Sovereigns of Themselves:
A Liberating History of Oregon and Its Coast
Introduction II
Abridged Online Edition
Compiled By Rev. Marilyn A. Riedel
  And M. Constance Guardino III
January 2006 Maracon Productions

Historians M. Constance Guardino III and Rev. Marilyn A. Riedel

I offer thanks to my friends, relatives, and ancestors whose strength of purpose
led me to my own. A special thanks to my co-author,
Rev. Marilyn A. Riedel, for her deep love and dedication to me and this project.
Without her tireless effort and selfless interest,
this liberating history of Oregon would never have been written.

Bones Suggest Early Settlement

 Milwaukee (AP): Mammoth bones found in Southeastern Wisconsin suggest human settlement 13,500 years ago—or 1,000 years before what has been considered the oldest human community in the Western Hemisphere, an expert on pre-historic Indian life says.
 Carbon dating established that the bones found in Kenosha County are 13,500 years old.
 "I think we can build a case for people having used the carcasses," said Eileen Johnson, curator of anthropology at the Museum of Texas Tech University and research director at Lubbock Lake National Landmark.

 Although the research is preliminary, "there do appear to be marks that may well have been made by tools, certainly by people," said Johnson, who examined the bones in Kenosha and Milwaukee this week.
 Monte Verde in Southern Chile has been considered the oldest human.
 For thousands of years, Native American memorizers retained and transmitted knowledge through memory and word of mouth. The memorizers, who were usually women since they were less apt to be killed in battle, were among the most respected citizens of every nation. Memorizers spent their lives absorbing historical, medicinal, religious, and secular literature from their predecessors, and in turn teaching it to representatives of the next generation. Until recently, Native Americans were reluctant to share this knowledge with the white man, but to avoid its being lost forever,  Cherokee Dhyani Ywahoo,Chief Sedillo of the Yanqui Indians, Apache Chief Asa Delugio, and others are generously revealing what is so carefully preserved.
 Dhyani Ywahoo tells us that the forebears of the Cherokee came from the Pleiadians to Atlantis, where they lived until its final destruction. When their homes sank into the ocean, they escaped to this continent. Before the Europeans arrived, Dhyani Ywahoo's people lived a happy life, always harmonious with their natural environment. The Cherokees' advanced mathematical skills, detailed knowledge of astronomy, and legends of their sources of power reflect the wisdom and accomplishments of their ancestors. Cherokee medicine people utilized crystals to capture and manage earth's energy for their protection. Ywahoo describes this positive energy issuing from forceful dragons the Cherokee called Ukdena. Ancient sacred rituals help these descendants of Pleiadians from Atlantis maintain a harmonious balance of power from the sun, the moon, the earth, and the universe. The Cherokee grew bountiful crops and lived happily for an untold number of years in the Southern US. When western civilization encroached, the number of Cherokee medicine people decreased, the shamans lost the dragon power, and their beneficial relationship with the energy currents of the universe disappeared...
 Legends transmitted for generations by descendants of the Algonquin family refer to the great flood and to the big country that sank in the sunrise sea. In their drawings the crescent is its symbol; when the points are up, the old land is still living, and when the points are down, their homeland is covered by the ocean. The Sioux, like Aztecs and the Caribs, believe they are the children of seven kings from an old, red land. To this day they still keep seven tribes. Their realistic tales of the flood help to confirm that their memorizers related facts, not fiction, Apaches recall a grand fire island in the eastern ocean and the maze like entrance to its port. Asa Delugio offers a graphic description of the sacred mountain that "spurt fire like a giant fountain" describing "the Fire God crawling through the caverns, roaring and thrashing the land about like a wolf shakes the rabbit. He reports that after his distant forefathers fled from their homeland, they traveled west to South America and eventually reached the mountains. Here they found temporary shelter in immense, ancient tunnels. After leaving the mountains they wandered with their seeds and fruit plants for many years before coming to the North American continent. Hopi, who live in the Southwestern US, describe their Third World, the one before this, as being an advanced civilization on a red land where the inhabitants wore shields to fly thorough the air. Their legends portray an overpowering flood destroying that world and survivors migrating on reed rafts to the present Fourth World. When they finally landed on the shore of a warm country to the south, their ancestors separated into various group sand began their long migrations over the continent. The Hopi expect that the islands of their past home will emerge one day to prove the truth of their memories.

Giants in History

 Translators attempting to learn things from Indians, particularly in the mid 1700s, did not always render the proper meaning of what the Indians were saying. If presented with the assertion that coincident with these large creatures were tribes or groups of very large men, the chances are substantial that the translator would use the English word "giant" as an adequate substitute for the Indian word or description. The word "giant," unfortunately, has certain connotations in the English language and immediately suggests children's stories, folklore, and, in the minds of scientists, superstitions.
 From talking with elders of several tribes, my understanding is that the Indians were describing people of more than average height. In fact, some elders as a routine matter have reported that the Indians themselves were much larger and taller. A more general description of these people used by traditional elders is "the tall ones."
 Ella E. Clark's collections of Indian traditions, Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest and Indian Legends of the Northern Rockies, contains numerous stories of giant people ... she respected the elders who shared their stories and tried, as much as possible, to retain the exact wording and flavor of what they said, although sometimes she used "giants" also.
 In a story discussing the origin of the Chief's Face, a rock formation on Mount Hood, south of the Columbia River, an elder commented: "In those days [early times] the Indians were also taller than they are now. They were as tall as the pine and fir trees that cover the hills, and their chief was such a giant that his warriors could walk under his outstretched arms." The mountain exploded, and the people could not live near it for a long time. When they returned to the area "... The children, starved and weak for so long, never became as tall and strong as their parents and grandparents had been." The story predicted that the people would remain weak until a great chief came who could conquer the volcano spirit.
 This tradition seems to be straightforward and appears to describe a condition of malnutrition which might be expected to occur if people were deprived of food for several generations. One would expect that after a century of living again in a fertile land the deprivations suffered as a result of the volcano would have been overcome and the people would have returned to a normal size again. We have seen a similar situation with the Great Depression generation in America. It is important to note here, however that human beings, as a result of some change of living conditions, beginning with the eruption of volcanoes, suffered an irreversible loss of size.
 Clark also recorded a story of the Coeur d' Alene people involving giants. These men had a strong odor and apparently painted their faces black. They were "taller than the highest tipis" and "when they saw a single tipi or lodge in a place, they would crawl up to it, rise, and look down the smoke hole. If several lodges were together, the giants were not so bold." Initially this description seems highly exaggerated, but again, if we know the Indian background, the story is not unreasonable.
 Many tribes of the Pacific Northwest lived in pit houses much of the year. These houses were partially underground and partially above ground, thus vulnerable to Peeping Toms from the outside. So to have these giant people looking through smoke holes does not imply that they had an unusual fictional height, but only that they were sufficiently tall so that they could easily look down on these kinds of dwellings.
 These stories of large people imply that Indians have a sense of historical sequence, somewhat different from Western history but nevertheless of some significance because some unusual and spectacular observations and experiences are remembered for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of years. Would the Indian accounts be "accepted" by scientists today as evidence of the existence of giants and the very recent existence of some kinds of megafauna (defined  as "individuals or animals of a certain region, period, or special environment large enough to be visible to the naked eye."? In America? Absolutely not.
 There is strong doctrinal bias against giving any Indian accounts credence—simply because the source is Indian. It is often hazardous for scholars to adopt a pro-Indian stances and suggest that Indian people could accurately remember anything of past events. Sometimes scholars even suggest that the Indian knowledge which does correspond to scientific knowledge was passed along by earlier scholars studying the same tribe... Some scholars have also alleged that Indian traditions and folk lore are not historical fact because "Indian traditions do not distinguish between Myth and history, nor between human and supernatural." ...It is almost impossible to get non-Indian scholars pried loose from their own cultural presuppositions to do careful interpretive work on Indian traditions.
 Scholarly journals are littered with similar kinds of situations in which Indian accounts are rejected simply because they are Indian and theories are discredited because scholars are not willing to give credence to Indian accounts that seem to be accurate memories of times past. In general practice, a scholar discredits an Indian tradition and then debunks it, classifying it as a psychological quirk illustrating the primitive mind.
 Considering all the fraud that has occurred in scientific circles—from Kepler fudging his data, Mendel rigging his figures, Burt writing his own reviews of his publications, and more recently, fraudulent reports in such areas as the breast cancer studies—it seems ludicrous that a scientist would call into question the veracity of others under any circumstances. Add to that sorry history the factual world view of the first Europeans who sought the Seven Cities of Gold, Prester John's palace, and the Fountain of Youth, a world view from which the Western scientific tradition has sprung, and it will be obvious that a long tradition of fantasy, Myth, fictions, and lies exists among Europeans and scientists that cannot be overlooked. Dismissing Indian accounts on the basis of predetermined doctrines, then, is not really a good idea and may prevent us from retrieving some factors about Pleistocene America that would be useful in understanding what happened over here.
 What we can establish, as common ground between science and the Indian traditions, is that many creatures, including human beings themselves, were much larger during the late Pleistocene and that body size decreased measurably...
 We know that these large people were not destroyed by the Indians. Many traditions suggest a state of peaceful coexistence with the tall ones. Frances Densmore reports a Sioux tradition in her classic study Teton Sioux Music which may give us some hints concerning this relationship:

 "It is said that the Thunderbirds once came to earth in the form of giants. These giants did wonderful things, such as digging the ditches where the rivers run. At last they died of old age, and their spirits went again to the clouds and they resumed their form as Thunderbirds."

 ...But the giants could well have been the white-skinned race which forced the Salish, Sioux, and Algonquins out of the north country and then, if we follow Werner Muller's thesis, migrated east and invaded western Europe, routed the Neanderthals, and are known as the Cro-Magnon peoples.
 The demise of the megafauna in almost every instance, is attributed by the Indians to an intervening act of the Great Spirit. With the tribes of the Mississippi a cause, an epidemic which also kills the giants, also, is given. The act of the Great Spirit, given by many tribes as the cause of megafauna extinction, implies some kind of natural event that was understood as an act of grace by high spiritual powers.
 ... So the Great Mystery made a great tent and kept it dark for ten days... Many of the Sioux believed that the event centered in the Devils Lake area of North Dakota and held the place to be sacred. It seems that the “dark tent” was some kind of traumatic climatic activity wherein the sky turned black for a significant period of time and great changes took place on the Earth.
 ... Donald Patten, in a highly informative and perceptive article entitled, "A Comprehensive Theory on Aging, Giantism and Longevity," raised a series of important questions about megafauna size and subsequent reduction to contemporary species size that bear reviewing...
 ... Patten links the propensity toward giantism with longevity, suggesting that the two phenomena seem to occur together, and that at one time animals and people grew larger than today and lived longer He points to the advanced ages of the patriarchs recorded in the Bible and references to "giants in the earth" and "mighty men" as evidence the Near East had its giantism also. Patten demonstrates in several writings that in the pre-flood era the people regularly lived unusually long lives. It thus was not uncommon for men in their seventies and eighties to be fathering children and for many generations to have shared long periods of time with each other...
 ...Once human longevity stabilized around four score for a life span, people began to doubt that anyone lived much longer. Even in ancient times extreme skepticism existed regarding this. Patten cites the efforts of Josephus to convince his readers that people really did live longer in ancient times. Josephus, in mentioning the advanced age of people before the flood, argued, along with many noted witnesses "that have written Antiquities... (among them Mantheo, Berossus, Mochus, Hestiaeus, Hieronymous, Hesiod, Hecataeus, Hekkanicaus, Acusilaus, Ephorus, and Nicolaus) that the ancients lived a thousand years..." Many times Indian elders have told me that in the old days people lived until they were 200 years old and, why I have no reason to doubt them. I have encouraged some of them to talk openly of these things but they are reluctant to draw the fire of skeptics.
 So we are talking about a golden age when there was very little hardship, when there was considerably more species of animals living on all continents, and when there was no Ice Age. This idyllic planetary condition was remembered in a substantial number of human societies but according to Patten's theory, was shattered by the appearance of a comet or meteor composed almost wholly of ice and water that passed close enough to the Earth to disintegrate, dumping ice in massive amounts on the magnetic poles and precipitating an ungodly amount of rain on the temperate regions.

Photo Courtesy of M. Constance Guardino III 1996

  Large amounts of ice quickly formed gigantic icy mountains in areas of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres where we had glaciers, producing, as some scientists have speculated and as the Shoshones have reported, mountains of ice that reached to the sky. The impetus of this dump provided the mechanism to enable the ice to travel in all directions, most particularly uphill, at a very rapid rate of speed, accounting for the glacial "advances" and, if there were several dumps over a short period of time, the "retreats" or "stages" of glaciation as well.
 Prior to the disaster, Patten suggests, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was considerably higher than our present level. With the icy catastrophe, the ocean cooled significantly, and as the temperature of the water decreased, much of the CO² was absorbed by the colder water. Some carbonate strata were formed —limestone, dolomites, and dolostones—and more CO² was taken out of circulation. About 50 to 75 percent of the biomass was buried, fossilized, and deposited in strata as tidal waves laid down immense beds of plant and animal matter...
 Several studies have shown that carbon dioxide enhances plant growth and Patten suggests that all organisms are somewhat affected by the amount of carbon dioxide available to them. The hypothalamus gland serves as a supervisor of the hormone system and carbon dioxide acts as a stimulator for it. An excess of carbon dioxide, at least something greater than our present concentration in the atmosphere, would stimulate cerebral circulation and oxygenation. Too much would tend to act as an anesthetic. In pre-flood days, then, there was sufficient carbon dioxide present to create giantism and promote longevity. Reduction of the percentage of carbon dioxide meant slower growth and a downsizing of the fauna and flora.
 We actually hear about CO² every day but in a different context—global warming and air pollution. During 1995 there were constant alarms by scientists concerning the breakup of the Antarctic ice shelf with icebergs the size of Rhode Island breaking from the main body of ice. Our atmosphere is definitely getting warmer and having a drastic effect on the polar ice sheets. In a sense we are returning to prediluvian conditions.  We never stop to think that there were once corals growing in Northern Norway and lush foliage in Alaska and Siberia. Our fossils give evidence of a much warmer Earth. And this warmer Earth had megafauna, suggesting that opportunities for maximum growth were present also. Among other factors, this warm climate has supported substantially more plant growth, which must have produced increased CO².
 The Earth's atmosphere, then, might have originally been much different and possessed maximum benign living conditions. With a maximum benign percentage of carbon dioxide during much of the planet's history, producing monstrous-sized dinosaurs could not have been difficult, given carbon dioxide's effect on growth... Perhaps the Earth, minus the tremendous amount of ice and water dumped on it, might have been a different place to... live. A collapse of that atmosphere once the dinosaur age ended and again in the Pleistocene would significantly reduce the size of animals over several generations until they were again adjusted to the present atmosphere. Every living creature would be affected and that would be why, according to the Indians, these giants are simply "gone."
 Derek Ager, the dean of European stratigraphers in geology, summed up the theories purporting to explain the major extinctions of the geologic past: "Almost all the theories (including the Noachian one) that seek to explain major extinctions in the past, lead by one route or another to climatic oscillations and related matters such as the composition of the earth’s atmosphere. These in turn tend to point to extraterrestrial phenomena." Patten certainly suggests an extraterrestrial source of planetary change, but he does not rest there. He takes seriously the effect this source would have on the atmosphere and does not simply try to locate mechanical geological disruptions...
 ... Actually, the size of human being started to increase with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of more carbon dioxide into the air. Patten cites some startling figures: "With the onset of the petroleum age, atmospheric CO² began to increase even more sharply. In 1957 the concentration of Hawaii (and the South Pole) was 311 ppM (parts per million)... By 1971 this had risen to 322 ppM, the rate of increase during the 1970's...steepening slightly. By extension the concentration by 1979 is between 329 to 330 ppM. The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing between .7 and .75 ppM per year."
 A related factor here is how an increased percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would affect our radiocarbon dating, which has all of the megafauna clustering at around 12,000 years ago. If there was significantly more carbon in the atmosphere, the initial premise of radiocarbon dating—determining the amount of carbon 124 in vegetal and organic material—would be much different at its starting point. We could not assume, as we do today, that the percentage... was the same as what we find today... We simply have not thought about these things.
 Scientists casually say that climatic conditions have changed, implying a rise or fall in the surface temperature of the planet, but then they do not think through the remainder of the problem. Since carbon dioxide is absorbed in cold water rather easily, the onset of the Ice Age...would have reduced the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere simply by decreasing the mean average temperature of the oceans. Thus... adjustments have to be made in scientific thinking regarding atmospheric carbon dioxide.
 Change of atmospheric composition, then, is a reasonable solution to the question of giantism and the demise of the megafauna of the Pleistocene (geological period). Watching this process of downsizing, Indians may have felt they were being saved by the Great Spirit, they may have seen individuals of both sizes in the same area and attributed the demise of these creatures to an epidemic. Indians themselves may have been reduced in size, not through malnutrition but because of the change of atmosphere. The exposing of Mount Hood would have been a minor local event, a mere hiccup within the Ice Age disaster. But effects of the new atmosphere would have caused a permanent reduction in size that the Indians recognized.
 ... No advances can be made in our understanding of our planet and ourselves when scholars simply recite doctrinal beliefs as if they could verify sagging credibility. Science increasingly acts as if it were a religion by relying on authority rather than argument of evidence...

Geology and Native American History

 Deloria's, in moving the discussion now to the field of geology, is to offer evidence from the Indian traditions that would suggest that American Indians have occupied the Western Hemisphere for very long periods of time and could not have been latecomers to this continent via the Bering Strait around 12,000 years ago. In order to present this evidence I will first look at some of Ager's critiques... and then examine traditions recounting what the Indians say occurred a long time ago.
 Ager is among the few scholars who have suggested that some geological events may have been experienced and remembered by early human beings... [and] speculates that "it may well be that early humans first kindled their fires from the conflagrations caused by such geologically recent eruptions." And again he suggests: "... many early humans must have seen geological phenomena far more violent and spectacular than any we know in historic times, including the last great volcanicity across Northern Europe from the Auvergne to Rumania and the Explosion of Santorini which may have given rise to the Atlantis legend..." Philip King echoes this possibility in his book The Evolution of North America, a rather technical treatise which gives a comprehensive overview of the geologic history of our continent, when he notes that "... all the evidence seems to point to the astonishing conclusion that the Grand Canyon was cut largely in the two million years or so of Pleistocene and later time, or a time when men were living already on the earth. If primitive man had been living in North America, he would have witnessed the formation of the Grand Canyon."
 There are indeed many traditions of human societies relating times when the Earth boiled and fumed, when, as the Hopis say, the world was destroyed by fire. If some geologists are now speculating on the possibility that people saw and remembered such events, why aren't these accounts useful in science? Here the arrogant attitude of scientists that all early people were frightened of nature and formulated fictional tales to explain the origin of things precludes scholars from using these accounts. Scholars have devised a technical language to deal with the traditions of the past and non-Western peoples, and this language is designed to cleverly divert this non scientific information into harmless categories where it cannot disrupt the doctrines we are currently supporting...

How Scientists Neutralize Native American Historiography

 Three basic concepts stand in the way of examining the traditions of Indians in a fair and intelligent manner: "myth," and its progeny "euphemerisms" and "etiology." "Myth" is the general name given to the traditions of non-Western peoples. It basically means a fiction created and sustained by underdeveloped minds. Many scholars will fudge this point, claiming that their definition of myth gives it great respect as the carrier of some super-secret and sacred truth, but in fact the popular meaning is a superstition or fiction which we, as smart modern thinkers, would never in a million years believe.
 Within the broad classification of myth are two subcategories of story—line creations: "euphemerisms" and "etiological" myths. The euphemerisms is a narrative which contains some participation of the supernatural that is wholly constructed by primitives and which they insist is historically true. For decades the Trojan War was believed to be a euphemerisms until Heinrich Schliemann began to dig tells in Asia Minor and proved the conflict to have a historical basis. An etiological myth is a narrative made up to explain something which people have observed or which they wish to explain in familiar terms. Looking at various kinds of landscapes, in etiological format we simply assume that primitive and ancient people would make up a story, based on their knowledge of nature, to account for waterfalls, volcanoes, rivers, and so forth. Most of modern science is, in fact, etiological myth, since we cannot explain fossils, we cannot explain sedimentary deposition, and we cannot explain the causes of glaciation.
 It is possible to separate non-Western traditions from the mainstream of science and keep them comfortably lodged in the fiction classification because most of them contain references to the activities of supernatural causes and personalities and are not phrased in the sterile language of cause and effect, which has been the favorite language of secular science. It is unfair to do so, however, when scientific writers have complete license to make up scenarios of their own which could not possibly have taken place and pass them as science and therefore as superior to other traditions.
 ... In the early 1970s, Dorothy Vitaliano attempted to show that some information possessed by very ancient peoples and the non-Western tribal groups, and classified as "myth," might indeed be useful. She began to match some accounts with modern geologic knowledge to create a new discipline which she called geomythology. Geomythology, according to Vitaliano, is an effort "to explain certain specific myths and legends in terms of actual geologic events that may have been witnessed by various groups of people." ... Linkage of traditions and legends with present-day knowledge might provide some additional data for scientific experimentation; it would also verify the historical basis of legend, take it out of the category of folklore, and give it some real status.
 Minimally, verification would suggest that a particular group or tribe of people lived at a specific location and had been witness to a geological event. In an unexpected format, Vitaliano was stepping forward to provided substance to Ager's offhand remark about the geologic events that the ancients might have experienced. It should be apparent how useful this approach is to American Indian efforts to get traditional knowledge verified.
  This knowledge of geologic and climatic events in the North American ancient past preserved by the traditions of the tribes can be a significant source of information for modern science. But it would require that scientists honestly reevaluate much of their dating of strata and abandon orthodox doctrines in instances where common sense dictates. Fresh-looking lava must reasonably be recent; processes of erosion cannot be suspended, like scientific beliefs, simply for doctrinal purposes.
 If the Indian legends demonstrate the presence of people in North America, or even the Western Hemisphere, tens of thousands of years ago—or in the case of Mount Multnomah 25 million years ago—then that discrepancy should alert scientists and they should reexamine their doctrines in light of the conflicting interpretations. The idea that people have only been in the Western Hemisphere for 12,000 years is simply an agreement among scholars who neither think nor read and who have been stuck on a few Clovis and Folsom sites for a generation. I personally cannot believe that any people could remember these geological events for tens of thousands of years. My conclusion is that these are eyewitness accounts but that the events they describe are well within the past 3,000 years. It is past time that this resistance be ended and a new scenario for the Western Hemisphere be constructed.
 Volcanoes provide the easiest natural phenomenon to link to tribal traditions because they are not difficult to date in the geological strata. ...Matching traditions about floods and the creation of lakes, rivers, and inland seas is somewhat more difficult. ...Flood stories are almost always linked with the concerns of fundamentalist Christians, who believe that Indian accounts of a great flood will provide additional proof of the accuracy of the Old Testament. With their cultural blinders in place, it never occurs to them that the Old Testament may very well provide evidence of the basic accuracy of the Indian story...
 ... All societies have these kinds of flood stories. Perhaps the belief is held that flood stories respond to a basic human psychological need and are therefore a part of the orientation process which human groups devise to enable them to live in this world. Accepting the possibilities that these flood stories speak of a planetary event, not so long ago, involving significant psychological trauma, would free minds to make progress in all sciences.
 ... The pervasive nature of the large floods, the wide geographical scope of their damage, and their seemingly complete destruction of the world as people have known it leads many tribes to remember the experience as a general purging of evil in the world. The tribal accounts therefore need to be "de-mythologized," not in the old Rudolph Bultmannian search for enduring religious truths, but simply to eliminate the idea of crime and punishment to allow a concentration on the physical phenomenon of an unusually spectacular and destructive flood event.
 The flood stories of the seafaring Indians of the Pacific Northwest coast used the sea as the Plains tribes used the land. With a complex set of triangulation devices, these tribes—Quinaults, Makahs, Clallams, and others—went far out to sea hunting whales and seals. Therefore, over time, they experienced the terror of the sea as well as enjoyed its more placid benefits. If any groups knew and understood tsunamis and other hazardous ocean activities, these would be the people.
 Their flood stories, for the most part, involve tsunami actions of unusual strength and duration. Mount Shasta legends say that the sea came inland and rose until it nearly covered this peak and then final receded, leaving behind dry land and the marshes of the northern part of the state and Southern Oregon. Strangely, no flood stories were collected by Ella E. Clark from the Oregon tribes, and my suspicion is that these tribes may not have survived the flood, or may not have been affected by it.
 ... We discovered almost all that Washington State Indian groups have a flood story involving the sea invading the land. The people's solution, having been forewarned, is to build canoes or rafts and attempt to ride out the storm. In many of the stories only the good people in the canoe are saved. Most of the stories involve the efforts of the Indians to survive by fixing their canoes to the tops of mountains. They then identify landmarks and peculiar geological formations on mountains as the site where the canoes were tied.
 More often, this flood separates the different canoes and the tribe is scattered over a vast area before the water ebbs, leaving the people isolated from each other.
 ...These flood stories which involve tidal waves must be distinguished from flood stories which have rain as their primary source of water. Tribes all over the country have flood stories that feature incessant rain as the source of the disorder, and these stories, if any Indian stories, may have some relationship to Noah’s flood. Otis Halfmoon, a Nez Perce elder, told Ella Clark that "it rained for a long, long time. The valleys were filled with water, and the animals lived on the tops of the hills. Some of the animals were saved, but the big animals perished. That is why people have found the bones of big animals along the Salmon River and big hip bones near Lewiston." This tradition fits comfortably with the argument earlier concerning the demise of a major portion of the megafauna at the time of the large ice/water dump.
 The rain scenario is also found on the Pacific coast. ... The Skokomish relate that the Great Spirit was displeased with the evil in the world and after having secluded the good people and animals, "... he caused a heavy rain to fall. It rained and rained and rained for many days and many nights. All the earth was under water. The water rose higher and higher on the sides of Takhoma (Mount Rainier)." The water did not subside until it had reached the snow line.
 The Quileute Indians who live on the Olympic peninsula have a tradition which fits perfectly with the icy comet scenario. They experienced a storm of vicious intensity and prolonged duration. According to their tradition: "For days and days great storms blew. Rain and hail and then sleet and snow came down upon the land. The hailstones were so large that many people were killed. The other Quileute were driven from their coast villages to the great prairie, which was the highest part of their land." The storm lasted so long that the people grew thin and weak from hunger, and it was so intense that the men could not go out on to the sea to fish. Since theses people always had a ready supply of food in this area, the long duration of the storm seems to suggest we are dealing with a major climatic event. I would date this storm of rain, hail, sleet, and snow as preceding the tidal flood which divided this tribe into smaller scattered groups.
 With some few exceptions, Indian flood stories are sight specific, and while they may testify to the occurrence of a planetary event, they are more probably memories of local phenomena. Their chief virtue is that they suggest some evidence that a number of easily identified tribes have occupied the areas in which Americans found them for a considerable period of time. This evidence can help amend the rather artificial boundaries which the Indian Claims Commission and other agencies have forced on many tribes.
 The Indian legends also sketch out what could be a fruitful area of new research in establishing a more specific history of North America that could take the place of the present speculative chronology of "primitive man" with its endless "phases" of hypothetical occupations, the great variety of pottery types which many scholars argue show cultural development, and the interminable arguments over the use of scraping tools and spear points. The difficulties, however, are enormous because North American geological history has been stretched across a uniformitarian framework which requires countless millennia to pass between geological events, thereby trivializing catastrophic events to make them appear as slow natural processes that we can observe today.

Making Honest People out of Scientists

 Obviously, from the objections I have raised in this book, a great deal of the current popular scientific beliefs and doctrines do not hold up to any critical review. I hope that the next generation of scholars, Indian and non-Indian, will force open any breaches I have identified in the wall of scientific orthodoxy and make honest people out of scientists who are now afraid to publish their true beliefs and thoughts out of concern for conformity. To that end, therefore, I will now articulate areas where I believe good research and much difficult thinking will produce substantial breakthroughs in the years ahead.

Photo Courtesy of M. Constance Guardino III

Creation

 Apart from tribes having migration stories as descriptive of their origins, the majority of stories of origin suggest a creation in which people are given, simultaneous with their creation, an awareness that they have been created. These traditions often suggest that there was no essential spiritual/intellectual different between people and animals. Some tribes report that an entity should change shape and experience what various birds and animals experience in that particular kind of body. Thus stories relate that people and animals married each other. Peter Noyes, an elder on the Colville Reservation in Northeastern Washington State, told Ella Clark: "Long ago—I don't know how long ago, the animals were the people of this country. They talked to one another the same as we do. And they married, too. That want on for many, many years, and then the world changed." From the Sioux stories of compatible spirits I felt that this "marriage" must have been a blending of tow kinds of individual spirits.
 Human beings seem to be the focal point of communication in our world. Many traditions say that we cannot do anything very well except communicator, and consequently we are chosen to be the carriers of ceremonial thanksgiving activities on behalf of all other forms of life. We are not the only primate-shaped creatures, however, since there are peoples larger and smaller than we are, and some of these other peoples at on time coexisted with us, much as Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal are now knows to have been contemporaries.

The Early Climate

 This age, if we now move to a framework of world ages, and these could be geologic ages, was a golden age and was somehow disrupted, and planetary-wide catastrophes followed, radically changing the nature of our physical world. It was at this time, moist probably, that many of the older mountain chains were created, and thereby climate began to resemble what we have today. A feature of that world, however, was that the atmosphere was much different from our familiar sky today. The planet was shrouded in some kind of water vapor canopy and, while people could distinguish light and darkness, the canopy was too thick to produce clear images of the sun and moon. In this scenario the Indian traditions and the description of Genesis are mutually supportive of each other.
 Another feature was the rain and snow and thunderstorms, as we know them today, were not meteorological phenomena. Instead, the Earth was covered by a mist which constantly evaporate water from the ground and precipitated it again. Clarence Pickernell, a man with Quinault, Chehalis, and Cowlitz ancestors, said that "...when the world was young, the land east of where the Cascade Mountains now stand became very dry. This was in the early days before rains came to the earth. In the beginning of the world, moisture came up through the ground, but for some reason it stopped coming." The parallel with Genesis is firm: "For the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not man to till the ground." (Genesis 2:5) "But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. (Genesis 2:6)"
 Lest scientists begin to hemorrhage, these citations, in my mind, have nothing to do with the validity of any religions—Indian, Christian, Islamic, or Jewish. What we may have here is simply a description of a rather unusual planetary climate which characterized the initial state of our world—when human beings were around to experience it and how they remembered it.
 This condition existed prior to the origin of the four rivers of Mesopotamia mentioned in the Old Testament. I have already noted that the Sioux spoke of a time when there was no thunder and lightning and the rivers were made by giants. We are therefore talking about a time when the Earth lacked large rivers because there was insufficient rain to provide copious amounts of water to create the flow and beds of rivers. With some exceptions, the oceans and possibly some shallow lakes, it was not possible to have flowing water in the atmospheric mist of the early days. Conceivably, this condition may suggest an explanation of some of the more geologically placid eras of the past.

Volcanism

 When this world was destroyed, it was ravaged by fire, and here we have plenty of stories about the destruction by fire which I would take to be volcanic action of unprecedented severity. The lava flows, already observed, are often very fresh, as if they were still "warm" in some locations. Our world was radically changed, but stories seem to suggest that our species, while reduced significantly, was not destroyed as completely as during the first flood and mountain-building catastrophe.
 It is difficult to go beyond this sequence because the different tribes have different descriptions of volcanic activity. In fact, it may be going too far to suggest this sequence. It would seem likely...that the volcanism was a onetime event. What is important to note, however, is that in both instances of these early changes in world conditions, humans either were warned by the spirits or intuited hard times coming because we survived in enough numbers to repopulate the Earth. Surveying the Indian traditions, it seems likely to me that higher spiritual entities must have warned enough people, or provided for them in some other way, to ensure the continuance of the human species. Regardless of how many religious trappings have been attached to introduce lessons of morality, these are basically, in my mind, geological reports.

Crater Lake, Oregon
Photo Courtesy of Julie Hendricks

Living Fossils

 Scientific authority figures...casually let fly remarks that drastically undercut their beloved evolutionary doctrines without even realizing what they have done. We have literally hundreds of "fossil creatures" from the past living with us today. In fact, when we begin to compile a list of the animals casually mentioned by scientists, it is alarming. Where is evolution?
 ... [M]any living creatures today should actually be classified as living fossils, representatives of remote geological eras, because they apparently arose in remote times and however somehow survived al subsequent geological changes to persist today.
 Gordon Rattrey Taylor, in The Great Evolution Mystery, notes the following: bees, bacteria, salamanders, penguins, oysters, king crab, opossums, platypus, and shark, including a large number of familiar mammals and fish have dates from around the Paleocene—12 million years ago.
 It should not take a genius to recognize that the so-called antiquity of these creatures is illusory. We see hundreds of species in our modern world who are, in fact, survivors of previous Earth epochs. If we could find an honest scientist and have her or him make up a complete list of animals, fish, birds, reptiles, bacteria, and plants that "stopped evolving" millions of years ago and are found alive and kicking in the modern world, we would have a pretty good inventory of contemporary fauna and flora... It must be possible, and probably necessary to understand our situation, to collapse these millions of fictional years as much as we can and understand that our planet has a much different history than we have been told.

Dinosaurs and Monsters

 The discussion of living fossils was necessary because a number of tribal traditions describe creatures that may have been dinosaurs. In the world view of orthodox science, such a suggestion is preposterous at first blush, but as we have seen, a number of fauna originated in very early times and the crocodile and alligator apparently came on the scene before the dinosaurs flourished. The Tohono Oodham (Papagos) live on a large reservation in Southern Arizona which contains peak Baboquivari. There, in their earliest traditions, an extremely large animal, personified as the Spirit Etoi dominated the vicinity. ...Good authority suggests that it was some kind of dinosaur. ...In a revival of ancient customs with their tribe members in Northern Mexico, ...it is believed on object of particular sacredness used in this ceremony wan an unfossilized dinosaur bone from one of Etoi's personifications.
 Again the Pacific Northwest peoples have a number of stories concerning oversized animals in their lakes and rivers. Since the current trend in dinosaur research suggests that these creatures, for the most part, were warm-blooded and had social and instinctual characteristics like mammals of today,... some of these creatures, described as animals or large fish by observers, were surviving individuals of some presently classified dinosaur species. That is to say, humans and some creatures we have classified as dinosaurs were contemporaries.
 The best-known story concerns the monster, known as Ogopogo, who lives in Lake Chelan (50 miles long and 1,600 feet deep) on the east slope of the Cascades.
 Why would we attempt to identify this creature as a dinosaur or comparable animal? Indians generally speak with a precise and literal imagery. As a rule, when trying to identify creatures of the old stories, they say they are "like" familiar neighborhood animals, but then carefully differentiate the perceived differences. I have found that if the animal being described was in any way comparable to modern animals, that similarity would be pointed out; the word "monster" would not be used. Only in instances where the creature bears no semblance to anything we know today will it be described as a monster.
 Deloria further describes other native oral traditions and pictographic records discovered in the Great Lakes region of a monster called a "water panther." It was described as having a saw-toothed back and a benign, cat-like face in many of the carvings where it lived in streams and lakes identified by pictographs posting warnings! Similar animals were also described crossing the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers into Southwestern Missouri by the Sioux. In this case the dinosaur had "...red hair all over its body...and its body was shaped like that of a buffalo. It had one eye and in the middle of its forehead was one horn. Its backbone was just like a crosscut saw; it was flat and notched like a saw or cogwheel." Deloria suspects the dinosaur must be a stegosaurus. The dinosaurs thus easily displace the familiar, perhaps Pleistocene, megafauna and move west, where their remains are found in the Rocky Mountains today. Havasuapi Canyon in Northern Arizona at the intersection of "Tobocobe Trail" with Lee Canyon depict spectacular local fauna: a dinosaur, Diplodocus, under an extremely aged desert "varnish" covering in the lines of the figure. Found also were a fourteen feet high cow elephant striking an equally tall giant of a man with its trunk. He is in the water, a typical ambush location found in several Southern Arizona sites of remains butchered from the hunt as shown in the marks on the mammoth's bones. Also seven Ibex identified from the knobs on the horns and two deer are shown driven into the canyon. Above the canyon floor on a plateau was found an ancient megalithic fortress.
 These dinosaur scenarios...make a point about the longevity of American Indians through its own prehistory. Many scholars, when reminded of it, simply say, "Oh, that old thing," as if this whole discussion had been satisfactorily explained decades ago. But it has not. Orthodox scholars simply omit any evidence that shakes the foundations of accepted scientific belief from consideration.

Radiocarbon Dating

 What are the real facts about radiocarbon dating? Depending on the varying percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, radiocarbon dating might be significantly affected, changing the dates from what have been previously accepted. Today, lay people have surrendered their trust to science and uncritically accept the results of scientific investigations. Merely citing a few radiocarbon dates in support of a theory by a person with academic credentials means to the average person that in fact science has irrefutable proof of age using this technique.
 Deloria refers to several specific instances of false radiocarbon dating. The tale begins with directors of some radiocarbon dating laboratory asking the investigator what dates s/he will accept for the material they bring to be dated; then, when a figure is obtained that comes near this date, it is reported—together with tolerance values—to make the test appear honest. Lab personnel are told what date the scientists would prefer and the public is rarely made aware of these manipulations of scientific fact behind the scene.
 (1) In the Antarctic Journal of the US, W. Dort wrote that freshly slaughtered seals, when subjected to radiocarbon analysis, are dated at 1,300 years old.
 (2) In Science, M. Keith and G. Anderson wrote that shells of living mollusks were dated at 2,300 years old.
 (3) In The Physiology of Trees, Bruno Haber wrote that wood from a growing tree was dated at 10,000 years.
 The tree that was tested was growing next to an airport which had a high level of carbon dioxide from airplane exhausts.
 The next generation of people working on these problems, unless they are warned, will simply build on the errors of the famous personalities of the past.

Modern Micmac Compared with Davenport Hunt Tablet

  This is a facsimile of Verse 4 of Psalm 114. In exit Israel, as rendered in the Austrian edition of the Abbé Maillard's translation. It deals with the rolling back of the Red Sea "when the mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like young sheep." It is here chosen for comparison with the Davenport Micmac text, as certain features of the Davenport style are retained, while new features are introduced. The literal translation is: “The mountains (a) skipped (b), likewise (c) the sea (d) as beasts do (e), also (f) (g), (untranslatable particle) the hills (h) as do (i) the beasts' (j) young (k)." Note conversion of reading direction to L-R, though the heads of the animals are now wrongly oriented by Egyptian rules; old Indian residents of Maine in 1866 could still recall when the script was written both vertically and horizontally in any direction.

Resolving the Fell-Diop Disparity

 I am concerned that Barry Fell has lapsed into the typical Western European scientific attitude and biased assumption that denies Northern African and Egyptian authorship of written language. When Ramses III defeats the Vandals-Sea Peoples three times (1194, 1191, and 1188 BCE), who are Nordic-type white, blonde, and blue eyed, and settle in the already settled (Berber) Libya. [Fell assumes being invaded and therefore changed and built up by the "white Aryans," the so called white Egyptians. Dr. C. A. Diop, French African history scholar and scientist-archaeologist elaborates disproved in his book, African Origin of Civilization, an explanation for the presence of the "Libyan" alphabet as alphabet of Nordic origin. It survived in Libya, but died out in its northern homeland, to be replaced by runes. Fell also guesses that the "blond Tauregs" were from Nordic immigrants at the time of the Sea People's invasion.
 Egypt's more advanced status as a nation state than its other Mediterranean neighbors. Also cite date of 1700 BCE of bronze age voyage of Scandinavian King Woden-lithi voyage to America to barter textiles with the Algonquin Indians in return for metallic copper ingot, and thus setting up a permanent trading colony. Thus Bronze Age "Europeans" were literate, educated people, who left engraved rock inscriptions, recording their Teutonic and Celtic tongues, using alphabets that survive today in "remote parts of the world" (Africa), but died out and were replaced 2,000 years ago in Europe when the Roman script became the predominant alphabet.
 Diop relates the Lower or Northern part of Egypt dating back to the pre dynastic have failed to uncover the existence of a White type. The Whites of Lower Egypt were transplanted there at a well—known, precise historical epoch; it was during the 19th Dynasty, under Merneptah (1300 BCE), that the coalition of Indo-Europeans (peoples of the sea) was conquered; the survivors were taken prisoner and scattered over the Pharaoh's various construction sites between 1,300 and 500 BCE, these populations had time to spread from the Western Delta to the outskirts of Carthage. In Book II of his History, Herodotus explains how they were distributed along the coast.
 Barry Fell particularly falls prey to a picture decidedly showing invading white Indo-Europeans in battle gear wearing horned, Nordic—like helmets fighting the Egyptians. He makes the common assumption the invading (Hyksos, Assyrians, Greeks, Persians, etc.) did assimilate into Egypt becoming white Egyptians, and thus gained such political, economic, religious, and technological ascendancy which black Africans could not have done, as race-culture bias From this reasoning, Fell imputes the Celtic ogam alphabet as the basis of (hieratic or non-hieroglyphic) Egyptian and evolving as the oldest language!
 According to (world renowned African history) C. A. Diop, these battles did take place in Egypt, but that the Egyptians always represented them as races apart and were never influenced by them, for the simple reason that the invader's civilization was less advanced then their own. No one has ever thought seriously of proposing scientifically the influence of any one of peoples on Egyptian civilization.
 Fell’s specialization is decipherment and translation of ancient languages and alphabets from pre-Columbian North American colonizers and Amerindian petroglyphs, images, and symbols, and hieroglyphs on other archaeological finds such as pottery, ancient coins, for translation and historical content. His expert work [of heretofore "mysterious, indecipherable squiggles" were variously identified] in Kufic, Tifinag, Celtic, Hebrew, Micmac, ancient Basque etc. decipherment and translations have gained international confirmation and verification from significant internationally known experts in these very specialized ancient language fields.

Historian Marilyn Riedel at Confluence
of Portage Canal and Fox River
Photo Courtesy of M. Constance Guardino III

The Difference Between European and African Researchers

 The difference in the intellectual approach of the African and European researcher often causes... misunderstandings in the interpretation of facts and their relative importance. The scientific interest of the European scholar with regard to African data is essentially analytical. Seeing things from the outside, often reluctant to synthesize, the European clings basically to explosive, more or less biased microanalysis of the facts and constantly postpones ad infinitum the stage of synthesis. The African scholars distrusts this "scientific" activity, the aim of which seems to be the fragmentation of the collective historical African consciousness into minute facts and details. Classical Greek and Roman scholars bristle when specialist African(ist) historian show how much these Northern Mediterranean ("Western") culture borrowed from African philosophy, science, religion, and culture; and recently, along with the Religious Right, have also attacked Afrocentric history as oral myths that black history studies have mistaken for "real history!"
 If the African anthropologist made a point of examining European races "under the magnifying glass," s/he would be able to multiply races ad infinitum by grouping physiognomies into races and subraces as artificially as his European counterpart does with regard to Africa. He would, in turn, succeed in dissolving collective European reality into a fog of insignificant facts.

The Boabab Tree

 Dr. C. A. Diop of Diourbel went back to the boabab last year. I was quite disappointed because I hardly recognized the signs that I easily identified during my childhood; the bark of the boabab had developed since. A little boy and girl passed by and enlightened me. They helped me to locate the signs which, as a matter of fact, are riddles, ideograms: a kettle, a sword, a goat skin, a camel's foot, a string of prayer beads, and so on, memorializing the visit of a great leader of yesteryear, presumably the Prophet...
 It is not writing in the phonetic sense of the word, but a series of drawings. The fact that this practice dates from the post-Islamic epoch tends to suggest that it reflects ancient habits about to disappear. On the boabab, along with the prayer beads, sword, and camel's foot, there was an ink stand and even a pen; so Arabic writing was known, but it was absent from the bark of the boabab. This is similar to the attitude of Njoya, the sultan of Cameroon who, although a Moslem, utilized hieroglyphic writing, perhaps because of ancestral tradition, excluding Arabic characters, to take a census of the population of his kingdom, to transcribe all the literature, the oral tradition, and the history of his country.

Millennialism

 Theories or theologies of Jesus as a political and/or spiritual Messiah as these affect ones understanding of time and history: what difference does it make (are the outcomes or their relationships or impacts as to) how one believes in Jesus as merely a human ("Son of Man"), and/or (if one believes Jesus is) or the divine "Son of God?" And what are the consequent results on the end of time in actual history or historical sense called [any impact] messianism, millennialism, and the apocalypse? That is, what are some of the common confusion between eschatology as messianism, millennialism, and apocalypse? These three latter terms of traditional Christian-Jewish belief systems upon our understanding of history? And how does this historical view or belief and its practice make us revolutionaries, liberators, or just supporters of the "status quo?" in our responsibilities. As citizens immersed by Western Judaism and Christianity in Western Jewish Christian cultural and religious values? And as atheists, humanists, agnostics, polytheists, monotheists, and paganists? An evaluation and recommendation.
 But this is too specialized a narrowing of argumentation for the sake of philosophy at the expense of action or function to argue here. Thus the study, debate, and elaboration of concepts of theology and liberation by knowledge elite using code words to speak to other elite derails any consideration of action, the more difficult “how to” solutions that inevitably divide people who must follow through with/upon the answer to "why do it?"
 This usually academic, exaggerated, and misplaced puffery reinforces the status quo through mutual mental masturbation of homo/erotic/social/sexual elite thus preventing implemention in a functional way any institutional. group, or individual change or revolution/liberation for the people, and the environment—the despised, dispossessed, alienate, and under represented—the disposed of society. This is not encouraged by other than progressive seminaries and the well-read, interested layperson—the religious elite.
 It is the people who make and do their own liberating—not the church, political, and social institutions or leaders themselves, nor even by relying only upon an "outside source" (or being) to heroically rescue themselves. How our lives are a part of and make history no matter what our beliefs, a secularization or freeing the boundaries of justice for all individuals, groups, societies, and environments whose beginnings or ethic and actions or functioning proceed from a core that is a person's faith, spirituality, and humanistic concern, whatever ones belief or theology may be. Faith or its lack is the one common denominator each one of us has, or must have, a vision in order to "keep on keeping on." In the following of ones own values, truths, and ethics comes the expectation for those around us and the institutions to test us and we to test them in this liberating process that seeks to treat others as they would like to be treated and/or to bring the "kingdom" or "reign of justice" on earth "as it is in heaven," so states the Lord's Prayer!
 Knowing ones "roots" and cultural traditions may become a significantly important armor to increasing anonymity, technological employment and unemployment, cacooning and interpersonally, physically deprived social isolation, and subsequent spiritual distress upon the jobless individual, uncaring civil society, and the destroyed environment as mass culture shock and ego-centered values plummet at dizzying speeds and seemingly disintegrate the superstructure man-made artificially created "reality" from its binary delusion/illusion of their man-made artificiality by a pull of the atomic-electric plug! and into thin air! Apocalypse! The end of "big brother" time!
 Ancient prophets and astrologers, Medieval and modern prognosticators, scientists and environmentalists, spiritualists and channelers, UFO abductees and sect believers, and the superstitious, facing the dying away of the last seconds of this century and the great, uncertain leap into the next predict apocalyptic evens and Armageddon!
 This is another way of saying that the coming second millennium, unlike the first millennium eagerly expected the messiah to come again to end the terrible persecution of Jews and later the Christians (by 1,000 CE) in the first, may be the apocalypse or "end of the ages." Millennialism now very popular, controversial in the religious and popular, glitz-news press.

Y2K: The Year 2000 Computer Crisis

 The idea of the end of time and history is basically an attempt by Judeo Christian Moslem religious tradition to explain to their followers why God either allows evil in the world and therefore is evil, the problem of theodicy. Thus, one's enemies or "sinners" will have their day in court for punishment by a vengeful god in the hereafter if they escaped punishment, or if not necessarily in this world, but in "the next" at the judgment throne. On the other hand, being martyrs for ones faith therefore guarantees a reward in paradise, or after life. Like the early Christian masters who, like Jesus in his willingness to, as church theologians say "give up his life for the sins of all as a sacrifice" in our place to a vengeful god who demands perfection is theologically and literally biblically acceptable (Levels One and Two) as accepted behavior demanded toward women, gays, lesbians, children, and pole of color, disabled diseased, poor and others who are weak, the losers; to emulate—to give until it hurts, or to hurt is god-like and honorable behavior especially for the strong and righteously indignant. This masochism results from a sadistic god and plays out ever day in society between the haves and the have not with the powerful and the weak, the influential over the dispossessed to "prove that God will thereby take care of them" and so not to worry in this life. This is a Level One, literal biblical truth (faithing) interpretation, to fulfill "for the poor you will always have with you." And sure enough, as God promised, there they are! This is the reversal of the Level Five premise that takes the context of the saying into account, that questions why there are the poor, the outcast, and conversely, on the other hand, praises the "Good (but outcast pariah) Samaritan" who no one thought would desire to minister to their supposed enemy. Nor would the samaritan be allowed to minister to themselves, the pharisee, the priests, etc!
 Second, regarding the end of time theology and the Heaven's Gate groups mass suicide "to get from this would to the next" shows the failure of such a Level Three, conventional, traditional, sybheic society judges. How leader-god Applewhite internalized the university's homophobia of being a gay employee. Lesbian, gay or even (hetero)sexually confused teenagers and young adults commit suicide is a condemnation of the failure of our society hatred to allow difference and diversity in people, that "human" (and god-likeness!) and sentient, living beings come in all modes, shapes, forms, colors, and sizes, and are no "evil" enemies to fearfully undermine. Dysfunctional society enforces, stigmatize, intolerance, fear, alienation and rejection. Sophisticated attitudes and measures of stealth are used socially and personally to undermine or block the way of humanity legally or illegally, by omission or commission, with a fountain pen as well as gun. So people aren't allowed to be who they are—that it is unacceptable to "be(come) who you are, meant to, or called, to do and thus become. Again, this is Level Five faithing vs. Level Three conventionality, of public polls by politicians for legislation and election strategies, etc.

Marshall Applewhite of Heaven's Gate Cult

  This faithing system to evaluate "cults" as to whether they are inward, ego, imploding in heir purpose of self destructive behavior, and/or outward reaching and giving to others as to themselves, no matter who they are (Level 5, transcendent of category). These benchmarks to levels of maturing faithing may be used as part if the content or ethics of behavior from a universal perspective including religions, bureaucracies, groups, politics, and individuals. The processes of becoming manure can also be identified a the chronological or mental age at which these behaviors develop and usually resolved or awareness develops.
 If my local Apple Macintosh consultants are correct, this computer and all those Macs made from 1975 on comply with the Y2K criteria so that if publishing this millennium edition isn’t completed by then as planned, we'll still be capable of continuing satisfactorily on January 1, 2000!

Hale-Bopp: History and Time Defined by Cults and UFOlogists

 March 29, 1997: FLASH! Saturday, Holy Week of Easter: This Monday of Holy Week, with the presence of the comet, Hale-Bopp, importuned a great loss of life by mass suicide of Heavens Gate sect of followers. This death-scene was discovered in Rancho Santa Fe, CA by a former member alerted by the group's video of its member's plans. This is the largest such tragedy to date in the continental US. Thirty-nine androgynous women and men, many being older and some younger, along with their leader, Marshall Applewhite, called "Do," of the Heavens Gate UFO spiritual group were found in their immaculately prepared and clean six bedroom ranch home.
  All wore casual new T-shirts, jeans, socks and sneakers, and were lying in their bunk beds, glasses off, as if they were taking but a brief nap. Each had a purple shroud over the face and body, and a bag packed for a "rescue" journey from their “worn vehicle” bodies and this corrupted and "spaded" physical world to a "higher physical and spiritual plane" by alien space craft.
 Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of Nichelle Nichols, who stared as Lt. Uhura of the Star Trek series. In respect for her brothers beliefs, she appeared once on TV's Larry King Live program representing the family in eulogy to him, delivering a poem her corporation produced for children's education on space called, "Hail to Hale-Bopp," which will not return in 2,000 to 4,000 years.
 When a "window of opportunity" was noted on the Heaven's Gate web page as portended by Hale-Bopp, a frenzy of inquiries crashed the site, while investigators and ultimately the FBI taking control of the page and any other internet information "to prevent a repeat" loss of life.
 Such bright, gentle, and self-disciplined like-minded people were practicing ascetics in their community of 22 years including a economically successful cooperative of technological savvy and expertise in WEB page computer design and marketing. All took celibacy vows and were assigned to relate to one other in a platonic relationship; voluntary castration of some men, including "Do" took place. The women wore short hair cuts and casual attire.
 In the 1970s, both Applewhite, a formerly married father of two, and astrologer-confidant Bonnie Lou Nettles, aka "Peep" and "Ti," gained national attention in 1975, when their group recruited members in the coastal town of Waldport, Oregon. Since this is just miles from the author's former residence, she remembers the great stir of public opinion, and vividly recalls the shock when 20 people mysteriously vanished from her area after this same group, (that began at the University of Oregon  in 1972), came through. However, a witness from South Beach, Oregon said when he attended their recruiting meeting in 1975, he was one who didn't join them.
 The earliest cult event of the Church of the Bride of Christ of Joshua II, aka Franz Creffield, also occurred in Waldport, Oregon, at the early turn of this century, and detailed in the American Weekly article of March 10, 1946 by Peter Levins, "Prophet Without Honor." Certainly, she feels, more such groups and alienated people are searching for help and answers to life’s meaning from the heavens of outer space and the cosmos where "Higher Intelligence" may literally reside. Even our government doesn't want us to know about the Roswell, New Mexico, incident by withholding their secret classified documents and conspiracy of silence, fanning theories of conspiracy even more!

Franz Creffield or Joshua II of
The Church of the Bride of Christ

  In 1886, Toledo was touched by cultism when Louis Kossuth Brooks, his wife, Mary Miller, and his followers built a two-story colony house where Wright Creek goes into Poole Slough. This mysterious religious group disbanded when it ran out of food and money, according to Brooks' daughter, Anne Jane.
 There was also a colony of seventh day adventists in Chitwood, according to lifelong resident and historian, Morris X. Smith.
 With the November 1978, mass suicide-murder in Guyana, South America, which claimed the Lives of self-proclaimed prophet, Jim Jones, the founder and leader of the People's Temple (San Francisco), along with 914 of his followers, a US congressman, and a member of the news media—and the the settlement of Rajneesh Puram in Central Oregon—it is interesting to note that sectism is nothing new to the West Coast, nor to those first settlers of the post-Colombian colonies who desired toleration of their beliefs to practice as they would want.
 Even today (1997), Eugene, Oregon, boasts the most secretive Old Testament sect in the US, run by a 58-year-old former marine, Jim Roberts, according to Peter Klebnikov in the April 7, 1997 Newsweek article, "Time of Trouble." Called "the brotherhood," followers are grouped into small nomadic cells that recruit college kids across the country who are "ready to die for him."
 It occurs to Guardino this story is electrifyingly connected to her own story a familiar turf and back-yard experience of historical Portage, Wisconsin and therefore, is part of the millennium edition of this historical work these 22 plus years in its making. And immediately Riedel suggests this as a news story or letter format to introduce and preface the reader to this book and its philosophy as a teaching, liberating, healing tool (mini-sermon) on our stories and critique of the concepts of history, time, space, spirituality, morality, liberation, and sexuality—all the "biggie" Western European male value systems that run our lives ragged! We speak of in this compendium of folk, bottom-up history, which had no known handle to UFOs, cults, and our own personal experiences. In fact, we were just remarking this morning that We didn't know why we were rewriting or how we were to organizing our creative work together, but that "We just had to continue on in blind faith" to do what we both do best: to "bring 'em back alive" and to enunciate the co-author's perspective analysis and essays upon the processes and effective paradigms they both discovered in returning, reliving, and reviving history through our own liberating stories and new awarenesses of healing our nation's, and our own stories.
 Finally, the purpose of the “end of history or of time” can be visualized in the Arthur C. Clarke movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). At the last scene is the black monolith, a metaphor of increasing human knowledge, technology, and passing time, a troubling, shadowy figure opening the beginning of the film. Humanity is curious, reaches out toward it and when it becomes space-borne, flashes into brilliant beams and exploding light sources into infinity, fading to a grand, graciously furnished home where the space and time traveler quickly ages and dies. Into the foreground of the 1987 Harmonic Convergence line-up of planets, and sun comes the shape of an arc, which gradually recedes into an unmistakable human embryo floating in the womb that somehow looks like the space traveler!
  Being birthed again, reborn, rebaptized by the breaking waters of amniotic fluid, and of the blood and straining birthing pain, life recycles, renews, begins again! From the "big egg" or womb-splash, rather than a "big bang" theory comes the first female-inclusive and original, legitimate creation story! Life cannot be built out of "No-thing." Mother's egg, though deeply invisible inside of her is in a natural cycles and process of giving birth in her own time: Mother Earth time, and not by ceacarian section at the masculinist's, controlling, possessive—convenient time and baby ownership schedule!

Chronicle Reporter Finds Rajneeshpuram Ghost in the Past 1987

 February 15: Someone who had never been there might never find the place—the road markers have all been taken down.
 But Rajneeshpuram is still there. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931-1990) jumped onto an airplane headed for North Carolina in an attempt to flee from federal immigration authorities. But it was September 13, 1985. Two months later the once-bustling commune was deserted, except for a handful of followers who stayed on to keep the buildings from deteriorating until the commune could be sold.
 The long drive on gravel and dirt roads from Antelope to Rajneeshpuram is still just as long. But the once-formidable feeling that "something awful is going to happen if I get much closer" quickly disintegrates once you pass the first of several tiny lookout stations where Sannyasins once monitored your progress with walkie-talkies.
 City Hall? Must be three or four Jeeps, modern and shiny, parked out front. Yes, these much be the caretakers. Now that you think of it, you have already passed a couple of them on the road. Their occupants were not dressed in red, orange or pink, though.
 You kind of slide east past City Hall and arrive on Main Street.
 Yes, it's just the way you remembered it—only not a soul in sight. An occasional tumble weed blows by, and you take a picture of it just for fun.
 The buildings, though empty, are carpeted and well-kept. Yes, there's the bookstore—where Ma Anad Sheela announced to the world that she was not going to take over Wasco County by bringing in transients to vote. We all just misunderstood her sense of humor—remember?
 A red-clad man appears as if out of nowhere and yells that the shops and sidewalks are private property—you are to stay on the county road.
 An encounter.
 Except for some cracks in the windows, the lookout stations stand like tiny capsules, mere suggestions of what once was.
 Most of the signs of welcome have been dismantled, but parts of the marble structures remain. The ever-imposing symbol of the bird of peace is riddled with bullet holes—ruined forever.
 You pass the man-made hours of work (the Sannyasins called work "worship") it took to dredge it. It sparkles in the sun.
 Then you are there—in the once-promised land.
 That is when you run into your first obstacle—the information center, with its huge parking lot, is closed off with a big wire fence. A herd of cattle grazes outside the fence: The information center sets isolated, yet another time capsule.
 Then there is the air strip. My, must have been huge airplanes taking off from there once. It seems to never end. Yet it sits quietly nestled between two walls of mountains. And fenced off.
 As you enter the city center you pass the once-bustling bus station. Buses were the main transportation across the massive commune, where buildings seemed so far and few in between. The terminal is still there, although the group of telephones that once lined one end of the parking lot are gone. ...
 They still own the place and have the right to protect the buildings until they're purchased.
 Back on the county road, you venture into areas that you were afraid to enter before—residential areas where hundreds of red-clad Sannyasins made their homes in mobile units. You cross over a bridge that leads to a vacant lot. A pattern of stones pressed into the ground hint that a garden must have existed once.
 But no more.
 The tour's over. There is nothing more to see. Only the county road remains open, since all the private roads have been blocked off. You retrace your steps as you return the same way you came. And for some reason as you pass the welcome sign "Thank you—come again" your pulse slows down to normal.
 You can’t resist stopping in Antelope, 13 miles away, and taking a peek into The Antelope Cafe. Remember "Zorba The Buddha?" The red visitor caps with pictures of antelopes on them let you know you are no longer eating at "Zorba the Buddha."
 Nor will you ever. Because you're safe now. Antelope's safe.
 But you can't help but wonder for a moment if the whole four-year epic of the Rajneesh in Wasco County ever really happened.
 It did. And we will never forget it. --Barbara Jean Guardino

Bhagwan's in Poona, Peddling His Ranch No Easy Undertaking 1987

 February 22: Selling real estate is not always the easiest thing in the world to do.
 But when you've got 64,000 acres, and your asking price is $28.5 million, you don’t just sell to the first party that comes along.
 This is the problem faced by Joseph DeJager of Cushman and Wakefield of Oregon Incorporated Realtors.
 DeJager has been dealing with a number of prospects, mostly private individuals, for the past seven months. He believes the property will be sold by mid-year, he said.
 Although the property is considered to be one parcel of land which cannot be subdivided, it is possible to do minor partitions, he said. The ranch is made up of seven or eight parcels. "I would envision maybe two sales," he said.
 DeJager said private parties have been interested in taking advantage of the existing structures on the property. They have proposed game ranches and "Fat" farms, he said.
 So far the state has not come forward with an offer. "I feel the ranch had a great deal of potential for state use, which would be beneficial to the local economy and to the state in general," he said. He said he would prefer to see the state purchase the property, for possible use as a facility for the elderly, a correctional facility, experimental agriculture or university programs, he said.
 Rajneeshpuram contains the potential for "a full array of recreational activities," since it contains an airstrip, hotel accommodations, an office and a variety of residential buildings, he said. It has two lakes and the John Day River running through it, which could accommodate water sports including sailing, windsurfing and fishing. It has places for horseback riding and other western-style recreation, he said.
 Meanwhile, a relatively small cadre of Rajneesh followers are acting as caretakers to maintain the ranch. According to Moses, president of Rajneesh Investment Corporation, the land is under 24-hour watch, and as a result vandalism has been minimal. He described the limited damage as "a bit of mischief," adding that the caretakers have "techniques and methods" of knowing when visitors are on the property day and night.
 The county road which runs through Rajneeshpuram is not private property, and this sometimes causes problems from a security point of view, Moses said. Occasionally people take the county road to Mitchell, a small community, he said. The county road turns into Mitchell Road, which is a very rough road, Moses said.
 Rajneeshpuram receives fewer and fewer visitors over time. "Apparently it is not quite so interesting a place to see now as in the past," Moses said.
 The areas other than the county road are all private property, and are "not available to the public for traversing," Moses said. The exception to this are potential buyers and public officials in the course of business.
 Moses said he recently returned from a trip to Poona, India, where he visited Bagwan Shree Rajneesh. The guru talks to his followers twice a day, although his living quarters are too small for him to stage a drive-through as he did at Rajneeshpuram.
 Moses said he did not know whether the bhagwan intends to stay in India. "I expected he was in Oregon to stay." he added that he was "just glad to have a chance to see him while he was in one place."

The Brotherhood

 In 1997, Eugene, Oregon, boasted the most secretive old testament sect in the US, run by a 58-year-old former marine, Jim Roberts, according to Peter Klebnikov in the April 7, 1997 Newsweek article, "Time of Trouble." Called the brotherhood, followers are grouped into small nomadic cells that recruit college kids across the country who are “ready to die for him.”
 It occurs to the author this story is electrifyingly connected to her own turf and backyard experiences and the millennium edition of this historical work these 22 years. And immediately Riedel suggests this as a news story or letter format might introduce and preface the reader to this book and its philosophy as a teaching tool/mini-sermon on our concepts of history, time, spirituality, morality, liberation, and sexuality—all the "biggies" we speak of in this compendium of folk, bottom-up history, which had no known handle to UFO's, cults, and our own personal experiences. In fact, we were just remarking this morning that we didn’t know why we were rewriting or how we were to organizing our creative work together, but that "we just had to continue on in blind faith" to do what we both do best: to "bring 'em (historical figures) back alive" and for the co-author's perspective analysis and essays upon them and the processes and effective paradigms they both discovered in returning (to the NOW), to reliving and reviving history through our discoveries/new awarenesses as liberation historians.)

2001: A Space Odyssey

 Finally, the purpose of the "end of history or of time" can be visualized in the Arthur C. Clarke movie, "2001: A Space Odessey" (1968). At the last scene is the black monolith, a metaphor of increasing human knowledge, technology, and passing time, a troubling, shadowy figure opening the beginning of the film. Humanity is curious, reaches out toward it and when it becomes space-borne, flashes into brilliant beams and exploding light sources into infinity, fading to a grand, graciously furnished home where the space and time traveler quickly ages and dies. Into the foreground of a Harmonic-Convergance line-up of planets, and sun comes the shape of an arc, which gradually recedes into an unmistakable human embryo floating in the womb that somehow looks like the space traveler!
 Being birthed again, reborn, rebaptized by the breaking waters of amniotic fluid, and of the blood and straining birthing pain, life recycles, renews, begins again!
 Unknown to Riedel, Guardino hung up in her hallway one of her own paintings (1987) with her own poem published in 1974, called "Alpha," I hadn't really seen or studies before, until I read this last paragraph to her. I got goose bumps as I beheld a star-scape of brilliance, galactic clouds, points of light stars, and there near the middle, a human embryo enwombed, relating perfectly and synchronistically to the meme, the Jungian Architypal "group mind" which is herewith passed to you: out of catastrophic endings can new beginnings be made!

History as Story

 Stories of those who have collected stories are common among the storytellers they have studied. Kuiceyetsa next told stories of three of the leading researchers who had worked at Zuni over the last 100 years:

 Elsie Clews Parsons (1874-1941) stayed here too, and when Max was little he said she left her shoes in there, and they were those high tops. He pretended he was a cowboy. Put those on, got up on the bedside, and his mother's girdle was on the bed rail, and he was sitting on it like a saddle pretending he had a horse. [laughs]
 And he'd always pick up those cigarettes that she smoked. They were scented, I guess, or something, you know. And he'd always look around to see if she would drop some, and he'd just latch on to them.
 Parsons would always have pancakes, and she my mother-in-law said he always said, "Pancake ready." Max would go to the door of the house and knock and say, "Pancake ready." They had it fixed, you know.
 He remembers Elsie Clews Parsons. She stayed quite awhile, I guess, while she was here.
 Parsons began her field research at Zuni, New Mexico, in 1915, returned as often as she could for the rest of her life and published a truly monumental series of monographs and articles about the people she had come to love.

 The 71-year-old Zuni woman gave Cunningham a rather full, personal description of Mrs. Parsons:

 She was a very rich lady, but you could not guess it from the way she lived. She always dressed in sloppy dresses. One summer she brought white shoes with her. I thought it was funny and told her so. She became mad, so I explained that when the rains come she would realize her mistake. I told her that anyone who comes to Zuni should know that it is not New York City. The roads are muddy here. After a while she was all right.
 She was a real friend of my husband and me. We always wrote to each other. She had four children, as I have, and they were born at the same times when mine were. We joked about it. Although she was very talkative, we enjoyed having her with us and she was very glad for that. She used to pay us well and we did whatever she wanted us to do. You see, she did not have many friends at Zuni. We were her best friends and we worked hard for her. I am not a Zuni and I don't know everything about the Zunis. So if there was something Mrs. Parsons wanted to know about them and I didn't know, I asked the people and they told me everything. My husband was an important Zuni and he helped me a lot. One year she asked me to maintain a diary of whatever took place in Zuni and I did that. I guess she got that published as a book.
 Mrs. Parsons brought her friends to meet me. One year an artist—whose name I don't remember now—came with her. He wanted to sketch the Zuni dances, but they wouldn’t let him. I guess he drew some natural scenes and went back.
 One thing which always makes me sore when I remember Mrs. Parsons is that she invited me to visit her in New York City and I promised her to do so, but never went there. One day I got a letter from her secretary telling me about here death. She knew that we were great friends and that I would appreciate her giving me that news.

Native Americans in History

 "Tis now time for a destructive order to be reversed, and it is well to inform other races that the aboriginal cultures of North America were not devoid of beauty. Furthermore, in denying the Indian [their] ancestral rights and heritages the white race is but robbing itself. America can be revived, rejuvenated, by recognizing a native school of thought."
—Chief Luther Standing Bear

 The seeds for this book were sown in my mind during a late-summer day in 1975, by a young American Indian whose name I've long since forgotten. As a reporter for the Seattle Times, I had been researching a series of articles on Washington State Indian tribes. The research took me to Evergreen State College in Olympia, where a young woman, an undergraduate in the American Indian Studies program, told me in passing that the Iroquois had played a key role in the evolution of American democracy.
 The idea at first struck me as disingenuous. I considered myself decently educated in American history, and to the best of my knowledge, government for and by the people had been invented by white men in powdered wigs. I asked the young woman where she had come by her information.
 "My grandmother told me," she said. That was hardly the kind of source one could use for a newspaper story. I asked whether she knew of any other sources. "You're the investigative reporter," she said. "You find them."
 ...The woman's challenge stayed with me through another year at the Times, the writing of a book on American Indians, and most of a Ph.D. program at the University of Washington. I collected tantalizing shreds—a piece of a quotation from Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) here, an allegation there. Individually, these meant little. Together however, they began to assume the outline of a plausible argument that the Iroquois had indeed played a key role in the ideological birth of the United State, especially through Franklin's advocacy of federal union.
 ...Well-organized polities governed by a system that one contemporary of Franklin's Cadwallader Colden, wrote had "outdone the Romans." Colden was writing of a social and political system so old that the immigrant Europeans knew nothing of its origins—a federal union of five (and later six) Indian nations that had put into practice concepts of popular participation and natural rights that the European savants had thus far only theorized. The Iroquoian system expressed through its constitution, "The Great Law of Peace," rested on assumptions foreign to the monarchies of Europe: it regarded leaders as servants of the people, rather than their masters, and made provisions for the leaders' impeachment for errant behavior. The Iroquois' law and customs upheld freedom of expression in political and in religious matters, and it forbade the unauthorized entry of homes. It provided for political participation by women and the relative equitable distribution of wealth. These distinctly democratic tendencies sound familiar in light of subsequent American political history—yet few people today (other than American Indians and students of their heritage) know that a republic existed on our soil before anyone here had ever heard of John Locke (1632-1704), or Cato, the Magna Charta, Rousseau (1712-1778), Franklin, or Jefferson.

The Geo Politics of Adopting the Iroquois System

 The way in which the Iroquois system existed and was adopted requires an understanding of the context. The political events of the time that brought together the Iroquois leaders and the mid-18th Century colonial leaders, the dean being Franklin, who were searching for political governing alternatives to European tyranny and class stratification experienced in the American frontier. The Iroquois were the greatest Indian military power in Eastern North America between the rival French of the St. Lawrence Valley and the English of the Eastern Seaboard. Less than a million Anglo-Americans lived in their communities scattered along the East Coast, islands in a sea of American Indian peoples that stretched for inland, as far as anyone who spoke English know, into the boundless mountains and forest of a continent much larger than Europe. The days when Euro-Americans could not have survived in America without Indian help had passed, but the new Americans still were learning to wear Indian clothing, eat Indian corn and potatoes, and follow Indian trails and water courses, using Indian snowshoes and canoes. Indian and Europeans were more often at peace than at war—a fact missed by telescoped history that focuses on conflict.
 So Indian peace was as important to the history of the continent as Indian war, as the importance of English efforts to ally with the Iroquois and the need for treaty councils. This brought together leaders of both cultures. Ben Franklin, for the earliest days of his professional life, was drawn to the diplomatic and ideological interchange of these councils—first as a printer of their proceedings, than as a Colonial envoy. This was the beginning of one of the most distinguished diplomatic careers in American history. Out of these councils grew an early campaign by Franklin for Colonial union on a federal model, very similar to the Iroquois system.
 Contact with Indians and their ways of ordering life left a definite imprint on Franklin and others who were seeking, during the pre-revolutionary period, alternatives to a European order against which revolution would be made. To Jefferson, as well as Franklin, the Indians had what the colonists wanted: societies free of oppression and class stratification. The Iroquois and other Indian nations fired the imaginations of the revolution’s architects. As Henry Steele Commager has written, America acted the Enlightenment as European radicals dreamed it. Extensive, intimate contact with Indian nations was a major reason for this difference.
 In telling this story, the authors demolish the stereotypical Western histories of Native Americans whose effective social and political organization began our earliest revolutionary models of political, philosophical and governmental organization and state craft, as Franklin, Jefferson, and others knew it as they envisioned the future, including Native American wisdom and beauty. This makes our task to relearn history in all its richness and complexity, a more complete understanding of what we were, what we are, and what we may one day become.

The First Composite Culture

 The creation of this culture began with first contact—possibly long before Columbus's landing. Fragments of pottery that resemble Japanese patterns have been found in present-day Ecuador, dated well before the birth of Christ. The Vikings left some tools behind in Northeast North America.
 Squanto (?-1622), a Wampanoag, was one of several Indians kidnapped from their native land (New England) and brought to England in 1614, and returned in time to greet the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock by 1620 in English and produced the first Thanksgiving, a feast the Indians provided of turkey and many other of their own domesticated staples for the unprepared Pilgrims. He helped them survive their first winter, and acculturated them to the new land. He was therefore called a Pilgrim father.
 Students may not know that following this rescue, American Indian first cultivated and contributed by the 20th Century, almost half the world's domesticated crops: corn and white potatoes, manoic, sweet potatoes, squash, peanuts, peppers, pumpkin, tomatoes, pineapples, avocado, cacao (chocolate), chicle (as in chewing gum), several varieties of beans, and at least seventy other domesticated food plants. The original cotton plant was derived from those cultivated by the native peoples, and so was rubber, too!
 Several Native American medicines were used among Euro-Americans: quinine, laxatives, and several dozen other drugs and herbal medicines. The Europeans also adapted many Indian articles of clothing and equipment for their own needs: hammocks, kayaks, canoes, moccasins, smoking pipes, dog sleds, and parkas, as well as the many Indian words to describe these, and other features of the new land, half of the states of the US bearing names first spoken among Indians, and thousands of words entered English and European languages from Native American sources, too numerous to list briefly. Native Americans also contributed to the shape of Euro-American folk songs, locations for railroads and highways, dying cloth, war tactics, and bathing habits. Their contribution to American civilization so influenced the lives of Europeans in America because they were useful and necessary to sustaining life here. The intellectual contributions of American Indians to Euro-American culture have not been studied at all until very recently, and only inferred from islands of knowledge written almost exclusively from Euro-American origin, leaving blind spots that may be filled by records based on a dwindling Native American source of elder oral history.
 The causes of this neglect has been scholar's ethnocentrism that relegate "primitive" people who have more "institutions as complex and histories as full as our own, according to Paul Bohannan,  in a quote of Bernard de Voto (1897-1955), rails that: Most American history has been written as if history were a function solely of white culture—in spite of the fact that well into the 19th Century the Indians were one of the principal determinants of historical events. Those of us who work in frontier history are repeatedly nonplused to discover how little has been done for us in regard to the one force bearing on our field that was active everywhere... American historians have made shockingly little effort to understand the life, the societies, the cultures, the thinking and the feeling of the Indians, and disastrously little effort to understand how all these affected white men and their societies."
 Hollowell added: "Since most history has been written by the conquerors, the influence of the primitive people(sic) upon American civilization has seldom been the subject of dispassionate consideration."

Relationship of Western Individualism and the "Other"

 From the absolute perspective, one is all; when you are healed, the whole universe is healed. Thus, according to the Diamond Sutra, the Bodhisattva ("enlightenment—being," the archetype of compassion;) who vows to save all beings is still under a fundamental delusion:
 Any Bodhisattva who undertakes the practice of meditation should cherish one thought only: "When I attain perfect wisdom, I will liberate all sentient beings in every realm of the universe, and allow them to pass into the eternal peace of Nirvana." And yet, when vast, uncountable, unthinkable myriads of beings have been liberated, truly no being has been liberated. Why? Because no Bodhisattva who is a true Bodhisattva entertains such concepts as "self" or "others." Thus there are no sentient beings to be liberated and no self to attain perfect wisdom.
  Mamana Maharshi clarifies this point:

 People often say that a liberated Master should go out and preach his message to the people. How can anyone be a Master, they argue, as long as there is misery by his side? This is true. But who is a liberated Master? Does he see misery beside him? They want to determine the state of the Master without realizing the state themselves. From the standpoint of the Master their contention amounts to this: a man dreams a dream in which he finds several people. On waking up, he asks, "Have the dream people also woken up?" How ridiculous!

 I am suggesting that my own world view bias has been, (before I became a teacher, a pastor, and) an activist, that I reach out (to motivate,) to convert other people toward a kind of duological existence of: Me or us vs "them" mentality. (Gradually, I first had to learn, one needs to observe the specific kinds and examples, or stories of otherness in the communities of people, sentient and insentient beings, as to comparison and respect of differences and celebrating the similarities in that "unity in diversity" which is our world, gaining some human awareness and understanding as these experiences bridges the fearful abyss of aloneness and alienation, and suffering, as a process of re-creating renewed hope and life among us. For a long time I have known, however, that unless I have experienced what I'm speaking about, and live the values of love-in-action I am espousing, I will not and cannot convert others—because I, myself, have not been converted! The natural unity of the universe is very difficult to realize when every day, science and technology regularly break up everything around us [values] into abstract, and smaller, more intellectually manageable categories or pieces. The unity of people who live this enlightened way surely have community. If each one of us took to heart the liberating of themselves, first, the rest of the process naturally follows. I must confess this "power over" tendency to judge others and myself, that something objectively "out there," a god, is stronger and required to enforce liberation upon us as a "disembodied power—value," in order to bring on the “revolution,” was more of a conceptual head trip, a dreaming and hoping for a future vision, but not based on the here and now that we all live in the NOW, the present. That is to say, the how of doing what we say we want can only be done by doing it, showing it NOW, and not waiting for some heaven in the sky, by and by. Thus, unity is not just a concept, it IS found in the present, or must be manifest, brought to life, as life, itself. To live life fully now, to become aware of the presence of that Universal Mind in and a part of all sentient and non-sentient being, let go of reconciling the hold of the unforgiveness and making amends for the past, and the sentimental longing (or "what-if-ing") for dreams of the future, utopia, paradise, heaven, etc. that only derail the necessity for activism and justice-making presence of the NOW.
 How long is "now?" you may ask. One scientist says that it lasts 13 seconds, that is the amount of memory one can store. Is that not in a "twinkling of an eye?" How fleeing now passes, which many lived, life experiences highlight! As the Chinese peasant in "Teahouse of the August Moon" reminds: "Pain make man think, thought make man wise, and wisdom make life bearable!"

Distinction Between Human History and the Historical Enterprise

 As a historian James M. Washington left a legacy of his own opposition to the historical profession that trained him. He was acutely aware of the distinction between human history and the historical enterprise.
 The former is the entire story of the whole human race, and the latter represents those parts of the story historians choose to recall.
 Hence, his goal was to call to remembrance the countless narratives of the victims of history, and in the process, to discover "when, where, and how we failed to love them as the Lord commanded us to do." Washington believed that by uncovering the hidden stories about black religious experience, perhaps all Americans could learn something that might prove beneficial to understanding the experience of non-blacks. Indeed, he contended that the particularity of human experience holds important insights for a broader appreciation of the human condition.
 Here, in The Courage to Hope, Washington's friends and colleagues come together to attempt to give a meaning to black suffering that goes beyond the narrow bounds of racial particularities to unlock the limitless prospects of the human experience. While the point of inquiry begins with black suffering to remain at that point means that one runs the risk of privileging black pain. The danger in this is that it places one on a path which leads to the two-headed dragon of self-pity and self-righteousness. While pain certainly is relative, it is our contention that there are important lessons for all of humanity in the distinctiveness of another's afflictions. Of course, we are not suggesting it is the only light on the horizon, nor is it the brightest light. Nonetheless, black suffering is a gateway through which humankind may gain access to its own tortured soul. In sum, it is a "faint light" that leads to redemption.

The Cross in the Landscape

 "No intellectual or historical mapping can fully locate the cross in the landscape of concept and of sensibility as our century closes. For participants in an overwhelming secular, technologically oriented society, this location is a 'black hole' left by mythologies and unreason out of the past. For the majority, one suspects, of 'practicing' Christians—and what does practicing entail in this context?—the crucifixion remains an unexamined inheritance, a symbolic marker but vestigial recognition. This marker is revered and involved in conventional idiom and gestures. It's concrete status, the enormity of suffering and injustice it incarnates, would appear to have faded from immediacy. How many educated men and women now hear Paschal's cry that humanity must not sleep because Christ hangs on his cross until the end of the world?" —George Steiner

 James Melvin Washington was first and foremost a black intellectual Christian obsessed with the meaning of the cross in his time and in his life. He was the existential giant and spiritual giant among us for forty-nine short years because he unrelentingly brought his mind, heart, and soul to bear on the profound truth of evil in the human predicament. He not only understood that a condition for truth is to allow suffering to speak but also that the courage to hope is grounded in the heartfelt grappling with the depths of suffering. In the words of his beloved Paul Tillich (1886-1965), "there is no depth without the way to depth. Truth without the way to truth is dead."

The Historical Shift from Premodernity to Modernity to Postmodernity

 The first grand shift from premodernity to modernity is often limned as a change from a theocentric world to an anthrocentric world in which economics, politics, and culture were the prime movers in history, and humans as their agents the proper subjects of history. According to the propagandists of modernity, premoderns had employed God to justify superstition, irrationality, ignorance, tyranny, and dogmatism. The flight from enlisting God as the cause forced humanity, in the estimation of moderns, to take responsibility for the world, for the human plight, and to change society for the better. In their scenario a return to God as the subject would be ruinous to human intelligence and the world.
 The second grand shift, modernity to postmodernity, is depicted as a transition from an anthrocentric world to either a centerless or a polycentric world characterized by loss of the subject. According to the purveyors of post-modernity, the moderns used the myths of reason, the "universal man," and progress to promote universality. The result was that the human world became a unidimensional world, with modern historians employing their master narratives for Eurocentric purposes. History was the arena for Europeans and a few others. Africa was bereft of history. The arena of history—politics and philosophy—was occupied by males; females lived in the ahistorical world of the private sphere. For the emerging postmodern historians of the late—twentieth century, the polycentric shift had produced a turn in which all lived experience became the subject of h