Am joyfully stunned to discover that iconoclast Camille Paglia shares my passion for Native American culture. As in what came before, thousands of years before, the arrival of Europeans on the continent's shores.
My passion was triggered back in 2010, when it hit me that the tribes scattered from coast to coast were most probably remnants of what my birth faith describes as the Ancient Church. Sort of a hoot that some folks at one time proposed they were the lost tribes of israel. Needed to go back one more church!
Camille's interest is in Native American culture around the end of the last Ice Age, as the glaciers withdrew. Sounds about right for me, too. Not that we'll ever learn much. So much of the evidence was destroyed - willfully & unintentionally - by European settlers.
My brain is so buzzed by her talk of "odd clusterings of boulders" that she found in heavily wooded areas not far from Philadelphia (as in PA; not to be confused with the Nanih Waiya Mound and Village outside Philadelphia, MS).
Camille noticed what looked like man-made cairns, piles of stones that seemed to intentionally deigned & created to be just piles of stones tossed up by farmers clearing fields. They reminded her of "ritual space" she'd seen in her studies of European pre-historic art. Then, she began coming across "imposing, smoothly planed standing stones (up to seven feet high)." Almost all of them were toppled over long ago, many found in underbrush, partially buried. Considering where they were placed throughout the Delaware River basin, she concludes - as would I - that they were once part of the Native American cosmology.
Goose bumps! Speak to me, Camille!
Researching her passion reconnected me with when I stumbled across my own. Was preparing course work for teaching the early history of our continent to at-risk high school students. I only note that they were at-risk because I had far more leeway in what I taught them than would have been the case in a standard high school. Instead of using a textbook, my courses were marked by a trail of mini-lectures & specialty units, designed to grab & go their attention.
Perhaps it is faulty memory, but I don't recall getting much information at all in any of my schooling about the people who were here when our own earliest ancestors arrived settled secured the land as their own.
It never hit me that people had been living on the continent for thousands of years, yet what Europeans found on landing seemed to them untouched by mankind. An experience & attitude that, unfortunately, helped them foster nurture embrace an image of the original inhabitants as less than human, something they could treat far worse than the most mangy dog.
Thanks, Camille, for resparking this passion! Instead of fixating on an election that represents the worst of times, am going to ponder the unknown, sadly now probably unknowable, history of the people who roamed the hills & fields where I live, who sought to protest & preserve the earth. In many ways, we are, at this moment in time, the sorry nadir of the disdainful dismissive destructive mindset that sought dominion over stewardship, subjection over collaboration. And always always always in the name of a greater good.
Oh, the joy of lifting my eyes from whatever unfolds over the coming five months & pondering the ties I see from the scant study I've done between a culture that was crushed & brushed away with an ancient wisdom far superior to what we have in this here & now.
Camille - mega mega mega thanks! You've saved me from Election 2016.
