite unprepared for the magnitude of the ruins. Its Street of the Dead, broad and straight, sloped northward across the valley for almost three miles, flanked by scores of temples and temple complexes including the Pyramid of the Sun, whose base is comparable to that of the Great Pyramid at Giza. At the northern end of the street stood the Pyramid of the Moon, whose architecture mimics the sacred mountain of Cerro Gordo in the distance. Exploring its southern end, I discovered the monumental Ciudadela Complex, which surrounds a great rectangular courtyard large enough to have held 100,000 people. On the east side of the complex were the remains of palace and administrative buildings flanking the city’s third largest monument, the Feathered Serpent Pyramid. Dozens of stone fanged monster heads, arranged in pairs, gazed out from its layered tableros and balustrades. One with protruding jaw and plumed collar was surely the legendary Feathered Serpent so often depicted in Mesoamerican art. The other, sporting goggle-like rings on its mosaic-beaded forehead above inlaid obsidian eyes, was far more enigmatic.
As I searched for the best camera angles, my head spinning from the heat, altitude, and excitement, I was approached by one of the ubiquitous local guides. Teotihaucan was an ancient city of the Aztecs who, he proudly explained, were his ancestors. It was named Teotihuacan (Place of the Gods) because their gods, whom they worshiped with human and animal sacrifices, had been born here. The Aztecs, he told me, called the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, a powerful creator god of the winds, legendary warrior, and hero of the Aztec’s spiritual ancestors, the Toltecs. The goggle-eyed monster was Tlaloc, a god of rain and fertility. Children were sometimes sacrificed to Tlaloc, their tears invoking the spirits of the rains.
Local guides at archaeological sites worldwide are notorious for supplying a creative mixture of fact and fiction, and this fellow was no exception. Tetihuacan was neither Aztec nor Toltec. In fact, it lay in ruins for nearly six centuries before the nomadic Mexica tribes, whom we now call the Aztecs, wandered into the Basin of Mexico and were awestruck, according to their own accounts, by its splendor. For them, Teotihuacan was the birthplace of the gods. In truth, they probably knew little more of the site’s history than my guide.
Leaving Teotihuacan that day with more questions than answers, I vowed to learn as much as I could about this ancient city and its relationship to the other cultures of Mesoamerica. This decision led to a change in my career from extragalactic astronomy to archeology. I began to focus on the astronomical practices, celestial lore, mythologies, and world-views of the ancient peoples of the Americas.
Who were the Teotihuacanos? What language or languages did they speak? Why did the Valley of Teotihuacan become so important in the Classic period rather than the much larger and ecologically richer Valley of Mexico just to the south? What was the nature of their political, religious, and social systems? The tombs of the rulers have never been found and, unlike the Lowland Maya to the east, they left no obvious portraits of their leaders. Did they have a system of writing similar to the Maya? We know that the two cultures were in contact from Early Classic times. But, most important, what led to the rise of this extraordinary people around the beginning of the first millennium A.D., what was the key to their long-term success, and what precipitated the violent destruction of their city in the early eighth century?
We do know that Teotihuacan rose rapidly to become the largest urban center in the Americas. Its power and influence extended across Mesoamerica, east into the Maya and Gulf Coast areas, and southeast into Zapotec Oaxaca. The concurrent florescence of these cultures created what we call the Mesoamerican Classic period. Teotihuacan was a key player, and its fall precipitated a profound collapse of all the Classic civilizations.
Our current understanding of Teotihuacan stems largely from the last 30 years of scientific excavation of the site. In 1960, Eric Wolf initiated the comprehensive Valley of Mexico Project, which addressed the natural history of this unique environmental zone as well as its complex cultural heritage. This work led to the remarkable Teotihuacan Mapping Project, headed by the University of Rochester’s Rene Millon, which focused on the city itself, and the Teotihuacan Valley Project, directed by William T. Sanders of Pennsylvania State University, which examined the rural environs of the valley. These efforts provided the scientific bedrock for a series of further archaeological excavations beginning in 1980 under the auspices of the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and headed by Ruben Cabrera Castro. During 1988-89, Cabrera and George Cowgill of Arizona State University directed further excavations in which Saburo Sugiyama, also of Arizona State, penetrated the heart of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, which yielded explicit evidence for both militarism and abundant human sacrifice. My own research has focused on the Panmesoamerican practice of sacred warfare and ritual sacrifice regulated by the motions of Venus in the heavens. These efforts have yielded insights into Teotihuacan’s spectacular rise to power, what sustained it and, moreover, what led to its violent demise.
Ancient Mesoamerican astronomers were well aware of Venus’s 584-day celestial journey. Of the 16 or so surviving Precolumbian codices, five contain almanacs documenting Venus’s position relative to Earth’s 365-day solar year. According to two volumes, the Dresden and Grolier codices, Venus first appears just before sunrise in the east as Morning Star, where it can be seen for 236 days. Venus then disappears, reappearing after 90 days later at dusk in the west as the Evening Star. Then, 250 days later, Venus disappears a second time only to appear once again as Morning Star eight days later, thus completing its cycle. New World astronomers noted that five 584-day Venus cycles equal eight 365-day years and they used this astronomical resonance as the basis of their almanacs, which span 2,920 days. The Dresden and Grolier codices contain 104-year almanacs, which tie the cycles of the Sun and Venus into the 260-day Mesoamerican sacred calendar.
Why did the Mesoamericans create such elaborate Venus almanacs? The reason became clearer in the early 1980s when Floyd Lounsbury of Yale University discovered that certain war events or battles in Classic Maya texts, whose glyphs contained the Maya symbol for Venus, were timed to coincide with certain positions of the planet in the heavens. Dubbed “Star Wars” after the popular movie’s title, these astrologically timed battles were soon recognized as practices that extended well beyond the Maya realm. We have identified glyphs associated with at least three Venus-cult traditions practiced in Mesoamerica. One tradition was shared by the Maya and Gulf Coast peoples, one by the Zapotecs of Oaxaca, and another by the Teotihaucanos and cultures of the Mexican Highlands. In addition to military conquest, the Venus cult was concerned with the symbolic transformation of blood into water and fertility through the ritual execution of captives. The goggle-eyed Storm God has also been linked with both warfare and water. The key to our understanding of this cult has come only recently with the discovery of spectacular murals at Cacaxtla, a seventh-century site 80 miles east of Teotihuacan.
But let’s start at the beginning. Sometime early in the second century B.C., a remarkable transformation began to take place within the small farming communities along the Rio San Juan and the spring-fed marshes of the Teotihaucan Valley. At an elevation of more than 7,000 feet and with an annual rainfall of no more than 20 inches, the Teotihuacan Valley would appear to have been a marginal agricultural zone. However, numerous springs watered the valley’s rich volcanic soil, making it a particularly fertile region. In addition, its proximity to valuable deposits of obsidian and its location on a major trade route to the Gulf Coast and Maya Lowlands gave the site strategic importance. At the beginning of the first century B.C., the region was dominated by Cuicuilco, a town of about 10,000 inhabitants in the southern Valley of Mexico. Fortunately for Teotihuacan, natural disaster soon shifted the balance of power in its favor when the volcano Xitle erupted around 100 B.C., destroying Cuicuilco and its surrounding agricultural land. Following the eruption 90 percent of the valley’s population moved northward to Teotihuacan.
The eruption of the volcano, however, seems not to have been the sole cause for the migration. Millon and a number of other scholars, including myself, believe that religion played a major role in attracting people to the site. In the 1960s Mexican archaeologists discovered that the Pyramid of the Sun, the last phase of which was completed sometime before A.D. 200, had been built atop an important shrine–a dry four-chambered lava-tube cave. Archaeologist Doris Heyden of Mexico’s INAH has argued convincingly that this cave had long been an important sacred site, a place from which the Teotihuacan ancestors had emerged–its four chambers were likely interpreted as representations of the four parts of the Mesoamerican cosmos. In time, it became a Mesoamerican mecca attracting an increasing number of pilgrims as Teotihuacan prospered.
A second critical ideological factor in the city’s development involved the rise of a primary deity who, in all of her forms, is known to us as the “Great Goddess.” First recognized as a female entity in the 1970s by Peter Furst, then at the State University of New York at Albany, and Esther Pasztory of Columbia University, the goddess is apparent throughout the site, in monumental stone sculptures and murals and highly abstracted iconography. Exhibiting both creative and destructive aspects, the goddess would seem to have been the physical embodiment of Cerro Gordo, the sacred mountain from which the springs that nourish the valley flow. She is often depicted with a bird of prey in her headdress, a well-known Teotihuacan warrior emblem. Streams of liquid flow from her mouth and cave-like womb. With a characteristic open-hand gesture, she scatters precious liquids, seeds, and flowers. Her priests bear bags of incense and likewise participate in the scattering rites–their chanting illustrated by flower-decorated scrolls emanating from their mouths.
By the middle of the second century A.D., the ground plan of the city had been worked out, apparently taking into consideration the location and layout of the underground cave, the surrounding mountains, including Cerro Gordo, and important elements of the cosmos. Several structures, most notably the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent, face the northwestern horizon where the star cluster Pleiades sets and approximately where the sun sets twice a year when it passes directly overhead.
During the second half of the second century A.D. a brilliant new phase of municipal architecture south of the Pyramid of the Sun, including the Great Compound and the Ciudadela Complex with its spacious plaza, Feathered Serpent Pyramid, and flanking residential-administrative compounds, was completed. The Great Compound is likely to have served as a central market area for the city while the Ciudadela became its new administrative center. Even the Rio San Juan, which cut through the site, was rerouted to conform to the city’s design. Throughout its early years Teotihuacan was probably ruled by a succession of charismatic leaders. Millon, Cowgill, and others have argued convincingly that the Great Compound and Ciudadela were the work of the last such ruler, and have suggested that the Feathered Serpent Pyramid may have served, in part, as his mortuary monument.
After this extraordinary period of construction, there were no further monumental building projects, and attention was paid almost exclusively to renovating the city’s residential areas. From A.D. 200 to 600, the city continued to flourish with long-distance trade becoming an important factor in its prosperity. Teotihuacanos extended their influence to the far reaches of Mesoamerica, with contacts and even enclaves or colonies, in such areas as Zapotec Oaxaca (Monte Alban), the Guatemalan Highlands (Kaminaljuyu), the Gulf Coast (Matacapan), and the Maya Lowlands (Becan and Tikal, for example). These incursions were unquestionably associate with Highland-Lowland trade in goods such as obsidian, jade, shells, salt, rubber, cacao, exotic bird feathers, animal skins, incense, medicines, and textiles. More than 2,000 walled apartment compounds were built during this time, of which only a few have been excavated. Nonetheless, the results of these excavations, combined with surveys and surface collections, indicate a diverse society engaged in numerous craft specializations and diverse foreign populations. A Oaxaca barrio and a so-called Merchants’ barrio, housing a Veracruz gulf coast group, have been identified by their material culture, architectural style, and mortuary practices.
We also now know that Teotihuacan’s prosperity during these years involved the practice of sacred warfare and human sacrifice timed by the position of Venus. Ample evidence for this practice has been found at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid. The pyramid took its name from its remarkable facade of serpentine “Quetzalcoatl” and goggle-eyed “Tlaloc” masks revealed in the 1918-22 excavations of the Mexican archaeologists Manuel Gamio and Ignacio Marquina. In the intervening decades many speculative theories have been offered concerning the identity of these figures, the meaning of the building’s iconography, and the ultimate function of the temple and its surrounding Ciudadela Complex.
From the start, there has been essential agreement that the fanged figures with collars of blue-green feathers jutting out from the tableros and stairway balustrades are representations of the Feathered Serpent of Meosamerican mythology. Images of this rattle-tailed serpent undulate along the pyramid and swim within bands of marine shells, including white conch and various pink-painted bivalves–all symbols of water and fertility. Debate, however, has arisen over whether these serpentine creatures represent the same deity that the Aztecs knew as Quetzalcoatl more than six centuries after the fall of Teotihuacan. Quetzalcoatl was many things to the Aztecs, including a god of wind and legendary hero of the Toltecs. Quetzalcoatl could also manifest himself as Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli (Lord of the House of Dawn), a death-dealing warrior aspect of Venus whose rays speared victims. I have shown that the Feathered Serpent of Teotihuacan was also a manifestation of Venus, a god of warfare and blood sacrifice.
The other fanged monster head, with inlaid obsidian eyes and goggles on its mosaic forehead, has proved far more difficult to identify. Although the goggles and the fanged upper jaw are indeed characteristic of the Teotihuacan Storm God as well as the Aztec Tlaloc, this figure appears to be a different creature, one scholars have termed a Storm God-related serpent. It is occasionally depicted in full form with a rattle tail, forked tongue, and often covered with scales. Sugiyama and Karl Taube of the University of California have demonstrated that in these representations the goggle-eyed creature, lacking a lower jaw, represents a war helmet worn by members of the militaristic Feathered Serpent cult.
Teotihuacan’s Great Goddess appears to have played a major role in this militaristic cult. In Teotihuacan art, her attendant priests are virtually indistinguishable from the goggle-eyed warriors responsible for providing captives for sacrifice. Cult priests are shown marching in processions with blood-dripping hearts impaled on great obsidian skewers. They also scatter the blood and related offerings as does their patroness, the Great Goddess, as she presides over a religion that justified war and conquest as a source of water and fertility.
The sixteenth-century Spanish chronicler, Bernardino de Sahagun, vividly described such Venus-related sacrificial practices among the Aztecs of his day: “Of the morning star, the great star, it was said that when…it newly emerged much fear came over them; all were frightened. Everywhere the outlets and openings [of houses] were closed up. It was said that perchance [the light] might bring a cause of sickness, something evil, when it came to emerge. But sometimes it was regarded as benevolent. And also [captives] were slain when it emerged, [that] it might be nourished. They sprinkled blood toward it. With the blood of captives they spattered toward it, flipping the middle finger from the thumb; they cast [the blood] as an offering; they raised it in dedication.” [Sahagun (1953: Book 7, Ch.3, 11-12), The Florentine Codex].
The Feathered Serpent Pyramid was painted almost entirely in hematite red, a dark blood-red color, with decorative bands of the blue-green circles representing the goggles worn by the Storm God. The structure represented nothing less than the Great Goddess herself, the Mother of Waters, made manifest in an architectural mountain. The Aztec word for city, actually the concept of city and community inextricably bound, was Altepetl, meaning “water-mountain.” The Feathered Serpent Pyramid was the ultimate statement of Teotihuacan as the Altepetl. The gruesome physical evidence of the Venus-regulated warfare cult, however, lay beneath the pyramids’s structure.
In 1925, the Mexican archaeologist Pedro Dosal found burials of single individuals, evidently sacrifices, placed in pits just outside each of the pyramids’s four corners. Then, during INAH-sponsored excavations conducted in 1983-84, Sugiyama and Cabrera uncovered three symmetrically places burial pits along the southern side of the pyramid while excavating exploratory trenches. The largest, Burial 190, was a 25-foot trench placed midway along the side. It was flanked by two smaller interments (Burials 153 and 203). Burial 190 contained 18 young males, 169 obsidian projectile points, and more than 4, 000 pieces of worked shell. Many of the skeletons wore collars made of imitation human maxillae (upper jaws) with artificial teeth carved from shell, as well as several real maxillae and mandibles. Behind the pelvic regions of several were small slate disks resembling tezcacuitlapilli, pyrite-inlaid mirrors often worn by Aztec warriors and regularly depicted as part of Toltec and other Highland Mexican military costumes. Most of these 18 individuals were found with their hands crossed at the wrists behind their backs, implying that they had been bound when placed in the tomb. The conclusion of the investigators was that these were sacrificed military personnel who, judging from the positions where they fell when buried, had been placed seated, facing away from the center of the pyramid as if to guard it and whatever it contained. The two interments flanking Burial 190 each contained one individual–a female in Burial 153 and a male in Burial 203. These interments have been likewise interpreted as sacrificial. Stratigraphic evidence has verified that all of these burials were associated with the construction of the pyramid.
The symmetry of the graves strongly suggested that similar multiple burials might exist along the north side and perhaps even on the east and west sides of the structure. This hypothesis was verified when another linear trench (Burial 204) with 18 sacrificed people with similar costume elements and offerings was found in 1986 on the north side. This trench was also flanked by two single intrments completing the dedicatory pattern. Further excavations conducted by Cabrera, Sugiyama, and Cowgill in 1988-89 revealed still more burials along the east side of the pyramid. Again, multiple and single burials included large numbers of obsidian projectile points, numerous worked shell ornaments, and cut shell imitation maxillae that formed elaborate collars. Slate disks were again found beneath most pelvic bones. In Burial 5 , one person with pronounced cranial deformation was found interred with a massive collar composed of nine real human maxillae. Interestingly, in Burial 6, opposite Burial 5, another individual was found with a collar of shell teeth made to resemble those of wolves, coyotes, or dogs.
During the 1988-89 field season, Sugiyama began tunneling directly into the south face of the pyramid in part to search for a central tomb. About a third of the way to the center, he found two additional mass burials. The first was a simple one containing eight young individuals ranging in age from ten to 25 years. They were found in the flexed position; some clearly had had their hands tied behind their backs and had been buried facing the center of the pyramid. Thees people may have represented the number of solar years in the Venus almanac. The second interment held 18 men with substantially richer offerings, 18 slate disks, numerous projectile points and additional necklaces of either artificial or real human and canine jawbones.
Near the heart of the pyramid, excavators broke into an ancient looters’ tunnel. The looters had entered in the southeastern corner, moving diagonally. Modern measurements show that they missed the center by six feet, but that they had located and looted two mass burials to the west side of the center. Both of these (Burials 12 and 13) were badly disturbed, but the quantities of remaining grave goods suggest that these tombs contained the remains of some of the highest status individuals yet found. Burial 13 still had one partially undisturbed and one complete skeleton found with a fine pair of earspools, 21 large beads, and rectangular nose ornament, all of greenstone, as well as a large unusually shaped obsidian projectile point. The discovery of a carved wooden baton in the forma of a stylized serpent head suggested that at least some of the high-status individuals interred there may have held priestly office.
Working east, from the old looters’ tunnel, Sugiyama finally reached the center of the pyramid where he found a mass grave with 20 undisturbed skeletons. These remains, known collectively as Burial 14, were placed directly on the ground in and elliptical pattern along with the richest offerings found to date. All appear to have been adult males laid out in a complex scheme indicating some attention to orientation. Six skeletons were aligned along the pyramid’s east-west axis, while the others tended to face the easternmost individual in the burial. However, this skeleton was indistinguishable from the others, and the rich collection of offerings was seemingly distributed randomly over the whole interment. The offerings, not yet analyzed in detail, included more than 400 greenstone items–among them 18 unique conical objects, figurines, earspools, nose ornaments, beads, and headdress-shaped plaques known as resplandores. More than 800 fine obsidian objects, 3,400 shell pieces, slate disks, animal and plant remains, and items of wood and fiber were found. In addition, archaeologists recovered nine groups of artifacts surrounded by vegetable material–possibly textile fragments. These were most likely specially prepared bundle offerings. There were only a few ceramic finds, including the remains of two vessels modeled in the shape of the Storm God.These offerings appear to have been deposited as part of the sacrificial rite rather than as the personal property of those buried under the pyramid.
It is clear that both the number of individuals within each burial as well as their placement are directly related to the pyramid’s function within the religious life at Teotihuacan. Numbers such as eight, 18, and 20 immediately suggest calendrical significance. The months of the Mesoamerican calendar are 20 days in length. There are 18 full 20-day months in the traditional Mesoamerican 365-day year. Most significant, there are eight years in the Venus almanac. Although the four-directional pattern of the burials is not yet fully understood, it may, like the shape of the underground cave, reflect fundamental concepts of space and time.
Although the remains of more than 100 individuals have been found, the symmetrical placement of the burials suggests that as many as 200 people may have been sacrificed prior to the building’s construction. But who were they? Cowgill favors the idea that they were loyal Teotihuacanos, sacrificed to serve as eternal guardians of a great charismatic leader buried in the structure. There is ample precedent for this practice in Mesoamerica and elesewhere in the world. However, I believe that the remains may be those of enemy warriors and other prisoners captured in battle for sacrifice as part of the Venus warfare cult. The presence of the Storm God vessels in the central burial, a well-known ceramic form associated with water and fertility rites, fits my hypothesis.
Cowgill’s theory and my own, however, are not mutually exclusive. The pyramid, believed to have derived sustenance from sacred sacrifices, may also have been the tomb of a powerful ruler. Those sacrificed there may include palace guards or royal retainers as well as prisoners of war. Certainly the discovery of an undisturbed royal burial would have helped to support the pyramid-tomb hypothesis. Because of the ancient grave-robbers, we may never know if such an individual was ever interred in the structure. Future archaeometric analysis including DNA scanning may provide a key to the identities of the sacrificial victims. Excavations into the core of the Pyramid of the Moon, thought to be undisturbed, may answer the question of whether any of Teotihuacan’s great pyramids was constructed as a ruler’s tomb.
For half a millennium, Teotihuacan prospered. By the mid-seventh century, however, the city appears to have fallen into decline. Although no one dominant cause stands out, factors deriving from its long-term success seem to have spawned the seeds of its dissolution. The general health of the Teotihuacan people was poor and infant mortality high. There are also indications that environmental degradation was taking its toll. Centuries of harvesting wood had drastically depleted the forests, permanent springs were less bountiful, clean drinking water was difficult to obtain, and disease was endemic.But what caused the city’s violent end?
It is an ironic turn of fate that Teotihuacan, which was baptized in a rain of volcanic fire, was consumed in a great man-made conflagration. The archaeological evidence shows unequivocally that sometime before A.D. 750 the ceremonial and administrative heart of the city, all along the Street of the Dead, was systematically and selectively sacked and destroyed by fire. Outlying temple structures were likewise put to the torch,thought the majority of residential complexes were left untouched. But who did it and why?
Clues to Teotihuacan’s demise may lie on a hilltop, about 80 miles to the east at the ruins of Cacaxtla, a fortified acropolis in the state of Tlaxcala, apparently established around A.D. 650-700 by elite Gulf Coast warrior-merchants known as the Olmeca-Xicalanca. The site had received little attention until the mid-1970s when some of the most spectacular murals ever seen in Mesoamerica were unearthed there. These included life-sized jaguar and bird-costumed warriors standing posed on the backs of jaguar serpents and plumed serpents, respectively framed in water bands with numerous aquatic creatures. Further excavations revealed a great tableau of what appeared to be a fearsome battle between dark-painted jaguar-skin costumed Cacaxtla warriors and soldiers in elaborate bird costumes. The murals, which are marvelously preserved, were painted in a Lowland Maya style yet with eclectic mix of iconography for Oaxaca, the Gulf Coast, the Maya region, and Teotihuacan.
Although the scene has been interpreted as a battle, the losers–the bird-costumed soldiers–have no weapons. Furthermore, some of them are dressed as sacrificial victims, painted blue with their hands bound with characteristic sacrificial white paper or cloth ties, a Panmesoamerican symbol of sacrifice. I believe that this is not a battle scene but a mass public sacrifice directly linked to the Venus cult practices at Teotihuacan. On the west wall, the vanquished Bird Warrior Captain stands, hands folded in submission, guarded by a victorious Cacaxtla warlord named Three Deer. The Bird Captain stands in front of a strange white backdrop framed in red Teotihuacan Venus glyphs.
The meaning of this backdrop became clearer after the recent discovery of two new and equally spectacular groups of murals at Cacaxtla. The first was painted on two rectangular columns of a cloistered chamber on the west side of the site. They depict a blue-painted scorpion man and woman. The couple, members of the militaristic Venus cult, stand with upraised arms in a dancing posture above blue water bands on a red background, framed in Teotihuacan Venus glyphs. Each figure wears a jaguar-skin kilt with a massive Oaxaca-style Venus glyph buckle. The upper torso and head of the female did not survive the centuries; the scorpion-tailed man clearly wears a goggle-eyed mask of the Teotihuacan Venus war cult.
When I saw this painted chamber, I realized in one of those moments that all archaeologists live for, that this was the very sacrificial chamber where the humiliated Bird Warrior Captain had been prepared for sacrifice. The Venus glyph backdrop behind the defeated Bird Captain in the “battle” scene was a representation of this very room. Moreover, a representation of this same chamber is included in a previously undeciphered glyph at Cacaxtla–the glyph shows a rectangular box decorated with Teotihuacan Venus glyphs terminating in the well-known scattering hands of the Great Goddess and her attendants. The Bird Warrior’s blood must have been offered in rites evoking the forces of fertility under the auspices of Venus. Nowhere is this concept more graphically represented than in a portrait of one of the Cacaxtla jaguar warriors. He holds a great bundle of darts bound up in blue cloth tied with the same strips of fabric worn by sacrificial victims. From the darts’ obsidian tips, large droplets of blood fall down, filling the water bands that frame the scene. These blood drops are bright blue, having been transformed into the nourishing waters of life.
The last group of murals was found in a sunken chamber called the Temple Rojo. Amid myriad symbols of natural bounty such a s mature maize plants and cacao trees, a Cacaxtla merchant warrior named Four Dogs is dressedin the costume of a well-known Maya trader deity. His merchant pack, laden with Lowland products such as quetzal feathers, rubber for the ball game, jaguar skins, and possibly cacao, is propped up on his lance. Below hi, laid out on the floor for all to walk on, is a remarkable tableau of emaciated captives with sacrificial ties bound around their heads. Between the legs of one of these victims is a burning five-stepped temple-pyramid consumed by flames, a ubiquitous symbol for conquest in the Aztec world. The Templo Rojo murals show us for the first time that this symbol was in use at least 600 years earliear when Teotihuacan was destroyed by fire. Furthermore, on the step riser directly below these captives are the name glyphs of at least seven places Cacaxtla conquered. Two of these places are illustrated with Teotihuacan-style temples. I propose that these place names may be temples or enclaves in or around Teotihuacan. The warrior merchants of Cacaxtla had migrated up along one of their well-traveled routes and established themselves in Tlaxcala as the power or the old city waned. Some of them may have also been part of the foreign population represented in enclaves such as the Merchants’ barrio at Teotihuacan. In time, they, aided by other like communities, simply overran and destroyed the city.
These are immensely exciting times in Teotihuacan research. Current excavations by Cabrera and others are producing wonderful surprises. Just this past August, I visited Cabrera’s new dig in the La Ventilla area, just southwest of the Ciudadela. Surrounded by an army of archaeologists, conservators, and field workers, we walked from one ancient building to the next, passing by city streets that had not been trodden in 1,500 years. I was startled by what I saw in one small room where young workers were carefully removing the dry fill from the face of a red-painted band of murals along the lower walls. To my astonishment, I realized it was a sacrificial chamber just like the one at Cacaxtla. I had been scouring the literature for images of just such a room at Teotihuacan. Here, the red basal band was decorated with Teotihuacan Venus glyphs and with red droplets falling in between, and at the corners were goggles of the Storm God Venus warriors. Other rooms in the compound bore murals of plumed jaguars or pumas of the elite Teotihuacan military orders. Was this the kind of place in which those buried beneath the Feathered Serpent Pyramid had been prepared for sacrifice? I will always remember that special day as the twentieth anniversary of my first visit to the mysterious City of the Gods. I could never have imagined that, in 20 years time, stars on walls would be as fascinating as those in the heavens.

Ancient Altered States (PDF)

Ancient Altered States

“Here’s a real nice sheep getting killed,” says archeologist Dave Whitley, pointing at a rock. Whitley is not hallucinating. Step up to the rock and a carving can be seen: a horned sheep and a man with a bow and arrow, a petroglyph made by a Shoshone some 1,500 years ago.
The Shoshone was the one hallucinating. He was a shaman, Whitley says, who came here to this canyon in the Mojave Desert in California on a vision quest. The bighorn sheep was his spirit guide. “Killing the sheep” is a metaphor for entering the supernatural through a hallucinogenic trance.
You can see why Whitley has taken some grief in his day. For 30 years the prevailing theory about petroglyphs like this one has been that they were all about hunting. The assumption was that Native Americans believed that making art of their prey would magically cause the creatures to materialize in abundance. On the surface, the hunting-magic explanation seemed to make sense. Of some 100,000 petroglyphs in the canyons of the Coso Mountain range, 51 percent are bighorn sheep and 13 percent are male humans. For a long time no one bothered to question it.
Trouble is, the Shoshones didn’t eat much sheep. “We looked at 10,000 bones, and precisely 1 was a bighorn,” says Whitley, tossing back a wool serape. If not for the serape, you would be hard-pressed to divine the man’s vocation. Ruddy-cheeked and plaid-clad, he could as easily be out here hunting chukar or mending downed fences. “If they were going to make rock art out of what they were eating,” he adds, “there’d be bunnies all over the rock.” Though Whitley spends most of his time running a cultural resource management consultancy in his hometown of Fillmore, California, his background is in research and academics, at UCLA (where he still teaches) and at the Rock Art Research Unit of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
What sets Whitley and a handful of his colleagues apart is a willingness to stray from the ordinary precepts of archeology into the hinterlands of anthropology and psychology.Whitley turned to ethnographies of the Shoshone and Paiute tribes that inhabited the Coso Range–a string of small mountains lying east of the Sierra Nevada–from as early as A.D. 1200 to the end of the last century. Ethnographies are detailed descriptions of people in traditional cultures, gleaned from interviews and the observations of field anthropologists.
From ethnographic materials, Whitley learned that the places shamans made rock art were held to be portals to the supernatural; cracks and caves in the rock were interpreted literally as openings to the beyond. The art itself–carved with chunks of quartz–is said to depict visions that came to the shamans in their trances. The bighorn sheep is referred to as the spirit guide specific to rainmaking. One ethnographic source cited shamans who traveled from as far away as Utah to these canyons in their quest for rain.
With an average annual rainfall of about four inches, the Mojave Desert seems an unlikely setting for rainmaking activities. This is a landscape of dust and desolation, a sere, scrubby chenille of sage and saltbush. Joshua trees point spiky mascara-wand limbs this way and that, invariably at nothing. Sheep Canyon, where we are hiking, is a dry riverbed.
“It does seem odd,” allows Whitley, “until you realize that Native American shamanic rituals subscribe to the principle of symbolic inversion.” Where the natural world is dry, its supernatural counterpart is the opposite.
Why didn’t archeologists bother to check the ethnographies before? “Partly,” says Whitley, “there’s this perception that prehistory has to be interpreted on its own terms.If we go to the ethnography, then we’re assuming that the past was like the near present, and then what’s the point of doing archeology? There’s deeply embedded presupposition that archeologists maintain, and that is that because things change over time, time causes things to change.” Which isn’t always true. Shamanic rituals have persisted unchanged for centuries.
The other part of the story is that few archeologists had any real interest in pinning down the origins and meaning of rock art. Whitley was the first American archeologist to do a dissertation interpreting rock carvings (the technical term is petroglyphs; rock paintings are pictographs). There has been a tendency among archeologists to regard the study of ritual and belief as less scientific and less relevant than the study of technology and subsistence. “It’s that bumper sticker: “he who dies with the most toys wins,'” Whitley says. “Which is, to me, a very shallow, materialistic view of human culture.”
To illustrate his point, Whitley gives the example of Australian Aborigines. “You can take a line from the center of Australia out to the coast, and you can plot on that line a series of different aboriginal cultures. And if you look at the complexity of their kinship system and the complexity of their technology and tools, what you see is a perfect inverse relationship.” Coastal groups have a complex technology and tend to use a lot of tools. In the middle of Australia, it’s more like it is in the Cosos. “Those guys are running around near to buck naked, surviving only on their wits, yet they have this kinship system that is mind-bogglingly complex. And it structures every aspect of their social life. Now what is more important, this complex cognitive mental construct or the kind of tools these folks made?”
Whitley stops talking and directs his gaze at my hiking boot. “You’re standing on a sheep.”
The art of the Coso Mountains is not all sheep and stick-legged men with feathers and horns. High above Whitley’s head is a circle filled in with grid lines, like a flattened fly’s eye. Across the canyon, a sine wave snakes across a boulder. Beside it is an arc of nested curves, like a fragment of a mammoth fingerprint. Abstract patterns are everywhere among the boulders–grids, hatch marks, zigzags, curves, spirals. They’re trippy, doodley, devoid of any recognizable meaning. For years, archeological theories about these markings amounted to guesswork. Maps? Menstrual calendars? Solstice observatories? Forget about it. Let’s go dig up a hogan.
There is another place you can reliably see these images, and that is inside your head. In the 1960s, neuropsychologists began cataloging the visual imagery of altered states of consciousness. Subjects given LSD or mescaline would lie on mattresses, describing their visions into researchers’ tape recorders. The first stage of the hallucinogenic experience–whether brought on by drugs, sensory deprivation, fasting, or rhythmic movement–is characterized by recurring geometric patterns, known variously as “phosphenes” or “entroptics.” The seven most common categories strike a familiar chord: grids, parallel lines, dots, zigzags, nested curves, meanders, and spirals.
Whitley wasn’t the first to notice parallels between this abstract imagery and that of rock art. In the 1950s, a German neuropsychologist named Max Knoll noted similarities between electrically stimulated (and, later, LSD-induced) patterns that appeared in his subjects’ visual fields and common abstract patterns in southern African rock art. In a 1970 article in Scientific American, psychologist Gerald Oster highlighted “phosphenelike figures” in prehistoric cave drawings.
One of the first archeologists to come on board was David Lewis-Williams, professor of cognitive archeology and director of the Rock Art Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand. Lewis-Williams found examples of the seven common entoptic patterns throughout the ancient rock art of the San bushmen. He also found evidence in the ethnographies that San shamans went into trances, both to heal and to make rain, and that they recorded their trance visions on the rock to preserve them. (Coso Shoshones believed that if they forgot their visions, they would die–powerful incentive to jot them down.) Lewis-Williams’s “neuropsychological model” for interpreting rock art incorporated not only abstract images but also the representational images that occur in the later stages of trance.
The Shoshone and Paiute shamans didn’t, as is often assumed, take peyote or jimsonweed. Their route to trance was a combination of exceptionally strong native tobacco, lack of sleep, sensory deprivation (the canyons here are mute as tombs), and fasting.
Somewhat surprisingly, given his interests, Whitley himself has never tried hallucinogenic drugs. “What I do do is, I interview archeological field crews a lot.” He did experience entoptics once, when someone ran a heavy dolly over his foot. “Pow! Entoptics. Just like the cartoonists draw around someone’s head when the safe lands on his toe. Those guys are keyed in to it.”
Cartoonists aren’t the only artists keyed in to entoptics and altered states. Whitley says Wassily Kandinsky, revered tribal elder of abstract art, wrote a paper in a psychological journal in 1881 about the entoptics that preface a migraine. Whitley also says Kandinsky studied shamanism and the role of the subconscious in art, and that this influenced his transition from figurative to abstract art. “His paintings are full of entoptic forms.”
Entoptic means “within the eye.” It’s believed that these geometric patterns derive from the optic system itself. In some instances, says Whitley, “you’re basically seeing what’s in your eyeball.” Retinal blood vessels and “floaters”–the faint squiggly lines that meander across the vision field–may be the anatomic inspiration for dots and meandering line entoptics. Concentric circles, spirals, and grids are probably generated by neurons firing in the visual cortex and the retina.
In the second stage of altered states imagery, the mind steps in and tries to make sense of the doodlings set before it. This is something minds do: they decode visual input, matching it against the memory banks of stored experience. If a match is made, the image is recognized. How the brain interprets an entoptic depends on the state of the brain’s owner. “The same ambiguous round shape,” wrote psychologist M.J. Horowitz in Hallucinations: Behavior, Experience, and Theory in 1975, “…can be ‘illusioned’ into an orange (if the subject is hungry), a breast (if he is in a state of heightened sexual drive), a cup of water (if he is thirsty), or an anarchist’s bomb (if he is hostile or fearful).” Or a bighorn sheep body if he’s a shaman on a rainmaking vision quest.
By way of demonstration, Whitley leads me to a carving of a bighorn that is more horn than sheep. Three parallel arcs span the length of the sheep, rainbowlike, from its head to its tail. Whitley identifies the entoptic: “Nested or catenary curves.” The size of the horns, and the fact that there are three, not two, suggests the curves appeared first, and the shaman then interpreted them as horns.
A few hundred yards down the canyon, Whitley points out a fantastical creature, like something form one of those split-page children’s books in which the giraffe’s head is on the monkey’s body, with kangaroo legs. The figure sports bird-talon feet, an upright humanoid body, and big, downward-curling horns.
This is an example of Stage 3 of Lewis-Williams’s neuropsychological model: the full-blown vision. The shamans didn’t think of it as a vision. To them it was a parallel reality; they had entered the realm of the supernatural. The literature on altered states of consciousness describes the sensory changes involved. According to Lewis-Williams, “This shift to iconic imagery is also accompanied by an increase in vividness. Subjects stop using similes to describe their experiences and assert that the images are indeed what they appear to be.”
The man with the horns is the shaman himself, in his own vision, entering the supernatural and “shape shifting” into his spirit guide. The original assumption about the horns was that they were a hunting disguise. Which makes sense until you think about it. “It’d be way too heavy,” observes Whitley. “Besides, the Native Americans have systematically denied this.”
The talons in place of the shamans feet could be part of a common metaphor for entering the supernatural: flight. (Many petroglyphs of therianthropes–being part animal and part human–also have wings in place of arms.) This probably ties in with the feeling of floating up and out of one’s body, as often happens during the third stage of a mind-bending altered state.
“Here’s a guy with six fingers on one hand,” says Whitley. “Clearly not a normal individual.” Again, it fits with the literature on altered states of consciousness. Imagined extra digits are a common hallucination.
The humanoid figures that aren’t busy turning into sheep are busy shooting them with bows and arrows. In the mythology of the Native American cultures of the Far west, death is the most prevalent metaphor for entering the supernatural. (At this point, according to Whitley, the shaman has become his spirit guide and the two are considered interchangeable.) Whitley cites the example of Coyote, the shaman character of myth, who begins many of his adventures by dying or being killed, whereupon all manner of supernatural events ensue. On a physiological level, the metaphor makes sense. Consider what can happen to a person who enters a trance: his eyes roll back into his head, he may go limp and lose consciousness, he may bleed from the nose. Whitley has shown me examples here today of bighorn sheep with lines coming from their noses.
Beside the horned shaman is a shaman with what appear to be truncated golf clubs or perhaps musical quarter notes protruding from his head. Whitley insists they’re California quail topknot feathers. They do look a lot like the bobbing doohickey you see on these birds’ heads, but to link this to the flight metaphor strikes me as a bit of a reach.
As it turns out, it might have nothing to do with flight metaphors. Rain shamans, Whitley explains, wore a distinctive headdress festooned with quail head feathers. Know your ethnographies.
Not all petroglyphs fit the neuropsychological model of rock art. The Hopi carved clan symbols on rocks during pilgrimages. Northern Plains tribes decorated the landscape with symbolic renderings of their war exploits. The carving on the standing stone in front of us fits no established categories. Whitley has no idea who made it, or why. It says, “E=mc2.”
Given that this canyon sits within the million acres of supersecret labs and missile ranges known as China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, it was most likely military personnel. Even if the carving were a sheep, Whitley wouldn’t have been fooled into believing it was carved by early Native Americans. He can eyeball a petroglyph and tell, by the degree to which the carved areas have darkened, approximately how old it is. Our little theory of relativity inscription is, relatively speaking, brand-new. The etching still appears white. After about 500 years, a “brown crud,” as Whitley puts it, begins to become visible. The crud, known in academic circles as rock varnish, derives from microbes on the rock surface. Over time, different trace elements leach out from the varnish at different rates. By calculating what’s leached out and how much, chronometricians can get an idea of how long the varnish has been there, and from that, the carving’s age. This can be compared with the results of radiocarbon-dating of organic materials such as lichen and pollen that are trapped on the carving as the varnish accumulates on top of them. Neither method is especially precise, but the combination suffices to pin the date to within a few hundred years.
While the oldest Coso petroglyphs may have been made as long as 16,500 years ago, the overwhelming majority fall in the neighborhood of less than 1,500 years old. Whitley has a theory to explain the sudden flurry of shamanism in the region. An examination of the archeological record around this time shows a dramatic increase in abandonment of villages in the region. The likely reason: The area was being sucked dry by a major drought some 800 years ago. Hence the unprecedented upsurge in rainmaking endeavors.
In a bizarre display of symbolic meteorologic inversion, rain clouds have appeared overhead. Against the gathering gray, a dozen Canada geese fly in perfect V formation, as though under orders from the base commander.
The rock art of the Coso Range is by no means the oldest in the world. The famed Lascaux and Chauvet cave paintings of France date, respectively, from 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. As anthropologists had yet to materialize 30,000 years ago, no ethnographies exist for these peoples. Partly because of this, European rock art archeologists were slow to warm to the shamanistic, neuropsychological model. The skepticism may also have had to do with European separation of archeology and anthropology; they’re not, as they typically are in the States, part of the same academic department.
In 1992, Whitley brought French archeologist Jean Clottes, the world-renowned scholar of Paleolithic cave paintings, out to the Mojave and did his pitch. Clottes wasn’t easily swayed. Though the rock art of France and Spain most certainly includes the classic entoptic patterns, Clottes saw too many other images that didn’t fit.
“Over the next two or three years,” says Whitley, “I brought him back to the Cosos again, and he started reading the ethnographic texts.” Eventually Clottes crossed the divide. Whitley knew he had him when Clottes called him up in 1995 after the discovery of the famed Chauvet cave. “He said to me, ‘There’s a therianthrope here!'”
It’s easy to buy the entoptics portion of the theory; the similarities between the rock art and the hallucination descriptions in the neuropsychology papers are too striking to dismiss. Less clear are the Stage 3 visions. What’s odd is the uniformity of the Coso shamans’ hallucinations. The vast majority of the estimated 100,000 images found in the Coso Range fall into one of six categories: bighorn sheep (51 percent), humans (13 percent), other animals (5 percent), weapons (2.4 percent), medicine bags (1.3 percent), and geometric (entoptic) designs (26 percent). Yet the hallucinations of nonshamanic drug-induced trance are limitlessly diverse. Whitley’s answer to this is that the shamans may have been practicing some form of “lucid dreaming.” With the help of special glasses that flash lights when the eyes begin the characteristic movements of REM sleep, lucid dreamers achieve a borderline level of consciousness that allows them to watch their dreams like movies and, it’s said, even influence the plots and direct their outcomes. The ethnographies say nothing of this practice. However, as Whitley points out,that doesn’t mean it didn’t occur. “This may,” he says, “be an example of rock art supplementing the body of ethnographic knowledge.”
Back at the mouth of the canyon, a vision appears out of the mist: four wild horses running abreast, manes rippling like white water. As abruptly as they appeared, they wheel and vanish again into the fog. A comment about the four horses of the Apocalypse prompts a raised eyebrow from Whitley. “Some horses got left behind when the military evicted the homesteaders here.” Some things are less symbolic than they appear. And some aren’t.

Some Thoughts on Stones and Sacred Sites (PDF)

Some Thoughts on Stones and Sacred Sites.
David Peat

It is remarkable that North America is scattered with sacred sites, sacred rocks and rock paintings. The question arises as to what these sites mean and how rock markings are to be interpreted. Why put them there and why?

Even more disturbing is the fact that similar stones, mounds and sites, and even similar markings are found throughout Europe and even as far away as India and China, as well as in other parts of the world

What are the meanings of these great sites? Why did early civilizations spend so much energy to build them? Why are they laid out with such accuracy? Why was it necessary to build them to such a scale and why are there so many of them — (ie why duplicate an accurate observatory?).

Scientists and archeologists have offered a number of explanations. One is that many stone circles are astronomical observatories00and it is certainly true that they show accurate astronomical alignments.

But why were they built? It is too far fetched to suppose that such vast and complex undertakings by a society with a sophisticated knowledge of surveying and astronomical arithmetic should have built them simply to discover when to plant crops! Were they perhaps built to acknowledge the great powers and movements of the heavens? Were they an expression of “as above, so below”, ie a representation on earth of the dynamics of the heavens? Or were they built so that people could move through them and celebrate and participate in the actual movement and power of the cosmos? Or were they points of focus for certain “energies”, psychic amplifiers as it were? Who knows? One promising track would be to discover the meaning of these sites from elders in, e.g., North America and Australia who are still part of a living oral tradition.

The notes below are some reflections on ancient mounds, stones, etc. They are approached only from a Western scientific perspective:

1. Megalithic Yard
In the 1950s Dr. Alexander Thom, a professor of engineering at Oxford University, made highly accurate surveys of over 600 megalithic sites in Britain and France. His significant discovery was that all these sites were built on the basis of a common unit of measurement–the megalithic yard–of 2.72 feet (to an accuracy of 0.003). He discovered that many sites were constructed with a veery high degree of surveying skill and that the same unit of length was used throughout Europe to a high degree of accuracy. It raises the question of how and why sites that are vast distances apart in space (and time) should all be constructed according to the same measure. Admittedly a human stride is under 3 feet and a natural unit–but not to such accuracy.

There is now independent statistical evidence that Thom is correct and that a single standard of measurement extended over Europe in megalithic times.

(Question: Is this unit of measure found in North American sites? Note: It was known in Iberia and may then have been carried as the more modern “vera” to South America in post Columbian times. The evidence would therefore have to be from pre-Columbian sites.)

The question is why and how? Were highly accurate length standards transported across Europe and handed down from generation to generation in the form of physical standards–like the French Meter that is kept in Paris? Or was the “yard” derived from some natural, and unknown, process? This is a mystery but it does suggest that the builders of these sites were highly skilled engineers capable of great precision.

Question: How was this information and surveying skill passed on? Were there special sites where teaching took place? Did people come from afar to learn how to carry out their building? And remember that some of these sites may not have been built in one generation–Stonehenge was modified at a number of periods stretching over 1000 years. How was this information encoded and transmitted? Is there any evidence that the sites in North America are connected to those of Europe? (Of course astronomical observatories will always have similar shapes that are determined by the earth’s relationship to sun and moon.)

See: “The place of astronomy in the ancient world”, Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1972. Oxford U.P. 1973.

Alexander Thom, “Megalithic Sites in Britain”, OUP 1967. “Megalithic Lunar Observatories”, OUP 1971.

2. Ley Lines

In the 1920s Alfred Watkins, a psychic and amateur archeologist, had the vision that ancient sites in Britain were all connected by straight lines. Watkins called these “ley lines” and showed, for example, that the Glastonbury-Avebury ley line extended to St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and to Bury St. Edmunds. Often monasteries and churches were built on more ancient sites so Watkins began to look for leys that connected standing stones, churches, burial mounds, megalithic sites, ancient crossroads and sites with ancient names. Many of these were found–but some people objected that with so many ancient sites and stones in Britain it was simply a matter of chance that some of them would fall on straight lines.

Today Watkins is not taken seriously by archeologists. Some people have even associated these patterns of supposed lines with the patterns in Peru, with flying saucers, etc. It certainly attracts a lunatic fringe. Yet some of the major coincidences on ley lines are indeed persuasive. But why straight lines? And why were these lines extended for hundreds of miles?

3. Why do some things look alike?

To see a similar shape or structure in two distant cultures is often staggering. Why should this be, one asks? It must mean that these two cultures were in direct contact in megalithic times, one supposes. But this does not necessarily need to be the case. There are a number of other reasons why symbols and objects may look identical.

Nature’s Design

Note how similar shapes occur throughout nature–in animate and inanimate forms. There are a number of books showing remarkable photographs where identical forms occur at different scales. Sometimes this is because a particular form is the result of simple cumulative growth. The famous Fibonnaci spiral is found in a ram’s horn, the seeds of a sunflower, etc. It is simply the result of any form of growth in which next year’s growth is added to what went befor. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…. Find any number by adding the previous two together–a universal law of growth.

Fibonnaci spirals–and other forms that are related to the same mathematical sequence such as arrangements of certain tiles–are inevitable when growth or accumulation occurs in a particular way–it must always be so, it is a simple fact of the natural world and this accounts for the fact that similar shapes are seen at vastly differing scales throughout nature.

Other shapes have to do with nature’s solutions to design problems–trees, river deltas, lungs, blood vessels all have a branching character. the shape of an egg is repeated throughout nature and in the domes of great buildings because it is the most elegant solution to maintaining strength in certain structures. Grains pack in a certain way before slipping, which means that the angles formed by a pyramid of sand will always be the same. There are a variety of other instances in which such things as gravity, stress, wind, waves, etc., all impose design problems that nature, and humans, solve in the best way. For such reasons it is often the case that natural and human-made forms may resemble one another.

Human Representations

A further example would be a megalithic observatory–used to determine such things as the equinoxes, movements of the moon, etc. Observations will be made in similar ways–using stones or mounds as markers and as backsites and inevitably they will fall into a certain pattern. Anna Sofaer has also shown how the spiral naturally emerges from such a procedure. (This is not to say that there are not other meanings to the spiral.) In this way certain geometric arrangements, triangles, angles and shapes, appear to be universal and similar mathematics is found in widely different sites–they are all a response to the movement of the heavens.

Archetypes

Carl Jung offered yet another explanation–he held that certain symbols such as the circle, square, serpent that swallows its tail, etc.–together with figures such as the hero, virgin, all powerful father, destroying mother, etc., were universal, appearing at all times and in all cultures. He suggested that these were symbolic manifestations of archetypes that reside within the collective unconscious of the human race. for this reason similar dreams, stories and symbols are to be expected to surface across the world.

Recently I discovered a remarkable example of this. In my book Synchronicity I describe the physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s great dream of the World Clock, a vision that is also recorded in a medieval manuscript. A film maker told me that he had heard a report of an identical dream that had occurred to an Inuit Shaman. Such synchronicities would not be considered at all unusual to Carl Jung.

Another case is that of alchemy which was much pursued in the Middle Ages and may have its origins in Sufi knowledge of the spirit. But there is a related spiritual alchemy in ancient China which speaks in terms of the circulation of energies through the spiritual body (as in Kundalini). Likewise one student of alchemy has suggested a deep connection between the alchemical process and the Peace Pipe of the Plains. To Jung there need not be direct physical connection of peoples to establish these parallels–they are all manifestations of the same archetypes.

To Jung the serpent and turtle mounds, rock images, etc., of North America would be manifestations of the collective unconscious and would also occur as far away as India and China. Yet to talk of archetypes and the collective unconscious is to beg the question. For in what sense are these images shared–are they inherited genetically within the brain, like an appendix in the body?
Are they somehow related to the actual architecture of the human brain?
Are they deep inherited memories from our common evolutionary past?
Or are these images communicated psychically?
Or could it be that mind is disembodied and distributed throughout nature–being focussed and unfolded in each individual?
Or do these images come from gods and spirits that enter the human mind?
Or could there be a common wisdom and knowledge within the human race that expresses itself in slightly different ways in different cultures?
Jung is not at all clear about this, his writings are often evasive with the same term being used in a number of different ways throughout the same article.

Are, for example, the Aztec and Egyptian pyramids evidence of direct contact and exchange of knowledge? Or could it be that they are manifestations of the same ancient knowledge and wisdom that is held within the human race? I don’t think that Jung’s archetypes take us far or deep enough–the question may be even more far reaching.

Certainly it is curious as to why standing stones are found throughout the world. Why serpent mounds can be found in different parts of the globe and why certain patterns found on rocks in North America are also found in India, Scotland, Australia, etc. The meaning of these marks is a deep question.

3. Energies

There is some speculation that mounds and rocks have to do with some sort of energy in nature. Below are few speculations:

Cosmic Energy

The whole universe is alive with flows and fluxes of energies. Our galaxy is threaded with vast magnetic fields that act to accelerate and channel cosmic rays. Gravitational vibrations may well be emitted from black holes and even from the centre of the galaxy. In addition electromagnetic radiation of all frequencies comes from the stars. Indeed every cubic centimeter of empty space is packed with vibrating energy which could also be thought of as enfolded information about the whole universe.

Solar Energy

Fluxes of energy also occur at the level of our solar system–magnetic fields extend from the sun and from individual planets. Cosmic rays from far out in the galaxy spiral in towards the sun and earth. A solar wind of charged elementary particles streams out from the sun and, meeting the magnetic field of the earth, creates a great shock wave as well as a long trail that stretches out far behind the earth.

The sun itself is not a static furnace for its output of energy is constantly fluctuating. To begin with the sun actually “rings” like a great bell-vibrating and changing shape. Solar flares push out streams of elementary particles that race towards earth. Periodic sun spot activity also changes the nature and amount of radiation that reaches the earth.

Earth Energies

Our earth is therefore racing through an ever-changing bath of energy and radiation. Not only does this radiation change from day to day–with the rotation of the earth–and year to year–with the earth’s movement around the sun. It also responds to cycles within the sun, to the change in gravitational force as the moon moves around the earth, to disturbances induced by the movements of planets and to the solar system’s movement through the galaxy. So cycles upon cycles upon cycles affect the earth–and keep in mind that many of these cycles are not regular but are effected by other cycles and movements.

As to the earth itself–it has an outer magnetosphere that interacts with the sun’s magnetic fields and solar wind. There are belts of charged particles, like the Van Allen belt, that circle high above the earth from pole to pole and produce the Northern Lights. There are various belts that reflect radio waves–but whose strength and height fluctuate from hour to hour, day to day, and season to season. There are the various cosmic rays that reach the earth’s surface, and whose intensity also fluctuates with a variety of cycles.

Here on the surface of the earth we are subject to an ever-changing dance of electromagnetic fields and charged particles. There is even the Schumann resonance–a standing wave of electromagnetic energy that circles the surface of the earth at about 3-4 cycles/second. (Indeed some have speculated that these ELFs–extremely low frequency waves–have a biological significance,i.e., they may resonate with brain rhythms.)

Add to all this the fact that the earth itself is vibrating with shock waves produced by seismic stresses and one realises that we live in a great bath of fluctuating energy and that the nature of these fluctuations are very much connected with arrangements of the heavens–sun, moon, planets and stars (i.e., our position with respect to the rest of the galaxy).

What’s This Got to Do with Us?

Given that we live in a flux of energies, some of them cyclic, others ever changing, can this in any way affect our lives? this could happen in several ways. Energy fluxes could:

1. Affect the world’s weather, temperatures, winds etc. Which in turn affects life on earth.

2. Certain patterns of energies could affect plant and animal life, such as growth, movements, migrations, etc. These, in turn, are observed by humans.

3. These energies could affect humans directly by
a) Cellular effects, or effects on the immune system; i.e., not sensed consciously, but through changes in the body.
b) Interaction with some special organ, or location, in the body; i.e., certain animals have, I believe, concentration of minerals which respond to the earth’s magnetic field and thereby allow the bird or animals to orient.
d) Subtle effects are focussed or amplified by various natural phenomena such as rocks and rivers to the point where they can be “sensed” by humans.
e) Effects can be sensed only by very special individuals who become dowsers, priests or shamans.

What is the experimental evidence? Very, very controversial. I have visited laboratories and talked to sincere and careful scientists who have demonstrated repeatable human responses to electrical currents, low frequency radiation and electromagnetic fields. I have also talked to other scientists who have been unable to detect any effect at all. Certainly the anecdotal information is strong–as in reports of dowsing. Yet dowsers are also able to use maps and locate water and minerals without ever visiting the site–so their skills may have nothing whatsoever to do with energy fields. Other dowsers speak of spirals, spirals in DNA and in the fields of stones–what does all this mean?

Energy or Information?

It is important to make the distinction between a simple response to energy–such as the movement of a compass needle–and a response to the “information” within this flux; i.e., a television set extracts the important information within a very weak signal. What counts is not the energy itself but its detailed subtle form. My guess would be that people are responding not to brute energies or radiation, but to very subtle forms and levels of information–information about the earth and cosmic orientations.

A Field of Information

In my recent book I have tried to tie in some ideas on electromagnetic processes in cells to the idea of global fields of information. I include the print-out of this.

Stones and Sites

A further possibility is that in some way this flux of information becomes localized, amplified and focussed within limited geographical regions. In these regions holy people, and possibly ordinary people, can sense some great force, spirit or intelligence–indeed they would ultimately be responding to the overall intelligence of the whole universe.

In addition to standing stones, mounds, long barrows, etc., there are also the Fairy Glens, Holy Wells and sacred woods that are found all over Britain. All suggest that a certain “force” or “spirit” may be associated with particular places on earth.

But how is this possible? Can an explanation be given at the purely “scientific” level? Take a rock that contains quartz. A quartz crystal is piezoelectric which means that when placed under pressure it will generate a considerable electrical potential–tens of thousands of volts. Suppose a deposit of quartz lies in the path of periodic seismic shock waves–the result would be a fluctuating electrical field in the area. Indeed a variety of speculations have been made about underground rivers, rocks and standing stones–i.e., that they amplify weak effects and generate fields that are detectable.

One theory is that carefully chosen stones are placed at a sacred site and amplify subtle effects to the point where they are detectable by ordinary, sensitive people. In this way the various sacred sites grew up–they were “beacons” and amplifiers of natural forces. But such arrangements also have astronomical significance, so presumably there would be some connection between earth and cosmic energies. All that is pure speculation–some sensitives report feeling electrical impulses. Others claim to have measured magnetic and electrical fields–but it is hard to rely upon anecdotes like this.

My own opinion is that there may well be some sort of response to the fact that we live in an ever changing electromagnetic flux. Life evolved under such conditions and may make use of them. There may well be subtle ways in which we can communicate with the earth and listen to the cosmos. Indeed we may even be able to make use of these complex fields to communicate with each other. Moreover, since the fields on earth are the results of complex processes involving the planet, its interaction with the solar wind and sun, its perturbation by the planets and galactic effects, it is not unreasonable to suppose that this vast sea of energy-information contains within it patterns of the sun, moon, planets and cosmos.

But it is a major jump from such speculations to suggest that this is why the great stones and earthworks were constructed. There may be many other reasons. One should also listen to elders and oral historians who may have their own accounts of the meaning of the stones.

Wayfinding and the New Sun: Indigenous Science in the Modern World (PDF)

Wayfinding and the New Sun: Indigenous Science in the Modern World
by Pamela Colorado
Note: The last few years have seen a re-assessment of the knowledge held by the indigenous peoples of the world, and a desire to understand traditional ways of life and the wisdom they contain. One of the most exciting possibilities to emerge from this revival is a synthesis, a real dialogue between ancient and contemporary modes of knowledge. The following article is one such contribution to that synthesis. It is adapted from a talk between Jane Carroll of Beshara magazine and Pamela Colorado, founder of the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network (WISN).
Pamela Colorado was born an Oneida Indian, meaning “people of reality’ (called by white settlers the”Iroquois”) of the tribe of Ongwehahwe (“the people of the long-standing rocks”), and was brought up on a reservation in Wisconsin. She was one of the first Indian women to attend an American university and completed her doctorate work at Harvard University where she started her attempt to integrate within herself Native and Western systems of knowledge. This led to the founding of WISN, with participation from tribal elders, scientists, artists, and others; its purpose is to forge links between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples throughout the world, revitalizing ancient forms of knowledge. Of special interest are the great migrations of pre-history, and correlating the oral accounts of these events with modern archeological discoveries.
Adapted with permission from Beshara, Issue 13, Summer 1991.

My thoughts concerning indigenous science first came to me while I was completing my doctoral dissertation in 1977. At that time I was having great difficulty communicating with my doctoral committee. I had excellent instruction and a thorough curriculum, but I just could not communicate in the way that was expected. One day I was sitting in my apartment in Cambridge, and it came to me that it was not just that, as Native people, we look at life differently. Even the way we come to knowledge and present that knowledge is totally different from the Western way. The I heard myself say out loud: “It’s almost as if we have a science of our own!” And as soon as I thought it, or heard myself say it, I realized that is what needs to be said, because up until that time it was only the West which “had science”.
Of course, a lot of what is in the Native American worldview, or indigenous worldview, falls beyond what would normally be thought of as science in a Western sense, although there are some things that are directly parallel–for example,the knowledge Native people have about the environment. But because I felt our view is so much broader I thought it a good thing to call it “science”. Some people have called it natural science, others have called it life science, some have called it woman science. But for my own purposes, I go back to sciens/scientia, which meant “to know” in its largest sense Native science is a way of bringing people to a higher knowledge, and one of its goals is to bring us to the Gii Lai–“the still quiet place”. Ind other words, our religion and our spirituality are built into our science. And Native scientists, through their rituals, songs, dance, are working all the time with energies–the energies of the Earth–in very precise ways.
Now in 1977 it seemed quite radical to think that tribal peoples would have anything at all to contribute to Western knowledge. And indeed nothing much happened until several years ago. By that time, the environmental crises had deepened, threats to the survival of tribal peoples had sharpened, and attention to environmental issues like the rainforests had to some extent focused the world’s attention on tribal peoples. Then in 1987 along came the Bruntland report. It is rather weak in its understanding of tribal peoples but at least the commission’s report says, in effect, go and learn from indigenous people, because they are the last reservoirs of knowledge of how to live sustainably with the environment. They did not do anything to ensure this would happen or make any suggestions about how it could come about. But it was from this that the inspiration came for the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network.
The Dark Sun
Had I tried to do this work before now, it would not have happened because in tribal peoples’ view, at least in the Americas, it wasn’t appropriate to talk about certain kinds of knowledge. These things were considered secret; we just didn’t share them, not among tribes and definitely not with the Western world. Oral tradition says there was a very definite decision made, at some point, not to talk, not to share our knowledge. Recently I discovered that one such policy originated in Mexico at Tenochitlan in 1521.
People knew then that we were entering a time they called the Dark Sun, which was predicted for 468 years.During this time consciousness would go through darkness. Prior to the arrival of the Dark Sun, the spiritual and scientific community prepared the people for what was to come. These preparations were four- or five-fold. The first was that the sites of knowledge–the pyramids and petroglyphs sites that dot the Americas–the traditional “universities” would be closed. The knowledge would no longer be recorded, neither written by Aztecs and Mayans, nor enacted in the big centers of ritual like the pyramids. This is why, when the white people came, they found so many of the ancient sites apparently abandoned.
Secondly, the people were told that the ancient teachings would have to be preserved withi family structures, and moved to the personal domain of our own hearts. Thirdly, Native tribes would stop their cycles of international gatherings and, as a result, the knowledge would become scattered to all the directions.
Many people still assume that the Native peoples of the Americas always lived just as the new wave of Europeans in the 1500s-1600s found them. But that is not true. What they found were people who were under attack, and who were implementing the instructions they had been given for survival through the Dark Sun. For instance, at the time of contact, many of the Native communities had become palisaded, stockaded villages, and people weren’t mixing with each other anymore. When they did mix, the contact was often hostile.
Before this, according to our oral history, there had been many, many conacts, not only between the different peoples of North and South America, but also across the Pacific Ocean and across the Atlantic Ocean. There were established trade routes, and ways of exchanging knowledge. The contacts began to be different in the 1500s. For instance I comre from a northeast tribe and my people used to go to Mexico City for what we might today call “conferences”–policy-making sessions–about every six years. These meetings were attended by peoples from all over the Americas, and also by tribes which came across the Pacific Ocean by boat. They stopped after 1521.
So at the time of the Dark Sun, it was said that only two things would stay open. We would keep our languages alive, because so much knowledge of our ancestors is in that,. Secondly, we would keep our spiritual contact with the Great Spirit, and that would saty open always. It was understood that this layering of activity would encode teachings on our consciousness, just as the ancients carved their knowledge into rocks. And like the rocks, the knowledge or consciousness can be entered into, now, only with the correct “key”.
I have a document which records this prophecy, which I found just recently in Mexico City. In it are the words of Cuautemoc, one of the last Aztec chiefs. Cuautemoc had the job of standing in front of the thousands of people and delivering the horrific prophecy of the Dark Sun, telling them this is how they were to live, how they were going to survive for the next 400 years:
Our sun has hidden.
Our sun has disappeared from sight,
And in complete darkness
it has left us.
But we know that it will return again.
That once again it will emerge
and will shed its light on us anew.

But while it is there in the place of Silence
let us quickly reunite,
let us embrace one another.
And in the center of our being let us hide
all that our heart loves
and which we know to be a great treasure.

Such a document exists because it was recorded by a Spanish Catholic priest already present at the gathering. It is written in Spanish and Nahuatl, the Aztec language.
All this is in our oral history. Evidence of this, in addition to the written documents, is the reading of wampum belts. These are beaded belts, several thousand years old, made out of shells. They are mnemonic devices, used to trigger the mind, and they’re memorized; people who read those belts are trained from early on to be able to do it. After I heard about the Dark Sun prophecy in Mexico, I visited one of my chiefs in the north and asked whether it was true, and whether there was the degree of migration and contact which I have described. He said, “Yes, it fits.” I was very happy, because I had validated this in a traditional way.
From All the Directions
It was also said that after the 468 years, according to the Aztec calendar, there would be a new sun–which started in approximately 1987. Other Native peoples have a similar prophecy. They may not have put it in mathematical form, but they’ll tell you in another, maybe symbolic, fashion.
What is prophesied as the end of the Dark Sun is that the condor (that is, the land of the South Americas) and the eagle (the land of the North Americas) will be re-united, and the knowledge of the Earth will re-emerge and the knowledge that we have will become whole. When we say “the Earth’ in our language, we don’t mean just the physical Earth, but rather something you might call “energy”. During the Dark Sun, the knowledge became fragmented. This ancient knowledge will rise again, only this time the key to it is integration, and we have to do it with “all the directions”.
One way of understanding all the directions is that these are the colors of the races of humankind. As the fragments of knowledge start to come out, we will meet people and each will have a certain piece, and as we put them together they will start to become whole again. Many people today don’t realize that the different tribes do not understand each other any more. While I can understand most of the Iroquois people, for example, I cannot understand our neighbors, the Sioux, except for a few words. And yet all of our languages (more than 1000 in North America) contain “universal” words, as well as unique local words. Indians love to hear each other’s language, because it gives us the chance to discover how, by what kinds of words, we are united and how we are different.
The Overview Effect
How might this integration occur? Some while ago I read about an intriguing phenomenon described by space scholar Frank White. In his boo The Overview Effect, he talks about what happened to the astronauts when they went into space. Some of them had what I suppose would be called profound spiritual conversions. White describes the experience of looking down on that which we think of as separated things, and seeing it is all one, “the universal insight”. Then he goes on to talk about “the overview effect”, your simultaneous recognition that you too are a part of what you are seeing. He wonders if we could find some way of creating the possibility for human consciousness to be transformed to this state without blasting everybody into outer space.
Combining this with things I have read from Thomas Berry and other environmentalists, I have come to feel that the biggest problem we face in terms of the Earth, and the whole of humanity, cannot be tackled by technology. We already have the technology to do the job, to heal the Earth–but what matters is the attitudes we carry in our minds and in our hearts. A transformation in worldview needs to occur.
So, how to provide opportunities for large numbers of people to achieve “the overview effect” and “the universal insight”? That is the question if the the Earth is to survive. Again, clues come from Native science.
Between the Worlds
Our oral history, which we would estimate goes back more than 30,000 years, describes four periods in the past when the Earth was created and destroyed. One was destroyed by fire, another by wind, another by ice, and another by water. This information is recorded on teh petroglyphs in the Americas, for example, as well as in story form. The petroglyphs give rise to two interesting questions–when were they made and why were they made?
In each of the four periods or “worlds”, there arose a situation from which humanity had some great lesson to learn–and every time there was a mistake made.Sometimes there were warnings. Sometimes people could see they were making a mistake but were unwilling or unable to rectify the error. And so nature herself made an adjustment. The greatest thing we can accomplish in our science and in our lives is to be in balance with the universe. But each time, in each of these four worlds, people were unable to maintain that balance–they made mistakes which led to the destruction of their world.
I have done some research into these four worlds in association with Hanson Ashley, a Navajo medicine man and a transpersonal psychologist. We wanted to know how we could begin to talk about the concept of worlds to the West, and developed the hypothesis that they could be described as the evolving consciousness of humanity.(When I say “evolving”, it has to be understood more like a “revolving” consciousness, because as Native people we don’t look at things linearly.) We also wanted to be accurate in what we said; we didn’t want to distort knowledge in an effort to communicate across cultures, so Hanson spent time talking to several elders about the nature of the worlds. He now has a detailed history of each of them–and this includes the specific teachings or learnings which were of each world.
The elders agreed that you could, indeed, think about the worlds in terms of human consciousness. But the situation was more complicated than we had thought, for Hanson also found out that the people did not learn the most important lessons within the worlds–but between the world cycles. “Between the worlds” was the time when humanity had to do things to put itself in accord again–in accord with life, or with the natural world, however you want to say it. The four worlds were not the worlds of “man”, but were worlds in which nature herself went through her growth, challenges, transformations and realignments to come into balance.
So if we are interested in discovering how to create a shift in attitude, which is necessary now in order to save the planet, and how to integrate Native thought, we also have to understand what happened between those worlds. What happened that somehow saved the day and permitted humanity to move into another world–or, one could say, another form of consciousness? And how did our ancestors’ choices accommodate or block the Earth’s natural evolution?
The Wayfaring Mindset
Many things happened “between the worlds”, but one of the primary events was a journey or migration. These journeys can be described as wayfinding, and it was during these great movements or migrations that knowledge of how to live in balance with the Earth was recorded in the original rock carvings and petroglyphs.
This was a time when people physically moved around on the Earth or on the water. They moved in a patterned way; it wasn’t just any old way, for they knew they were going to some place for a specific reason. They were usually led by someone, one who had the inspiration or vision of where to go. As the people moved about, there were lessons they learned, mistakes they made, risk they took, and out of those experiences they learned rituals, songs and strategies that prepared them for movement into the next cycle.
One of the things the Indigenous Science Network is working on now is to recreate some of these migrations. Our focus is not so much on recreating the exact journeys, but rather the recreation of the protocol, the mindset that came into being as a result of lessons learned during the migrations. We are inviting our white brothers and sisters to join us in this because we believe this is something we are meant to be doing.
Bridges to the West
To communicate with the West we need “bridges”, models of migrations. One good example comes from the Polynesians:
In 1976 the Polynesian Voyaging Society was established and its first task was to recreate a traditional double-hulled Polynesian voyaging canoe, the “Hokule’a”, that would be capable of trans-oceanic voyages. But they soon discovered there were no Hawaiians who knew how to navigate in the traditional way–without instruments! as they searched they eventually found Mao Piailug from Micronesia, an elder who still knew the traditional methods of non-instrument navigation. He was brought to Hawaii to work with a young Hawaiian native, Nainoa Thompson. Nainoa drew from Western and indigenous sciences: He studied satellite weather charts and astronomy, and then he studied with Mao, who used stones to teach what our ancestors had known.
The result of this integrated education was the 1976 voyage of Hokule’a from Hawaii to Tahiti. This voyage was accomplished without the benefit of any instruments or charts. In 1985, on a subsequent voyage from Rarotonga to New Zealand, a distance of 1700 nautical miles across open sea, Nainoa steered a course which was only 100 miles farther than the shortest distance possible between the two points. The only reason for the extra miles was severe weather conditions.
The interesting question is, how did he do it? Well, that gets to something mentioned earlier–the overview effect. As Native people, we learn to train our minds from the time we are children, to be centered where we are, grounded in reality, and see all the signs that are around us. For the purposes of navigation, it is necessary to see the roll of the waves, the movements of the fish, the birds, the winds, etc. Ind addition, you have to have the ability to project yourself out, “to see what it’s not possible to see”. I’m just learning this myself, but I know that it is an ability that our people have known for thousands of years, and still practice. Now our task is to see that this mental acumen, this capacity of “the good mind”, is not lost. So this wayfinding mindset, the ability to project ourselves out, is a knowledge that is necessary if we are to create a healthy relationship with the Earth.
A New Sun
Nobody said that the Dark Sun was due to the coming of the Europeans. (In fact there is evidence of much earlier contact with the Europeans; but then the relationships were different.) Who tells the sun how to move? Not the Spanish or the English!
We don’t like what has happened. We surely didn’t want it. On the other hand, that’s life–the cycles of life. Perhaps the best way to say it is that we really value accommodation as a universal principle. Accommodation to life is more important than judging what needed to have happened. Now what is important is that we are entering a new sun.

The Art of Human Navigation (PDF)

Wayfinding
The Art of Human Navigation
“For the earth is ocean. And rising everywhere in it are islands. Go find the islands…”
From An Ocean in Mind.

Karen Chandler

Such was Nature’s strong, persistent message for ancient Polynesian voyagers and native tribes of the Pacific Northwest Islands. Written in the stars, on flotsam, and in bird migration paths, came word of distant, undiscovered islands. Called seaward beyond the horizon clouds, native peoples of the Pacific Rim did indeed find islands scattered throughout a sea spanning half the surface area of the earth. Out they went and back they came, home again to Samoa and Tahiti, to the Prince of Wales and the Queen Charlotte Islands. How? asked western navigators centuries ago. Skillfully, the legends tell us, consistently tracking nature’s guideposts.
Without instruments navigation was a human act. The map was in the mind of the wayfinder, whose whole being had been trained and opened by chants, long hours of observation and elder’s patient teachings. He or she learned to recognize and interpret nature’s clues to judge direction, distance traveled, time and final landfall. Under sail in a circle of sea and sky, memory, awareness and the physical senses formed part of a dead reckoning system linked to ocean, atmosphere and sealife
Wayfinding was a well-developed art according to Will Kyselka, astronomer and author of a book on Polynesian wayfinding. For hi it was as precise as math and logic, with the magic of ritual and intuition. For Native American and social scientist, Dr. Pamela Colorado,founder of the Indigenous Science Network, it was and is, science in the full meaning of the word, “a holistic way of knowing nature, fully human, aligned with self, nature, and spirit.” It is proof, according to her and cultural anthropologists, of the intentional peopling of the Pacific through exploration, trans-Pacific gatherings and established trade routes.
For the ancient navigator apprenticed to the sea, wayfinding was a way of life embedded in his being. It was part of a culture that still watches, rearing seamen as meticulous observers of natural phenomena. These new wayfinders, schooled in modern astronomy and experienced in ways of the sea, are learning to trust their senses and their minds once again on a journey in search of the ancient mind. Their goal is to sense and feel their way back into harmony with nature, a state of being so needed, many claim, in a high-tech western culture trained to dominate, not cooperate, with nature.
Each ocean voyage began with two points on the navigator’s reference course. “You knew where you started, and where you wanted to go,” says Hawaiian steersman Na’ilima. He recently returned from a wayfinding voyage to Tahiti on the Hokule’a, a modern replica of an ancient sailing canoe. “Between home and that distant island may lay thousands of miles of open sea,” he says. “It did for us.” It did, no doubt, for the Haidas people of Prince of Wales Island. They sailed, Dr. Colorado tells us, to Japan and back. Along such a route, everything had meaning: ocean swells, the color and shape of the clouds, currents, and the pitch and roll of the canoe.
“Native sailors knew what to expect,” says Dr. Colorado. “They knew the wind and sea conditions all along the way from chants, personal accounts, and petroglyphs, or symbolic rock drawings.” According to her research, Indians of the northwest Pacific coast may have planned their trips using star maps and tidal clocks written in the changing pattern of tideline rocks.
Navigators, like the Nootka women of Vancouver Island, had songs and special rhythms keyed to the surface movements of the sea. “Everything we ever knew about the movement of the sea was preserved in the verse of that song,” writes Anne Cameron, quoting an elder in her historical novel on Nootka tribal history. “There was a song for goin’ to China and a song for goin’ to Japan. All she (the steerswoman) had to know was the song and she knew where she was.”
“We had the rising sun and the swells to steer by too,” says Na’ilima. “Like other wayfinders, we also knew where reference islands lay along our path. And most of all, we had the stars. They showed the way.”
According to Na’ilima and others, navigators set their course, their time, their latitude,and their distance traveled by the night sky. Each target island has its guiding stars, points along the margin of an imagined compass that was studded with other well known lights. In the center sat the wayfinder, watching and memorizing the patterns. The steersman nosed the “compass needle” along a predetermined path of successively rising or setting stars. In the mind’s eye of the crew, the sea and reference islands flowed past a stationary canoe, from beneath one star position to another. Synchronous pairs of rising or setting stars, charted just above the horizon, told latitude. Other stars at zenith marked the location of target islands like Tahiti and Hawaii.
At dawn the navigator read direction in the swells against the pattern of the morning sky. “We always knew where north was–our reference point for daytime steering,” Na’ilima explains. It was never more than a few handwidths away from a sun that rose just north and south of east.”
Wayfinding was very effective but less precise during the day. It required more clues and more concentration to assimilate and process them. But the swells were always there, and seasonal trade winds blew in consistent patterns written in the color and shape of horizon clouds. The wayfinder could estimate speed from the sound and feel of the canoe and determine currents from the shape and direction of waves. At times he or she just knew the direction to set–with or without external clues–drawing upon intuition, perhaps, or a subtle communion with the sea itself that was the essential mark of a seasoned wayfinder.
The final destination lay to windward of the reference track, surrounded by what Kyselka calls “concentric circles of life”, coastal fish and homing birds, land clouds, and wave defraction and refraction patterns. These diverse though predictable signs of a landmass could expand a small island into a sizable target or bridge island gaps in an archipelago, creating a large block to aim for. With a shift in focus to the nearfield, the wayfinder pieced together each island’s signature. Carefully, knowingly, the crew tracked the evening seabird flight paths and the directional streaks of transient deep phosphorescence.
That final destination, Dr. Colorado reminds us, is also a mindset. It is a way of seeing and being in balance with nature, gleaned from living a ceremonial life. Each wayfinding voyage, she points out, reminds us of our human potential to integrate analysis with intuition, and ritual with western science. “The greatest thing we can accomplish in our science and in our lives,” she concludes, “is to be in balance with the universe.”
Renewed interest in wayfinding presages a time when scientist and seaman alike are in balance and in open communication with nature. Recent voyages have proven that it can be done again. In Hawaii the Hokule’a has made three successful wayfinding voyages to Tahiti and back. The first was led by Mau Piailug, a traditional Polynesian navigator; the last two by Hawaiian Nainoa Thompson, one of the new breed of wayfinders. Na’ilima’s expedition, called “No Na Mamo” (For the Next Generation), symbolizes the intention of native peoples and organizations like the Indigenous Science Network, to share traditional knowledge. Other trips are planned. Canoes will gather from around the world on Vancouver Island in 1993 as native tribes convene to rekindle the art.
“We are still missing pieces of information”, says Dr. Colorado. “Some of the art remains hidden. Some may have been lost.” Or not yet found, at least by western culture. For we in the west may still not know how to ask the right questions or to understand the full meaning of each answer until our own minds begin to open and expand under the tutelage of elders and nature’s wise persistent teachings.
Author’s note–books cited or recommended: An Ocean in Mind by Will Kyselka; The Daughters of Copperwoman by Anne Cameron; and We the Navigators by David Lewis.
For more information on the Indigenous Science Network, contact Dr. Pamela Colorado, 573 Wainee St., Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii.
Karen Chandler, M.S., is a marine ecologist and co-founder of Adventure Spirit Maui, a company which specializes in ocean awareness and wilderness expeditions. P.O Box 3104, Waikoloa, Hawaii 96738.

A Meeting Between Brothers (PDF)

A Meeting Between Brothers
The last few years have seen a re-assessment of the knowledge held by the indigenous peoples of the world, and a desire to understand traditional ways of life and the wisdom they contain. One of the most exciting possibilities to emerge from this revival of a synthesis, and a real dialogue, between ancient and contemporary modes of knowledge. In the following articles, we introduce two ways in which this possibility is currently being presented to us.

Indigenous Science
Dr Pamela Colorado talks to Jane Carroll
Dr Pamela Colorado was born an Oneida Indian, meaning ‘people of reality’ (called by white settlers the ‘Iroquois”) of the tribe of Ongwehahwe (‘the people of the long-standing rocks’), and was brought up on a reservation in the state of Wisconsin. She was one of the first Indian women to attend an American university, taking a degree in Social Sciences at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where she was the only native person in a student body of ver 20,000. She went on to do doctoral work at Harvard, studying alcoholism in the native communities. It was during her doctorate that she began to take an interest in her indigenous culture, and to attempt to integrate within herself native and Western systems of knowledge.
She has since made a special study of the ancient American rock carvings and their meanings, and in 1989 founded The Worldwide Indigenous Science Network. With a membership which includes tribal elders, scientists, artists, academics and other professionals, the Network aims to forge links between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples throughout the world, researching and reviving the ancient forms of knowledge which the tribal peoples still hold. Amongst the many schemes scheduled for the next few years is a research project into the great migrations which the Indian peoples undertook in pre-history, trying to correlate the accounts given in the oral histories of the tribes with modern archaeological discoveries.
Dr Colorado now teaches at the University of Calgary in Canada. Jane Carroll spoke to her during a recent visit to the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California.

How did the Network for Indigenous Science start?
The idea had first come to me whilst I was doing my doctoral dissertation in 1977. At that time, I was having great difficulty communicating with my doctoral committee. I had excellent instruction, and it was a really demanding curriculum, but I could not communicate in the way that was expected. One day I was sitting in my apartment in Cambridge, and it came to me that it was not just that, as native people, we look at life differently. Even the way we present the knowledge and come to the knowledge is totally different from the Western way. Then I heard myself say out loud: “It’s almost as if we have a science of our own!” And as soon as I thought it, or heard myself say it, I realised that that is what needs to be said, because up until that time it was only the West which could have science. The rest of the world’s cultures could have culture or philosophy, but it wasn’t considered that anyone else could have science.
Of course, a lot of what is in the native American worldview, or indigenous world-view, falls beyond what we would normally think of as science in a western sense – although there are some things that could be considered directly parallel; for example, the knowledge that native people have about the environment. But it was because I felt that our view is so much broader that I felt it was a good thing to call it ‘science’. Knowing something about the history of science, I knew that western science is in the process of struggling for its third revolution – revolution in the sense of Thomas Kuhn’s definition – so I thought that maybe by calling indigenous knowledge ‘science’, there was a possibility of making a bridge between it and western knowledge.
Another consideration was that one can still see, everywhere, the destruction of native lands and tribal people. The people have never been able to find a voice to stop this destruction. This is perhaps because of the language that we use; not only because of actual linguistic differences, but also the way we have been educated and learnt to communicate with western people. For instance, we have had available to us the language of anthropology, because in the past anthropologists were the only educated people that ever spent time with us. But these people were clearly not doing the job of preventing the annihilation, for even in the 70s it was becoming clear that things were getting very dangerous; there was worry about the survival of tribal people globally and about the survival of the planet.
So my feeling was, that if I could find a way to talk about the native sciences, and about how much fuller and richer they are in many ways than western science, perhaps the western scientists would see something that they could learn from. Then maybe they would get involved with us, and then maybe they wouldn’t kill us anymore. I thought of it that simply, as a protection – not only for indigenous people but also, perhaps, for all people.

Can you say in what way indigenous knowledge is science?
When I looked around at what I had learnt through my education, I asked myself what, in western society, carries the weight that our indigenous knowledge does in ours? what is equivalent in term of value that we put on our knowledge systems, including the ritual and all that’s in it? I concluded that it had to be science, not religion or philosophy, for it seemed to me that science is held in such high esteem in the west. Since we hold our knowledge system to be spiritually based and, in a sense, spiritually driven, I wanted to find an equivalent knowledge system in the west that would be capable of ‘carrying the weight of God’. And again it looked like science to me.
If you want definitions of what indigenous science is: some people have called it natural science, others have called it life science, some have called it woman science, but for my own purposes, I go back to sciens/scientia, which means ‘to know’ in its largest sense. Native science is a way of bringing people to a higher knowledge, and one of its goals is to bring us to the Gii Lai – ‘the still quiet place’. In other words, our religion and our spirituality are built into it. Another thing that can be said is that native scientists, through their rituals and songs, etc. are working all the time with energies – the energies of the earth – in a way which is just as precise as the way western scientists work.

How have people responded to the idea of indigenous science?
In 1977, it seemed as if I had a tremendous nerve to think that tribal people would have anything at all to contribute to western knowledge, and I was considered quite radical. People said they were interested, but they did not want to know more. Although even then there were a few who said, this is really good stuff, have you written about it? Of course I hadn’t, because I had not worked out any way of talking about it properly. So nothing much happened until two or three years ago. By that time, the environmental crisis had deepened, threats to the survival of tribal people had sharpened, and the attention given to certain environmental issues like the rainforests and the problems in Brazil had focussed the world’s attention a little on tribal people. Then, in 1987, along came the Brundtland report. It is rather weak-kneed as far as tribal people are concerned, but at least the commission’s report says: go and learn from indigenous people, because they are the last reservoirs of the knowledge of how to live sustainably with the environment. Of course, they did not do anything about seeing that it would happen or make any suggestions about how it could come about. But it was from there that the inspiration came for the Network.
One thing that is important to add is that if I had tried to do this work before now, it would not have happened, because in tribal peoples’ view, especially in the Americas, it wasn’t appropriate to talk about certain kinds of knowledge. They were considered secret; we just didn’t share them, not among tribes and definitely not with the western world.
Is there a specific reason for this?
Yes, at least in the Americas. I haven’t checked it out in the other parts of the globe. In our oral tradition, it is said that there was a very definite decision made, at some point, not to talk, not to share our knowledge. I did some research recently into where that policy originated, and found that it was in Mexico at Tenochtitlan in 1521.
You see, people knew then, through our scientific practices, that we were entering a time they called the Dark Sun,which would go on for 468 years. During this time, consciousness would go through darkness. In fact, around that time it is recorded that there was a flare-up of solar activity with enormous sunspots. These sunspots, which were visible to the naked eye, made the sun look black.
Prior to the arrival of the Dark Sun, the spiritual and scientific community prepared the people. These preparations were four or five fold. The first was that the sites of knowledge – such as the pyramids and petroglyph sites that dot the Americas – those traditional universities would be closed, and the knowledge would no longer be recorded; neither written down in the case of the Aztecs or Mayans, nor enacted in the big centres of ritual, like the pyramids. This is why, when the white people came, they found so many of the ancient sites apparently abandoned. Secondly, the people were told that the ancient teachings would have to be preserved within family structures, and move to the personal domain of our own hearts. Thirdly, native tribes would stop the cycle of international gatherings and as a result, the knowledge would become scattered to all the directions.
It was said, at that time, that only two things would stay open – we would keep our languages alive, because so much knowledge of our ancestors is in that; and secondarily we would keep our spiritual contact with the Great Spirit, and that would stay open always. It was understood that this layering of activity would encode teachings on our consciousness, just as the ancients carved their knowledge into rocks. And like the rocks, the knowledge or consciousness can be entered into, now, only with the correct ‘key’.
I have a document which records this prophecy, which I found in Mexico City just last February. In it are the words of Cuautemoc, one of the last Aztec chiefs. Cuautemoc had the job of standing in front of the thousands of people and delivering the horrific prophecy of the Dark Sun, telling them that this is how they were to live, how they were going to survive for the next 400 years. The reason that such a document exists is that the Spanish had already arrived in Mexico City, and there was a Catholic priest present at the gathering, who recorded it. It is written in Spanish and Nahuak, which is an Aztec language; after I found it last year, I brought it back to North America and had it translated. It is a very powerful and moving speech.
Many people still assume that the native peoples of the Americas always lived just as the new wave of Europeans in the 1500s/1600s found them. But that is not true. What they found were people who were under attack, and who were implementing the instructions they had been given for survival through the Dark Sun. For instance, at the time of contact, many of the native communities had become pallisaded, stockaded villages, and people weren’t mixing with each other anymore. When they did mix, contact was often hostile.

It had been different before this time?
Oh yes. According to our oral history there had been many, many contacts, not only between the different peoples of North and South America, but also across the Pacific Ocean and across the Atlantic Ocean. There were established trade-routes, and ways of exchanging knowledge. The contacts began to be different in the 1500s. For instance, I come from a tribe up in the north-east, by the Great Lakes, and my people used to come down to Mexico City for what we might today call ‘conferences’ – policy-making sessions – about every six years. These were attended by peoples from all over the Americas, and also by tribes which came over the Pacific Ocean by boat. They stopped after 1521.
All this is in our oral history. But I know, being a western-trained scientist, that if I tell someone it is in our oral history, they’ll say, prove it. Well, one of the evidences of all this – in addition to the written document – is that amongst our surviving traditions, is the reading of the wampum belts.
These are beaded belts made out of shells, and they are a couple of thousand years old. They are mnemonic devices, used to trigger your mind, and they’re memorised; people who read those belts are trained from early on to be able to do it. After I heard about this prophecy in Mexico, I visited one of my chiefs and asked whether it was true,and whether there was the degree of migration and contact which I have described to you. And he said: Yes, it fits. I was really happy, because I had validated it in a traditional way.

Do you have any explanation for why the choice was to keep that knowledge underground?
Oh yes, they’re really clear about that. It was for protection. They didn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands: it was too sacred and too powerful.

Was Mexico in some way a centre in that period for the native peoples in the North of America, so that a statement made there could have effect throughout the continent?
Yes, but this another thing that’s tricky to understand. because some parts of our knowledge system can be said to be very intuitive, people that weren’t there knew it anyway, and felt it, and they were preparing themselves.
Then they said that after the 468 years there would be a new sun, which started in approximately 1987. This is in the Aztec calendar. You see my people from the Great Lakes come from the Aztec people, from that migration. Other native people have a similar prophecy: they may not have put it in mathematical form, but they’ll tell you in another, maybe symbolic, fashion.
What is prophesied at the end of the Dark Sun is that the condor (ie the land of the South Americas) and the eagle (the land of the North Americas) will be re-united, and the knowledge of the earth – and you must understand that when we say ‘the earth’ in our language, we don’t just man the physical earth, we refer to something which you might call ‘energy’ – the knowledge of the earth will come out again and the knowledge that we have will become whole. The ancient knowledge will rise again, only this time the key to it is integration, and we have to do it with ‘all the directions’.
One way of understanding ‘all the directions’ is that these are the colours of the races of man. As the fragments of knowledge start to come out, we will meet people, and each of us will have a certain piece,and as we put them together they will start to become whole again. You see, during this Dark Sun, the knowledge has become fragmented. Many people don’t realise that the different tribes do not even understand each other any more. I can understand most of the Iriquois peoples, because they speak dialects of my language, but I cannot understand our neighbours, the Sioux, except for a few words. This is important because all of our languages (there are more than 1000 in North America) contain both ‘universal’ words and unique local words. Indians love to hear each other’s language, because it gives us the chance to discover how, by what kinds of words, we are united and how we are different.

When you talk about the knowledge coming out now, I take you to mean not the formal knowledge that was repressed or hidden four hundred years ago, but that spirit of the knowledge?
Yes- although I would call that ‘formal’ knowledge. What’s more formal than that?

I mean that rather than being known through a formal ritual, now it might take other forms. For example, the video you show to introduce the Network mentions that modern technology has taken us to the moon and given us a view of the earth as a single whole. The indigenous people have always had this kind of knowledge of the earth, but it has taken highly analytical technology to bring it back to us. This view of the earth is becoming a kind of icon for our times, and it seems to be a combining between the two knowledges.

Except, a man named Frank White, who is a space scholar and a writer, wrote a book called ‘The Overview Effect’ in which he talks about what happened to the astronauts when they went into space. Some of them had what I suppose would be called profound spiritual conversions. White calls the experience of looking down on that which we know as separate things, and seeing that it is all one, ‘the universal insight’. Then he goes on to talk about ‘the overview effect’; which is that it isn’t just that you are standing back from what you see, but at the same time you recognise that you are a part of it. He wonders if we could find some way of creating the possibility for human consciousness to be transformed to this state without blasting everybody into outer space. It is very destructive of the environment to create those ships, we don’t have the resources, and not everybody wants to be an astronaut.
Combining this with things that I have read from Thomas Berry and other environmentalists, I have come to feel that the biggest problems that we face in terms of the earth, and the whole of humanity, cannot be tackled by technology. We have the technology now to do the job – to heal the earth – but what matters is the attitudes that we carry in our minds and in our hearts. A transformation in world-view needs to occur.
So, how to provide opportunities for large numbers of people to achieve ‘the overview effect’ and ‘the universal insight’? That is the question if the earth is to survive. And it is here that I feel that native science has something to really contribute.

Could yo give an example of the sort of scientific projects the Network is undertaking?
Yes, but first let me provide some background. In our oral history, which we would estimate goes back more than 30,000 years, it is described that there were four periods in the past when the earth was created and destroyed. One was destroyed by fire, another by wind, another by ice and another by water. This information is recorded on the petroglyphs in the Americas, for example, as well as in story form. The petroglyphs are interesting to mention here, because of the questions they give rise to, such as, when were they made and why were they made?
At each time, in each one of those worlds, there was the situation in which humanity had some great lesson to learn, and every time there was a mistake made. Sometimes there were warnings, or people could see that they were making a mistake but were unwilling or unable to rectify the error, and then nature herself made an adjustment. The greatest thing that we can accomplish in our science and in our lives is to be in balance with the universe, ultimately. But each time, in these worlds, people made mistakes which led to the destruction of the world.
I have done some research into these four worlds in association with a man called Hanson Ashley, a Navajo medicine man and a transpersonal psychologist. We wanted to know how we could begin to talk about the concept of worlds to the West, and developed the hypothesis that they could be described as the evolving consciousness of humanity (and when I say ‘evolving’, it has to be understood that it is more like a ‘revolving’ consciousness, because as native people we don’t look at things linearly, going from one point in a straight line to another). We also wanted to be accurate in what we said; we didn’t want to distort knowledge in an effort to communicate across cultures, so Hanson spent time talking to the elders about the nature of the worlds. He now has a detailed history of each of them – and this includes the specific teachings or learnings which were of each world.
The elders agreed that you could, indeed, think about the worlds in terms of human consciousness. But the situation was more complicated than we had thought, for Hanson also found out that the people did not learn the real lessons within the worlds, but that in between the worlds, there was a cycle of twelve. This cycle of twelve – I don’t know how many years that was – was the time when humanity had to do things to put itself in accord again – in accord with life, or with the natural world, however yo want to say it. The four worlds were not the worlds of ‘man’, but were worlds in which nature herself went through her growth, challenges, transformations and realignments to come into balance.
So, if we are interested in discovering how to create a shift in attitude, which is necessary now in order to save the planet, and how to move from western thought to native thought, we also have to understand what happened between those worlds. What happened that somehow saved the day and permitted humanity to move into another world – or one could say, another form of consciousness? And how did our ancestors’ choices accommodate or block the earth’s natural evolution?
Well, many things happened, but one of the primary events was a journey or a migration. These journeys can be describes as wayfinding, and it was during these great movements or migrations that knowledge of how to live in balance with the earth was recorded in the original rock carvings and petroglyphs.

This is a literal wayfaring?
Yes and no. The literal wayfaring is only one kind; but many things were happening simultaneously. It was a time when people physically moved around on the earth or on the water. They moved in a patterned way; it wasn’t just any old way, for they knew they were going to some place for a specific reason. They were usually led by someone; someone who had the inspiration or vision of where to go. The case of the Navajo is interesting, because one of the people who led them, I think it was after the flood, was a woman, who is referred to in the histories as White Shell Changing Woman.
As the people moved about, there were lessons that they learned, mistakes that they made, risks that they took and out of those experiences they learned rituals, songs and strategies that prepared them for movement into the next cycle.
One of the things that the Indigenous Science Network is working on now, is to recreate some of these migrations. It is important to understand that when I speak of re-creating the migrations, it is not so much recreating the exact journeys and the steps; what we want to recreate is the protocol, the mindset. We are inviting our white brothers and sisters, the scientists, to join us in this because we believe that this is something we are meant to be doing. As native people that’s enough, that we have a vision to do it. In my case, it refers back to a vision that I had at a ceremony in Arizona in 1984, when the spirit of wayfinding came into the ceremony and touched my life in a way that set me on this path. But the problem that we faced was how we would be able to talk to the West about it.

Is this where your interest in the great Polynesian journeys comes in?
Yes. But before I go into that, I want to talk about the confidence level that’s generated by indigenous science. Confidence is a big issue in science. In westerns science, the confidence that people have in it depends on how accurate it is, how likely it is we can replicate it, etc. It was confidence, for example, that brought Columbus to the Americas in the first place – confidence in the navigation instruments which allowed him to go out of sight of land for the first time in European history. He got to the New World because he knew how to use them, whilst none of the other sailors that were with him did. They wanted to mutiny, to throw him overboard, but they didn’t dare because they were out on the ocean, with no landmarks to go by, and Columbus knew the navigation.
In the same way , there is a confidence that can be engendered by indigenous science. For example, the Navajo people have an extremely short life-span, about fifty years of age. Their average annual income is probably still not much more than about $2,000 – so in an economic sense, they live very marginalised lives. But when we first thought about re-creating these journeys, Hanson went back and talked with the medicine man who had run the ceremony in which I had had my vision, and spoke of all the things that had unfolded since then and asked him about it. Specifically, he asked about White Shell Changing Woman’s journey, in which she led the Navajo people from where they lived in the South-West over to the coast here in California, to the Pacific Ocean. There, they met Indians who were ocean-going, who could build canoes, and they showed the Navajos how to navigate and what to do. The Navajos sailed to the farthest island in their journey and then came back.
Hanson discussed with the elder the possibility of recreating this migration. In the light of all I’ve said about the Navajo’s lifestyle today, one might have expected the response to be – but how do we do it? Where will we get a grant, who will back us? But actually, the response was: well, we have stories and we have the charts to guide us, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. That’s the kind of confidence that’s engendered.
This illustrates as well how powerful indigenous science is, in the sense that it contains and is able to pass on information through thousands and thousands of years by its oral traditions. In contrast, how long do we think that most of the knowledge that we have today will last? We have very powerful computers, but even with them, the models change all the time, and if the electricity fails because of some kind of calamity or disaster, the knowledge is gone.

But the kind of knowledge that you are speaking of is very different from that of modern technology.
Yes, indeed. So in order to communicate with Western scientists, we have to give them a bridge, or an opportunity, to look again at these ancient forms of knowledge. And to do this we need models, and as far as the migrations and the navigation goes, it turns out that there is a good, existing example, and that is the case of the Polynesians.
For, in 1976, the Polynesian Voyaging Society was established. Its first task was to recreate a traditional double-hulled Polynesian voyaging canoe that would be capable of trans-oceanic voyages. Building the canoe – ‘Hokule’a’ – revealed some startling facts. Firstly, there were no trees left on the Hawaiian Islands that were big enough to make such a canoe, so Hokule’a could not be traditional; it would have to be a performance accurate replica which used some fiberglass instead of wood. Secondly, they discovered that there were no Hawaiians who knew how to navigate in the traditional way. So they began to search and eventually found Mao Piailug from Micronesia, an elder who still knew the traditional methods. He was brought to Hawaii, to work with a young Hawaiian native, Nainoa Thompson. Nainoa drew from Western and indigenous sciences. He studied satellite weather charts and astronomy, and then he studied with Mao, who used stones to teach what our ancestors had known.
The result of this integrated education was the 1976 voyage of Hokule’a from Hawaii to Tahiti. This voyage was accomplished without the benefit of any instruments or charts. In 1985, on a subsequent voyage from Rarotonga to New Zealand, a distance of 1700 nautical miles across open sea, Nainoa steered a course which was only 100 miles farther than the shortest distance possible between the two points. The only reason for the extra miles was severe weather conditions.
The interesting question is, how did he do it? Well, that gets to something I think Frank White is talking about when he describes the overview effect. As native people, we learn to train our minds from the time we are children, to be centered where we are, grounded in reality, and see all the signs that are around us. For the purposes of navigation, it is necessary to see the roll of the waves, the movements of the fish, the birds and the winds, etc. In addition, you have to have the ability to project yourself out, ‘to see what it’s not possible to see’. I’m just learning this myself, but I know that it is an ability that our people have known for thousands of years, and still practice. Now our task is to see that this mental acumen, this capacity of ‘the good mind’, is not lost. And the reason why we’ve been talking about this today is that the wayfinding mindset, the ability to project ourselves out, is the knowledge that is necessary if we are to create a healthy relationship with the earth.

There obviously is a major dichotomy between indigenous science and western science. Do you see western science as something that has gone wrong, or do you see that it’s pursued a particular path which is perhaps unbalanced but which is not wrong in itself?
That’s a difficult question, because it’s got so out of hand that the temptation is to say that it was an experiment that failed. I don’t know if it’s failed or it hasn’t failed. But I can say from a traditional perspective that when we describe the form that the migrations took, for instance across the Americas, it is a cross within a circle; a cross lying on its side. Our ancestors always knew about linear thought, but it was linear thought contained in a circle of light. The Hopi prophecy, which is written on their petroglyphs and which they ritually re-enact in their cycle of ceremonies every year, tells us that what needs to happen is that the knowledge of the white brother needs to be united with the earth knowledge of the native person.
What do you think Western scientists or any of us should be doing in a principal way? Obviously we should be learning to take care of the earth much better than we are, but how?
Well, for example, two physicists asked me in Germany, “Dr. Colorado, what would you recommend if we were to do our science differently?” One thing I said was that I think scientists should extend their calculations to seven generations. I asked them what they thought they would find out if they did that, and they admitted that the results would be very different. That’s one really simple thing they could do. Well, perhaps not so simple.

To expand their horizons…
Exactly. And in other directions. If you talk to scientists, you’ll find out that most of them have deeply moving moments of creativity and inspiration which they say that, at the present time, they’re not allowed to discuss or to bring into their science. They have to act as if it doesn’t happen, and as if all of their hunches, which may turn out to be right or to be wrong, were just manifestations of sheets of calculations. So another thing that would be good is for them to begin to create forms where they can talk about the other levels os knowing. Some people of course have already begun this – David Bohm, for instance.
I ask scientists to join us at any level. I have researched the journeys in a western way – I’ve researched it many ways – and I’ve had a lot of contact with different kinds of western scientists, from archaeologists to physicists.

It does seem that there is a very narrow focus to much of Western science, and an unwillingness to accept oral history, or mythology.
Bohm makes the point really well. He says that since Einstein, we continue to practice our science as if he hadn’t said what he said; and probably that vein of science, that particular very focussed approach to knowledge, will continue. What we see happening, I suppose, is that new streams of thought and science are appearing now. It’s from these that I’m looking for solutions, not only cross-scientifically but also globally. In a way, I think science has already begun this, or a least the scientists have already begun; that’s why a place like the ‘Institute of Noetic Sciences’ in California exists; that’s why Bohm does the work that he’s done for so many years. There is group of ‘scientists for peace’, and many scientists are looking for new ways. I have a lot of hope.

is there a way, from the native American perspective, to look at the cataclysm that occurred for you in the last four hundred years? Is there a way in which it has meaning?
If you think back what I had said earlier about the Dark Sun, nobody said that it was the Dark Sun because of the coming of the Europeans. The Europeans had come thousands of years earlier (there are evidence of very early contact which I won’t go into now) but then the relationship was different. Who tells the sun how to move? Not the Spanish!
We don’t like what’s happened, we surely didn’t want it. On the other hand, that’s life itself; that’s the cycles of life. Perhaps the best way to say it is that we really value accommodation as a universal principle – accommodation to life is more important than judging what needed to happen. Now what is important is that we are entering a new sun.

Discovering Indigenous Science: Implications for Science Education (PDF)

Discovering Indigenous Science: Implications for Science Education

Gloria Snively
Department of Social and Natural Sciences, University of Victoria
John Corsiglia
Consultant on First Nation’s history and culture, British Columbia

Abstract: Indigenous science relates to both the science knowledge of long-resident, usually oral culture peoples, as well as the science knowledge of all peoples who as participants in culture are affected by the worldview and relativist interests of their home communities. This article explores aspects of multicultural science and pedagogy and describes a rich and well-documented branch of indigenous science known to biologists and ecologists as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). Although TEK has been generally inaccessible, educators can now use a burgeoning science-based TEK literature that documents numerous examples of time-proven, ecologically relevant, and cost effective indigenous science. Disputes regarding the universality of the standard scientific account are of critical importance for science educators because the definition of science is a de facto “gatekeeping” device for determining what can be included in a school science curriculum and what cannot. When Western modern science (WMS) is defined as universal it does displace revelation-based knowledge (i.e., creation science); however, it also displaces pragmatic local indigenous knowledge that does not conform with formal aspects of the “standard account.” Thus, in most science classrooms around the globe, Western modern science has been taught at the expense of indigenous knowledge. However, because WMS has been implicated in many of the world’s ecological disasters, and because the traditional wisdom component of TEK is particularly rich in time-tested approaches that foster sustainability and environmental integrity, it is possible that the universalist “gatekeeper” can be seen as increasingly problematic and even counter productive. This paper describes many examples from Canada and around the world of indigenous people’s contributions to science, environmental understanding, and sustainability. The authors argue the view that Western or modern science is just one of many sciences that need to be addressed in the science classroom We conclude by presenting instructional strategies that can help all science learner negotiate border crossings between Western modern science and indigenous science.

INTRODUCTION
One of the intense philosophical debates in education literature focuses on the inclusion of multicultural science in mainstream science education, as evidenced by the number of papers submitted to this and other science education journals. For some, multicultural science is seen as important because it can function as a pedagogical stepping stone — especially for multicultural students of science (Atwater & Riley, 1993; Hodson, 1993; Stanley & Brickhouse, 1994). Certain other science educators who champion modern Western science as the last and greatest of the sciences tend to dismiss multicultural science as faddish or heretical (Good, 1995a, 1995b; Gross & Levitt, 1994; Matthews, 1994; Slezak, 1994; Wolpert, 1993).
Suspending consideration of the intrinsic importance of multicultural science Ogawa (1995) stresses that all science students must work through both individual and indigenous science understandings in the course of constructing their knowledge of modern Western science. Ogawa proposes that every culture has its own science and refers to the science in a given culture as its “indigenous science” (Ogawa, 1995, p.585). Westerners freely acknowledge the existence of indigenous art, music, literature, drama, and political and economic systems in indigenous cultures, but somehow fail to apprehend and appreciate indigenous science. Elkana writes: “Comparative studies of art, religion, ethics, and politics abound; however, there is no discipline called comparative science” (Elkana, 1981, p. 2). Thus, in many educational settings where Western modern science is taught, it is taught at the expense of indigenous science, which may precipitate charges of epistemological hegemony and cultural imperialism.
It would seem that the dispute over how science is to be taught in the classroom turns on how the concepts “science” and “universality” are to be defined. The debate rages over the nature of reality and knowledge, definitions of science, and the so-called universalist vs. relativist positions. Sometimes the debate appears to be at least as culture-centric as it is rational. Replying to a Stanley and Brickhouse (1994) suggestion to include examples of multicultural science in the curriculum, Good (1995a) challenged opponents to be specific with their “few well-chosen examples of sciences from other cultures”:

What are these few well-chosen examples that should be included in our school science curriculum? Additionally, it would be very nice to learn how these examples of neglected “science” should change our understanding of biology, chemistry, physics, and so on. Just what contributions will this neglected science make in modern science’s understanding of nature? (p. 335)

As one example of how far the universalist vs. relativist debate can be pushed, the authors have learned that Richard Dawkins is fond of saying: “there are no relativists at 30,000 feet.” No doubt that without an airplane of conventional description, a person at 30,000 feet is in serious trouble, but when universalists take off and land on vulcanized rubber tires they make use of a material and process reportedly discovered and refined by indigenous Peruvians (Weatherford, 1988, 1991). Without multicultural science contributions enabling airplanes to land and take off, there would be neither airplanes, nor for that matter, universalists at 30,000 feet.
While science educators have been fighting epistemological battles that could effectively limit or expand the scope and purview of science education, events on the ground appear to have overtaken us — working scientists have themselves been involved in wide ranging exploration and reform. Especially during the last 25 years, biologists, ecologists, botanists, geologists, climatologists, astronomers, agriculturists, pharmacologists, and related working scientists have labored to develop approaches that are improving our ability to understand and mitigate the impact of human activity upon the environment. By extending their enquiry into the timeless traditional knowledge and wisdom of long-resident, oral peoples, these scientists have in effect moved the borders of scientific inquiry and formalized a branch of biological and ecological science that has become known as the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), which can be thought of as either the knowledge itself, or as documented ethno-science enriched with analysis and explication provided by natural science specialists. The interested reader can find numerous detailed examples of TEK (Andrews, 1988; Berkes, 1988, 1993; Berkes & Mackenzie, 1978, Inglis, 1993; Warren, 1997; Williams & Baines, 1993). Additionally, the present bibliography provides the reader with a number of specific examples of TEK in Canada and worldwide.
Thus, we face four related questions: First, is science an exclusive invention of Europeans, or have scientific ways of thinking and viable bodies of science knowledge also emerged in other cultures? Second, if WMS is taken to be universal, what is the status of the vast quantities of local knowledge that it subsumes, incorporates,and claims to legitimize? Third, what is the proper role of science educators as leaders in the process of refining and clarifying the current definitions of WMS? And fourth, when viable bodies of useful scientific knowledge emerge in other cultures, how can science educators develop programs that enable all students to cross cultural borders — in this instance, between the culture of Western modern science and the cultures of long-resident indigenous peoples?
Because TEK is being used by scientists to solve important biological and ecological problems and because problems of sustainability are pervasive and of very high interest to students and others, it becomes increasingly important for science educators to introduce students to the perspectives of both WMS and TEK. The availability and varies nature of TEK examples will be useful to proponents of multicultural science (Aikenhead, 1995, 1996; Atwater & Riley, 1993; Bowers, 1993a, 1993b; Hodson, 1993; Ogawa, 1989, 1995; Smith, 1982, 1995; Snively, 1990, 1995; Wright, 1992).
In this article, we argue the view that since Aboriginal cultures have made significant contributions to science, then surely there are different ways of arriving at legitimate knowledge. Without knowledge, there can be no science. Thus, the definition of “science” should be broadened, thereby including TEK as science. The intention is not to demean WMS, but instead to point out a body of scientific literature that provides great potential for enhancing our ability to develop more relevant science education programs.

TERMINOLOGY: WESTERN MODERN SCIENCE, INDIGENOUS SCIENCE, AND TEK
Since the phrases “Western modern science,” “indigenous science,” and “traditional ecological knowledge” all have multiple meanings it will be useful to linger briefly with definitions. For clarity, we shall distinguish between “Western modern science” which is the most dominant science in the world and “indigenous science” which interprets how the world works from a particular cultural perspective. This paper focuses on a subset of indigenous science referred to as “traditional ecological knowledge,” which is both the science of long-resident oral peoples and a biological sciences label for the growing literature which records and explores that knowledge.
What is Science?
As is well known, there are numerous versions of what science is, and of what counts as being scientific. The Latin root, scientia, means knowledge in the broadest possible sense and survives in such words as omniscience and prescience. Terms such as “modern science,” “standard science,” “Western science,” “conventional science,” and “official science” have been in use only since the beginning of the twentieth century. For some, scientific abstractions began with Sumerian astronomy and mathematics; for others, scientific theorizing began with Greek atomism; and for yet others, it began toward the end of the nineteenth century when scientists began to grapple with abstract theoretical propositions — for example, evolution, natural selection, and the kinetic-molecular theory. What confidence could one have in theoretical statements built from or based on unobservable data? Care was taken to develop logically consistent rules outlining how theoretical statements can be derived from observational statements. The intent was to create a single set of rules to guide the practice of theory justification (Duschl, 1994). Science can also refer to conceptual constructs approved by logical empiricism (positivism) which, in addition, has the capacity to carry science beyond the realms of observation and experiment. Also, we have come to refer to WMS as officially sanctioned knowledge which can be thought of as inquiry and investigation that Western governments and courts are prepared to support, acknowledge, and use. Some authors have represented “science” with the acronym WMS, which either means “Western modern science” (Ogawa, 1995) or “white male science” (Pomeroy, 1994). Striving toward comprehensive definitions, certain sociology of science scholars have described WMS as institutionalized in Western Europe and North America as a predominately white male, middle-class Western system of meaning and symbols (Rose, 1994; Simonelli, 1994).
In sharp contrast to the exclusivist definitions of science in the previous paragraph, Ogawa (1995) points science educators toward a broadly inclusive conceptualization of what science is by defining science rather simply as “a rational perceiving of reality” (p.588). The merit of the use of the word “perceiving”gives science a “dynamic nature” and acknowledges that “science can experience a gradual change at any time” (p.588). Another point put forward by Ogawa s that “rational” should be seen in relativistic terms, as discussed in the previous section.
The present WMS philosophical climate would require some reconfiguration if TEK, which takes a generally pragmatic approach, is to be properly received as science. Approaches to science seem to have proceeded along two fundamentally different courses — by the timeless procedure of relying on observation and experiment, and, during this century, by the theoretical examination of queries and assertions. By examining the methodology and logic of assertions, questions, and concept, logical empiricism (positivism) has come to function as a vigorous “gatekeeper” that has certainly succeeded in screening out metaphysical, pseudo-science during this century. In fact, logical empiricism (positivism) may have become so powerful a gatekeeper that even experimental science itself appears to have become diminished. Experiment cannot prove the [absolute] correctness of assertions, it can only help to rank or disconfirm theories. Hacking refers to the general difficulty in Boyd, Gaspar, and Trout (1991):

No field in the philosophy of science is more systematically neglected than experiment. Our grade school teachers may have told us that scientific method is experimental method, but histories of science have become histories of theory. (p.247)

Certainly, we may rejoice that logical empiricism (positivism) has been able to screen out historically destructive pseudo-science by exposing the meaninglessness of its metaphyscics, but there are problems. As poet Robert Frost put it, “Before I built a wall I’d ask what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offense.” As an expression of Western culture (or even as a system of pure, value free, universal truth), WMS must inevitably swim in a sea of cultural assumptions about progress, self-interest, winning/losing, aggressiveness, attitude to time (the purview of meaningful history), and the benefits of immediate advantage as opposed to the importance of long-term consequences.
Until the past two or three decades, the gatekeeper’s performance appears to have been generally celebrated. More recently, however, sociologists of science have been vigorous in identifying implicit values and assumptions that can be said to tacitly structure the gatekeeper’s activities. At the same time, a considerable number of working scientists, no doubt mindful of both the gatekeeper’s power to exclude and the real possibility of worldwide environmental collapse, have set up pragmatic TEK science shops. The fact that working scientists are increasingly acknowledging TEK suggests that there are sound reasons for changing the formal definitions of “science” so as to include such important forms of multicultural science as TEK.
Our position on “science” is closely aligned with that of Ogawa (1989) who prefers Elkana’s (1981) understanding of science, which argues that “every culture has its science,” … “something like its own way of thinking and/or its own worldview” and gives the following definition: “By science, I mean a rational (i.e., purposeful, good, directed) explanation of science of the physical world surrounding man” (p.1437). WE agree with Ogawa (1989) when he asserts that “Western science is only one form of science among the sciences of the world” (p.248). Also, the people living in an indigenous culture itself may not recognize the existence of its own science, hence, it may be transferred from generation to generation merely by invisible or nonformal settings (Ogawa, 1989).

Indigenous Science
According to Ogawa (1995), we must distinguish between two levels of science: individual or personal science and cultural or societal science. He refers to science at the culture or society level as “indigenous science” (p.588).
Although we all participate in indigenous science to a greater or lesser degree, long-resident, oral culture peoples may be thought of as specialists in local indigenous science. Indigenous science, sometimes referred to as ethnoscience, has been described as “the study of systems of knowledge developed by a given culture to classify the objects, activities, and events of its given universe” (Hardesty, 1977). Indigenous science interprets how the local world works through a particular cultural perspective. Expressions of science thinking are abundant throughout indigenous agriculture, astronomy, navigation, mathematics, medical practices, engineering, military science, architecture, and ecology. In addition, processes of science that include rational observation of natural events, classification, and problem solving are woven into all aspects of indigenous cultures. It is both remembered sensory information that is usually transmitted orally in descriptive names and in stories where abstract principles are encapsulated in metaphor (Bowers, 1993a, 1993b; Cruikshank, 1981, 1991; Nelson, 1983).
We may note that indigenous science includes the knowledge of both indigenous expansionist cultures (e.g., the Aztec, Mayan, and Mongolian Empires) as well as the home-based knowledge of long-term resident oral resident peoples (i.e., the Inuit, the Aboriginal people of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe, Micronesia, and New Zealand).

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)
Although the term TEK came into widespread use in the 1980s, there is no universally accepted definition of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in literature. The term is, by necessity, ambiguous since the words traditional and ecological knowledge are themselves ambiguous. Dictionary etymology shows the Latin roots of “traditional science” to be “knowledge” scientia of the world that is “handed across” or “traded” (from the Latin traduare) across generations of long-resident oral traditional peoples. “Traditional” usually refers to a cultural continuity transmitted in the form of social attitudes, beliefs, principles, and conventions of behavior and practice derived from historical experience. However, as Berkes (1993) points out, “societies change through time, constantly adopting new practices and technologies, and making it difficult to define just how much and what kind of change would affect the labeling of a practice as traditional” (p.3). Because of this, many scholars avoid using the term “traditional.” As well, some purists find the term unacceptable or inappropriate when referring to societies such as native northern groups whose lifestyles have changed considerably over the years. For this reason, some prefer the term “indigenous knowledge” (IK), which helps avoid the debate about tradition, and explicitly puts the emphasis on indigenous people (Berkes, 1993). The term “ecological knowledge” poses definition problems of its own. If ecology is defined narrowly as a branch of biology in the domain of Western science, then strictly speaking there can be no TEK; most traditional peoples are not modern Western scientists. If ecological knowledge is defined broadly to refer to the “knowledge, however acquired, of relationships of living being with one another and with the environment, then the term TEK becomes tenable” (Berkes, 1993, p.3)
TEK generally represents experience acquired over thousands of years of direct human contact with the environment. Although the term TEK only came into widespread use, the practice of TEK is ancient (Berkes, 1993). The science of long-resident peoples differs considerably from group to group depending on locale and is knowledge built up through generations of living in close contact with the land. Figure 1 show one way of attempting to describe TEK within an indigenous science framework and of emphasizing its importance to contemporary environmental issues. Examples of indigenous and TEK science may be accessed through living elders and specialists of various kinds or found in the literature of TEK, anthropology, ethnology, ethnobiology, ethnogeography, ethnohistory, and mythology, as well as in the archived records of traders, missionaries, and government functionaries.
TEK information is sometimes cherished as private or belonging to one family only. Also, in many traditions, oral information may only be shared under particular circumstances, for example, when it is clear that no one intends to use the knowledge for gain.

Relativity, Relatedness and Reality (PDF)

Relativity, Relatedness and Reality

By Vine Deloria, Jr.

It was not so long ago that Newtonian physics and mathematics described a world of absolute space, time and matter and people believed that understanding the universe completely was simply a matter of policing up the obscure subjects which had not received much attention in the past. Then the Michelson-Morley experiments to detect and measure, if possible, the “ether” which was thought to exist between large bodies in the solar systems returned a blank and thinkers went back to their solitude to try and understand what this failure actually meant for cosmology—and by extension for science itself.

The result of deliberations by many of the best minds of the age was a theory put forth by Albert Einstein, then a patent clerk in Germany, and certainly not a luminary of the academic establishment. Einstein’s thesis, viewed from our present perspective, is hardly revolutionary and probably just a simple corrective of the centuries of belief that human beings could know the innermost workings of the larger cosmos by examining phenomenon on one tiny planet on the edge of a galaxy. Space, time, and matter, Einstein argued, are concepts whose measurement should be in relationship to the context in which they are to be used. That is to say, these ideas are not part of the eternal structure of the universe in and of themselves but they are how we describe this universe, and therefore since we do have experiences we can use these ideas and they have substance as long as we remember that we are part of the process of gathering information.

Nearly three generations have been required to work through the implications of relativity and physics and mathematics have prospered immensely in their ability to probe the micro and macro levels of cosmic existence once freed from the idea of absolute time and space. Other “science” have not fared as well because many of their practitioners adopted the idea that everything is “relative,” which is to say, there is no absolute truth or description of reality, it all depends on the action of the observer and the nature of the experiment or investigation. In the social sciences in particular, the idea of including the observer meant a reduction of certainty almost to the point of personal preference. Americans, as we are likely to do , have reduced relativity to a form of psychobabble.

We Are All Relatives
A positive by-product of the entrenchment of relativity in the non-mathematical sciences and disciplines has been the willingness of people to look at non-Western cultures and give them a measure of respect for their knowledge of the natural world. In my previous article I reviewed the tendency of pioneer thinkers to begin to bring separate fields of inquiry together by merging ideas and concepts and in effect create new sciences which weld together the bodies of knowledge which should not have been separated in the first place. Strangely there has been very little attention paid to Indian methodologies for gathering data and, consequently, the movement is primarily and ad-hoc, personal preference way of gathering new ideas and attempting to weld them to existing bodies of knowledge. We cannot expect fundamental change in the manner in which Western scientists interpret their data until massive changes in individual items occur and a paradigm shift is forced by the failure of the established doctrines in the field to explain the materials.

The Indian perspective of the natural world is not subject to this limitation because it already has a fundamental principle of interpretation/observation which pervades everything that Indians think or experience. Thus verification of existing knowledge and the addition of new knowledge is simply a matter of adding to the already considerable body of information which Indians possess. And unfortunate aspect of the Indian knowledge is that so much data has been lost in the last century as Indians have been prevented from roaming freely over their traditional homelands, gathering plants and animals for food and ceremonies, and performing those ceremonies which ensured the prosperity of the earth and its life forms. Nevertheless the information which we formerly had remain available to us if we can return to the traditional manner in which we related to lands and life.

The Indian principle of interpretation/observation is simplicity itself: “We are all relatives.” Most Indians hear this phrase thousands of times a year as they attend or perform ceremonies and for many Indians without an ongoing ritual life the phrase seems to be simply a liturgical blessing that includes all other forms of life in human ceremonial activities. But this phrase is very important as a practical methodological tool for investigating the natural world and drawing conclusions about it which can serve as guides for understanding nature and living comfortably within it.

“We are all relatives” when taken as a methodological tool for obtaining knowledge means that we observe the natural world by looking for relationships between various things in it. That is to say, everything in the natural world has relationships with every other thing and the total set of relationships makes up the natural world as we experience it. This concept is simply the relativity concept as applied to a universe which people experience as alive and not as dead or inert. Thus Indians knew that stones were the perfect beings because they were self-contained entities which had resolved their social relationships and possessed great knowledge about how every other entity, and every species, should live. Stones had mobility but did not need to use it. Every other being had mobility and needed, in some specific manner, to use it in relationships.

Harvest By Observation
Materials illustrating kinds of relationships are plentiful but it is necessary when speaking to them to ponder their meaning very seriously in order to understand the body of knowledge which they represent. I will use some examples from the Plains but the same kind of demonstrative process could be done by using the knowledge of the Pacific Northwest tribes, the desert tribes of the Southwest, and the woodlands tribes of the eastern United States. It is my hope that the present generation of Indian students will adopt some version of this methodology as they are studying Western science, particularly social and biological science, and leapfrog into prominence in their fields by writing and teaching from an Indian perspective. In this way science will move very quickly into a more intelligent understanding of the natural world.

The tribes who lived along the Missouri River and its tributaries grew corn and vegetables but also conducted a summer hunt for buffalo, deer and antelope. It was their practice to plant the crops, do one hoeing to reduce the weeds and grasses around the corn hills, and then depart for the high plains and Rocky Mountains for July and August to prepare meat for the winter. We might think there was great concern about the condition of the corn crops since corn would provide the major food supply during winter. But the tribes had already perceived plant relationships and so had what we might call “indicator plants” which told them how their corn was coming.

The Pawnees simply examined the seed pods of the milk weed and when these pods had reached a certain condition and were at maturity, they packed up everything and headed for home, arriving in time to harvest their corn and hold a corn dance. At first glance this information seems like an interesting tidbit but has nothing to do with relatedness or relativity. In fact the Pawnee had been able to discern, through observation or by information given to them in a ceremony, that corn and milkweed had about the same growing season. To be more precise, milkweed was a bit faster growing than corn because it would take several weeks to return to their villages after having examined the milkweed. Western science might run across the similarity between the two plants but the chances of making the linkage and being able to use it predictively for practical purposes are minimal.

Standing Bear said that “away from the woods grew the sand cherries on little low shrubs. Around and over the sand hills, and patches so barren that not a blade of grass grew, these bushes flourished, yielding a luscious fruit which we were very careful in gathering. We picked this fruit only against the wind, for if we stood with our body odors going toward the fruit its flavor was destroyed.” Here we see that scope of relatedness in a surprising context. Unquestionably we have a human-plant relationship but one in which the human is the less sensitive participant. The human had to be particularly aware of the bush and pay unusual respect to it in order to use its fruit.

I would be curious to learn how an anthropologist or botanist trained in Western science would explain how the Sioux discovered this fact of plant life. people would have to harvest the fruit for a reasonably long time in order to have enough experiences with it to formulate the most constructive way to relate to the bush. But what on earth would inspire anyone to look into the direction of the wind when picking fruit? Annual harvests would occur for a very short time each summer. The variance in rain, heat, and other climactic factors would appear to be so much more important in determining the condition of the fruit that it would seem unlikely that anyone could identify human body odor as the critical factor in the relationship. Yet the Sioux were able to identify this element from everything else that needed to be considered.

Some information must have come directly from observations made by the people and once this knowledge was gained, it was put to good use. Standing Bear noted that gophers and other small animals cached their food for the winter and “our women knew the likely places of these caches, usually near a low bank, and went hunting for them with long, sharp-pointed sticks. They poked in the ground until they came to a soft spot in the earth, and there, ten or twelve inches under the soil and carefully covered with fine dry shredded grass, would be nice lot of vegetables lying in a heap as fresh as when they were gathered. Some of these caches would be three feet in diameter and would hold as much as one person could carry.”

I suppose it is not good public relations to recount how the Indians used to steal from the gophers but from this bit of information we can derive two things. First, Indians had the knowledge of the natural world necessary to sustain themselves in spite of any misfortune that might befall them. Thus a person lost on the prairie would not starve because of his knowledge. But more important, by watching how the animals preserved food, the people learned that they could use the same techniques to preserve their foods. Standing Bear says that the gopher caches were “models of neatness… there would be no sign of the tops and roots, both being cut clean from the vegetable, whereas when the women stored they left both attached tying bunches together by the long string-like roots.” The Indians, of course, did not have large bags and boxes for carrying vegetables and therefore had to keep the roots so they could tie the food to poles and harnesses in order to carry them.

Buffalo, Bulrushes and Sunflowers
Not all information about the natural world came as a result of careful observation based on the principle of relatedness. If we greatly expand our understanding of the sense of being relatives, we discover that plants, birds, and animals often gave specific information to the people. Standing Bear described one such instance. “A food that had an interesting history for us was the tall plant that grew in the swamps, commonly called the bulrush. The duck, who brought many good plants and roots to the tribe, told the Duck Dreamer medicine-man about it and named it spa. In the early spring and summer we welcomed this plant, which was pulled up by the roots, and the white part eaten like celery.” Here is a bird-human relationship that involves information about the plant and its use. We do not know what the subsequent plant-human relationship was or might have become but we can assume that at some point the tribe had more knowledge than what Standing Bear relates.

An observation that always struck me as critically important for understanding the plant and animal relationship, although I have no good explanation for it, regarded the buffalo and the sunflower. I briefly mentioned this behavior in my previous article and I would like to expand my comments on it. Standing Bear wrote that “the buffalo loved the simple and odorless sunflower just as did the Lakota. These great beasts wandered through the sunflower fields, wallowing their heads among them. Sometimes they uprooted the plants and wound them about their backs, letting sprays dangle from their left horns.”

I suspect that we have here and observation of a buffalo ceremonial, perhaps even the buffalo version of the Sundance performed by human beings. Or we may have a form of buffalo recreation. There is no question that this kind of behavior enabled the sunflower seeds to be scattered over a much greater distance than they would otherwise be able to reach but the benefit to the buffalo, other than enjoyment, was not explained. Nevertheless we have to recognize that the buffalo, bear and the cottonwood tree were there three dominant non-human entities on the Great Plains, that they engaged in purposeful action, and that they dominated even the ceremonial relationships of humans. Therefore it is highly probable that we have in this behavior a much deeper meaning than we can presently explain.

These examples are only the anecdotal data that is most easily retried today in a library, information about the buffalo could be multiplied a thousand fold by talking with the people who are now raising buffalo and are now coming back to a knowledge of this animal. At a recent meeting of the Intertribal Bison Cooperative in Rapid City speaker after speaker related observations on the intelligence and knowledge of this animal, affirming in many instances information which had been passed down in the oral tradition but never verified by the Sioux people because of being on the reservation the last 120 years. Each speaker at this training session, however, once again confirmed the ancient understanding that these creatures are more like humans in their behavior than they are like other animals—if you know how to interpret their behavior.

Reality By the Senses
The theory of relativity dislodged Western science in its belief that humans could not obtain absolute truth about the constitution and processes of the natural world. What this theory really did was eliminate the naive belief that by using one particular methodology, that of reducing everything to mechanical form, we could completely understand the world around us. This old belief saw reality as something beyond our senses and means of apprehension and Western people have held this belief since the time of the Greek philosophers. For American Indians, however, it was not necessary to postulate the existence of an ideal world of perfect forms untouched by space or time or to suggest that space, time and matter were inherent and absolute qualities of the physical world which, when properly described in mathematical terms, could accurately explain the universe.

For most Indian tribes it was enough that they understood the manner in which living things behaved. Recognizing that the universe was alive, they began to accumulate knowledge about how every other entity behaved in various situations. Once this knowledge had begun to expand beyond he ability of anyone to remember, various people would come to be experts in how entities would behave in certain kinds of circumstances. Thus there was specialization somewhat like present academic subdivisions of bodies of knowledge but the major principle of relatedness always remained as the critical interpretive method of understanding phenomena.

Reality for tribal peoples, as opposed to the reality sought by Western scientists, was the experience of the moment coupled with the interpretive scheme which had been woven together over the generations. If there were other dimensions to life, the religious experiences and dreams certainly indicated the presence of other ways of living, even the places, they were regarded as part of an organic whole and not as distinct form other experiences, times, and places in the same way that Western thinkers have always believed. Indians never had a need to posit the existence of a “real” reality beyond the senses because they felt that their senses gave them the essence of physical existence in enabling them to see how the other creatures behaved. Life in other dimensions was not thought to be much different than what had been experienced already.

Giving Science a Sense of Purpose
The next generation of American Indians could radically transform scientific knowledge by grounding themselves in traditional knowledge about the world and demonstrating who everything is connected to everything else. Advocacy of this idea would involve showing how personality and a sense of purpose must become part of the knowledge which science confronts and understands. The present posture of most Western scientists is to deny any sense of purpose and direction to the world around us, believing that to do so would be to introduce mysticism and superstition. Yet what could be more superstitious than to believe that the world in which we live and where we have our most intimate personal experiences is not really trustworthy and that another, mathematical world exists that represents a true reality?

The idea of a relatedness of all things is not new but it may seem to be outmoded to some Indian students who have been trained in Western scientific thinking. A good way to test this idea would be to go talk with elders about what they know of plants, animals, and the natural world. If the student keeps the methodology of trying to relate bits of information to all elements in the scenario, that is to say, to regard information about plants as relevant to the birds and animals who use them and the location where they are found, there is no question that a great deal of important knowledge will be achieved. Taking these diverse bits of understanding and working them into the Western scientific format will be little difficult at first but eventually the student will discover that he or she is the possessor of a knowledge much broader, deeper, and more comprehensive than what is being taught in the classroom.

Power and Place Equal Personality (PDF)

Power and Place Equal Personality

Vine Deloria, Jr.
American Indian Studies
University of Arizona, Tucson

Western science resolves itself into certain “laws” which describe the natural world . These laws are makeshift descriptions of the manner in which physical reality appears to operate, but they are often regarded by Western scientists as inviolable. Phenomena that fall outside the prescribed patterns of behavior are said to be “anomalies,” which can be disregarded when explaining how the physical universe functions. Eventually, of course, the Western scientist must deal with the so-called anomalies. These phenomena form an increasingly large body of knowledge and facts which cannot be explained using the acceptable paradigm into which the rest of scientific knowledge is deposited.

American Indian knowledge of the world does not suffer this structural handicap While tribal peoples did not have a detailed conception of the whole planet in the sense that Western scientists presently do, they did have a very accurate knowledge of the lands they inhabited and the plants, animals, and other life forms that shared their environment. It is also becoming increasingly clear that they had a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the heavens, with their own set of constellations and stories.

Emphasis on the Particular
The boundaries of American Indian knowledge were those of respect, not of orthodoxy. For instance, certain stories about the stars could not be told when the constellations in question were overhead. Some other kinds of stories involving animals, plants, and spirits could only be told at a particular time of year or in a specific place. There were no anomalies because Indian retained the ability to wonder at the behavior of nature, and they remembered even the most abstruse things with the hope that one day their relationship to existing knowledge would become clear.

The key to understanding Indian knowledge of the world is to remember that the emphasis was on the particular, not on general laws and explanations of how things worked. Consequently, when we hear the elders tell about things, we must remember that they are basically reporting on their experiences or on the experiences of their elders. Indians as a rule do not try to bring existing bits of knowledge into categories and rubrics which can be used to do further investigation and experimentation with nature. The Indian system requires a prodigious memory and a willingness to remain humble in spite of one’s great knowledge.

Keeping the particular in mind as the ultimate reference point of Indian knowledge, we can pass into a discussion of some of the principles of the Indian forms of knowledge. Here power an place are dominant concepts—power being the living energy that inhabits and/or composes the universe, and place being the relationship of things to each other. It is much easier, in discussing Indian principles, to put these basic ideas into a simple equation: Power and place produce personality. This equation simply means that the universe is alive, but it also contains within it the very important suggestion that the universe is personal and, therefore, must be approached in a personal manner. And this insight holds true because Indians are interested in the particular, which of necessity must be personal and incapable of expansion and projection to hold true universally.

The personal nature of the universe demands that each and every entity in it seek and sustain personal relationships. Here, the Indian theory of relativity is much more comprehensive than the corresponding theory articulated by Einstein and his fellow scientists. The broader Indian idea of relationship, in a universe very personal and particular, suggests that all relationships have a moral content. For that reason, Indian knowledge of the universe was never separated from other sacred knowledge about ultimate spiritual realities.

The spiritual aspect of knowledge about the world taught the people that relationships must not be left incomplete. There are many stories about how the world came to be, and the common themes running through them are the completion of relationships and the determination of how this world should function. Such tales seem far removed from the considerations fo science, particularly as Indian students are taught science in today’s universities. However, when the tribal concepts are translated into scientific language, they make a good deal of sense. Completing the relationship focuses the individual’s attention on the results of his or her actions. Thus, the Indian people were concerned about the products of what they did, and they sought to anticipate and consider all possible effects of their actions.

And on Appropriateness
The corresponding question faced by American Indians when contemplating action is whether or not the proposed action is appropriate. Appropriate includes the moral dimension of respect for the part of nature that will be used or affected in our action. Thus, killing an animal or catching a fish involved paying respect to the species and the individual animal or fish which such action had disturbed. Harvesting plants also involved paying respect to the plants. These actions were necessary because of the recognition that the universe was built upon consecutive and cooperative relationships that had to be maintained.

We can view this different perspective in yet another way that will speak more directly to Indian students studying Western science. Very early, at least beginning with Greek speculation on the nature of the world, the Western peoples seem to have accepted a strange binary system of reasoning in which things are compared primarily according to their size.

American Indians seem to have considered this kind of thinking at one time because there ar tribal stories which compare humans to various animals. The stories always emphasized that while humans cannot see as well as the hawk, they can see; they are not as strong as the bear, but they are strong; not as fast as the deer, but they can run; and so forth. However, when these comparisons are carefully analyzed, one finds that both physical and psychological characteristics are described.

When using plants as both medicines and foods, Indians were very careful to use the plant appropriately. By maintaining the integrity of the plant within the relationship, Indians discovered many important facts about the natural world which non-Indians only came upon later. The Senecas, for example, knew that corn, squash, and beans were the three Sisters of the Earth, and because they had a place in the world and were compatible spirits, the Indians always planted them together. Only recently have non-Indians, after decades of laboratory research, discovered that the three plants make a natural nitrogen cycle that keeps land fertile and productive.

Plants, because they have their own life cycle, taught Indians about time. George Will and George Hyde, in their book Corn Among the Indians of the Upper Missouri point out that it was the practice of the agricultural tribes to plant their corn, hoe it a few times, and then depart for the western mountains on their summer buffalo hunt. When a certain plant in the west began to change its color, the hunters knew it was time to return home to harvest their corn. This knowledge about corn and the manner in which its growth cycle correlated with that of plants of the mountains some 500 miles away was very sophisticated and involved the idea of time as something more complex than mere chronology.

Star Knowledge
Much Indian knowledge involved the technique of reproducing the cosmos in miniature and invoking spiritual change which would be followed by physical change. Hardly a tribe exists which did not construct its dwellings after some particular model fo the universe. The principle involved was that whatever is above must be reflected below. This principle enabled the people to correlate their actions with the larger movements of the universe.

Star knowledge was among the most secretive and sophisticated of all the information that Indians possessed. Today, archeoastronomers are finding all kinds of correlations between Indian practices and modern astronomical knowledge. Very complex star maps painted on buckskin hides or chiseled on canyon walls give evidence that Indians were astute observers of the heavens. A good deal of Indian star knowledge continues to exist, but religious prohibitions and restrictions continue to limit the propagation of this information.

The Principle of Correlation
Star knowledge gives us an additional principle of Indian information gathering That principle is correspondence, or correlation. Being interested in the psychological behavior of things i the world and attributing personality to all things, Indians began to observe and remember how and when things happened together. The result was that they made connections between things that had no sequential relationships. There was, consequently, no firm belief in cause and effect, which plays such an important role in Western science and thinking. But Indians were well aware that when a certain sequence of things began, certain other elements or events would als occur.

A kind of predictability was present in Indian knowledge of the natural world. Many ceremonies that are used to find things, heal, or predict the future rely upon this kind of correlation between and among entities in the world. The so-called medicine powers and medicine bundles represented this kind of correlative understanding of how different things were related to each other. Correlation is responsible, for example, for designating the bear as a medicine animal, owls as forecasting death or illness, and snakes as anticipating thunderstorms.

This kind of knowledge is both tribal- and environmental-specific. In diagnosing illness, for example, medicine men might search for the cause of sickness by questioning their patients on a variety of apparently unrelated experiences. They would be searching for that linkages which experience had taught them existed in these situations. Here again, there was considerable emphasis on the heavens. One need only examine the admonitions of different tribes with respect to shooting stars, different configurations of the moon, eclipses, and unusual cloud formations to understand how correlational knowledge provided unique ways of adjusting to the natural world.

A More Realistic Knowledge
The acknowledgment that power and place produce personality means not only that the natural world is personal but that its perceived relationships are always ethical. Fr that reason, Indian accumulation of information is directly opposed to the Western scientific method of investigation, because it is primarily observation. Indians look for messages in nature, but they do not force nature to perform functions which it does not naturally do.

The Indian method of observation produces a more realistic knowledge in the sense that, given the anticipated customary course of events, the Indian knowledge can predict what will probably occur. Western science seeks to harness nature to perform certain tasks. But there are limited resources in the natural world, and artificial and wasteful use depletes the resources more rapidly than would otherwise occur naturally.

Indian students can expect to have a certain amount of difficulty in adjusting to the scientific way of doing things. They will most certainly miss the Indian concern with ethical questions and the sense of being personally involved in the functioning of the natural world. But they can overcome this feeling and bring to science a great variety of insights about the world derived from their own tribal backgrounds and traditions.

By adopting the old Indian concern what the products of actions, students can get a much better perspective on what they are doing and how best to accomplish their goals. By maintaining a continuing respect for the beliefs and practices of their tribes, students can begin to see th world through the eyes of their ancestors and translate the best knowledge o the world into acceptable modern scientific terminology.

Most important, however, are the contributions being made by American Indian scientists. With their expertise, we can better frame our own ethical and religious concerns and make more constructive choices in the use of existing Indian physical and human resources. It is this linkage between science and the community that we must nurture and encourage.

American Indian Metaphysics (PDF)

American Indian Metaphysics
Vine Deloria, Jr.
American Indian Studies
University of Arizona, Tucson

For many centuries, whites scorned the knowledge of American Indians, regarding whatever the people said as gross savage superstition and insisting that their own view of the world, a complex mixture of folklore, religious doctrine, and Greek natural science, was the highest intellectual achievement of our species. This posture of arrogance produced some classic chapters in the history of the western hemisphere: Ponce de Leon wandering around the southeastern United States vainly searching for the Fountain of Youth, Swedish immigrants on the Delaware River importing food for thirty years because they could not grow anything in this country, and the Donner party resorting to cannibalism because of their fear of the local Indians.

In recent years, there has been an awakening to the fact that Indian tribes possessed considerable knowledge about the natural world. Unfortunately, much of this appreciation has come too late for anyone, white or Indian, to recapture some of the most important information on lands, plants, and animals of the continent. In a parallel but unrelated development, Indian religious traditions are now of major interest to whites whose own religious traditions have either vanished or been swamped in reactionary fundamentalism Fluctuating between a recognition of practical knowledge about the world possessed by Indians and outright admiration for their sense of the religious is unsettling and nonproductive; it does not attribute to Indians any consistency, nor does it suggest that their views of the natural world and religious reality had any more correspondence and compatibility than do western religion snd its science. Instead of talking of an Indian “science” or even a Indian “religion,” we should focus our attention on the metaphysics possessed by most American Indian tribes and derive from this central perspective the information and beliefs which naturally flowed from it.

Metaphysics has had a difficult time regaining its intellectual respectability in western circles. Its conclusions were greatly abused by generations of Europeans who committed what Alfred North Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” which is to say that, after they reached the conclusions to which their premises had led them, they came to believe they had accurately described ultimate reality. Metaphysics need not bear the burden of its past, however, if we understand it as simply that set of first principles which we must possess in order to make sense of the world in which we live. In this sense, the Indian knowledge of the natural world, of the human world, and of whatever realities exist beyond our senses has a consistency which far surpasses anything devised by western civilization.

The best description of the Indian metaphysics was the realization that the world, and all its possible experiences, constituted a social reality, a fabric of life in which everything had the possibility of intimate knowing relationships because, ultimately, everything was related. This world was a unified world, a far cry from the disjointed and sterile world painted by western science. Even though we can translate the realities of that world into concepts familiar to us from the western scientific context, such as space, time, and energy, the Indian world can be said to consist of two basic experiential dimensions which, taken together, provided a sufficient means of making sense of the world. These tow concepts were place and power, perhaps better defined as spiritual power of life force. Familiarity with the personality of objects and entities of the natural world enabled Indians to discern immediately where each living being had its proper place and what kinds of experiences that place allowed, encouraged, and suggested.

Western scientists frequently suggest that the Indian way of looking at the world lacked precision because it was not capable of nor interested in mathematical descriptions of nature. But, as Carl Jung pointed out with respect to the so-called primitive mind, once a person knew the places of things, a mere glance was sufficient to replace counting and, in most instances, was more accurate. The Indian mind was considerably more interested in learning the psychological characteristics of things than in describing their morphological structure. Hence, in some instances when defining common personality traits which men and animals shared,the Indian seemed to be talking nonsense. Today, as western science edges ever closer to acknowledging the intangible, spiritual quality of matter and the intelligence of animals, the Indian view appears increasingly more sophisticated.

Indian students today are confronted with a monolith of western science when they leave the reservation to attend college. In most introductory courses, their culture and traditions are derided as mere remnants of a superstitious, stone-age mentality which could not understand or distinguish between the simplest of propositions. Additionally, they are taught that science is an objective and precise task performed by specialists who carefully weigh the propositions which come before them. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Western science traditionally represents the consensus of the established scientists who almost always reject new ideas out of hand. Much of the progress made by western science has been made by amateurs and martyrs who have been derided and cursed in their lifetime, only to be canonized by a new generation which has learned to accept the smallest of changes with more grace than their fathers and teachers.

Indian students are further misled by outrageous claims made by science which suggest that the various fields of inquiry, if taken together, represent the sum total of humand knowledge. In fact, almost all of western science is reductionist in nature and seeks to force natural experience and knowledge into predetermined categories which ultimately fail to describe or explain anything. The whole process of science is that of finding common denominators which can describe large amounts of data in the most general terms, rejecting anything which refuses easy classification as “anomalous,” existing outside the generally accepted labels and, therefore, not to be given standing or serious attention. This way of gathering information about the world–and ourselves–is, of course, absurd.

One of the most painful experiences for American Indian students is to come into conflict with the teachings of science which purport to explain phenomena already explained by tribal knowledge and tradition. The assumption of the western educational system is that information dispensed by colleges is always correct, and the beliefs or teachings of the tribe are always wrong. Rarely is this the case. The teachings of the tribe are almost always more complete, but they are oriented toward a far greater understanding of reality than is scientific knowledge. And precise tribal knowledge almost always has a better predictability factor than does modern science, which generally operates in sophisticated tautologies that seek only to confirm preexisting identities.

We live in and industrial, technological world in which a knowledge of science is often the key to employment and many times is essential in understanding how the larger society views and uses the natural world–including, unfortunately, people and animals. Western science has no moral basis and is entirely incapable of resolving human problems except by the device of making humans act more and more like machines. Therefore, Indian students, as they study science and engineering, should take time and make the effort to regain a firm knowledge of traditional tribal lore. Even if many of the stories seem impossible under existing scientific explanation of phenomena, Indian students should not easily discard what their tribes have traditionally believed. There is most assuredly a profound knowledge present in many things which the tribes have preserved.

Richard Ford’s article on “Science in Native America” is a good representative piece recognizing the knowledge of Indians. It fairly surveys the various aspects of knowledge which Indians had and gives reasonable explanations of some of the ways in which our ancestors understood natural phenomena. Considering the present state of things, it is important for scholars such as Ford to begin to help us break the ice of ignorance and neglect which has been thrust upon our traditions for nearly half a millennium. Without the voices of respected white scholars, there is little chance that we can get sufficient attention from the scientific establishment in order to plead our own case. But we must remember that every article which attempts to discuss this problem should be understood as a call for each of us to enter into the exchange of knowledge. In this sense, Ford calls us, as Native Americans, to become more truly scientific–to offer our knowledge to the larger benefit of our species.