by Jill Burdigala » Wed Sep 27, 2006 1:06 am
I'm afraid this will contribute nothing to the discussion apart from buttressing things that have already been said, but for what it's worth....<br><br>I remember reading a while ago, in a book on Indians which I can't find now to cite, that, when most of the North American continent -- including harsh regions like the Arctic and the Southwestern deserts -- was populated by thriving native cultures, the rich wooded lands of what are now Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia had long stood empty. Small bands of hunters or warriors might pass through on occasion, but no one tried to settle there. It was only during the 17th and 18th centuries, when the European presence began to dislocate native populations, that uprooted peoples drifted into the area to take up residence. <br><br>The area in question is the center of the Hopewell and Adena mound builder cultures. Only a small percentage of the mounds now remain, and when these are on private property they may be destroyed, because <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>no extant Indian nation claims descent from the Hopewell/Adena cultures.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>The following conversation, dramatized but based on recorded communication, is taken from Allan Eckert's <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Frontiersmen</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->; this exchange took place in 1773 and involved Chief Black Fish of the Shawnees and a Virginia surveyor named Thomas Bullit, who came to advise the chief that Virginians intended to move into the land south of the Ohio river:<br><br>"The Shawnees", Black Fish said, "cannot tell you that you are allowed to settle in the Can-Tuc-Kee lands. We have never owned that land. It belongs to the ghosts of murdered Azgens -- a white people from an eastern sea. Their bones and ghosts occupy every hill and valley of the country. They protect the game there and have more and better right there than any of the Indian tribes, including our own Shawnee nation, because they do not need or use material food themselves and do not like it. Long ago our fathers and our grandfathers killed off the Azgens, but we now fear more the spirits of these people than our fathers and grandfathers feared them when they were flesh."<br><br>Black Fish paused.... "When our food is all gone," he continued, "and our squaws and children starving, we appeal to the ghosts of the white mothers who were killed there and, by saying the right words, we are allowed to kill an elk or deer or bear or buffalo. But... we are never allowed to kill the game wantonly and we are forbidden to settle in the country of Can-Tuc-Kee. If we did, these ghosts would not rise from their caves and mounds and slay us, but they would set father against son and son against father and neighbor against neighbor and make them kill one another."<br><br>On a personal note, and I realize that anectodal evidence is the weakest and most questionable of all, I know of three mounds within 6 miles of my home. I have visited two of them. One of them stands in the middle of a flat grassy field and is obviously an unnatural formation; the other is in a forest, situated among natural hills, and to look at it you would never guess it was a manmade structure without being told. Apart from the fact that it was excavated in the 1930s I don't know how anyone could tell it <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>was</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> a man-made mound; and I wonder if the hills around it are really natural, or are simply unexplored. They all look the same to me, but of course I am not a geologist. <br><br>Some strange and not entirely comfortable "vibe" seems to emanate from these mounds. I discount the feeling from the second one altogether since I knew it was a mound before I ever saw it, and thus my imagination may well be playing tricks upon me. But I passed by the first one on almost a daily basis for over a year before learning it was a mound, and it always resonated a little weirdly with me, as if there were some kind of unnatural silence enveloping it. But then again, perhaps some instinctive faculty in my subconscious realized that it was not naturally a part of the flat plain. I can't say. I definitely believe most of us have a "sixth sense" (more sensitive in some than others), and that feelings and intuitions, vague and undefinable as they are, should not be dismissed out of hand. But the question is always, how much of the feeling emanates from <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>without</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, as opposed to being generated somehow from <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>within</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->?<br><br>Anyway. Often in the past, while driving through the extensive rural swaths of southern Ohio, it has seemed to me that there is something oppressive and not entirely friendly brooding in the haze of the sleepy valleys and thick-shaded woods. But whether this is an echo of the misery of uncounted red people dying from disease and famine, or the lingering resonance of all the red and white blood that was spilled along "that dark and bloody" river, a or simply my own diseased psyche, or a whisper of things even more lost and remote than the Shawnees and Mingoes, I cannot say. <p></p><i></i>
