Love Medicine

Love Medicine
Detail of beadwork from an Ojibwe medicine pouch

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Today for our service day, the man in charge of our project was Native American and his name was "Grey Hawk". I thought that was interesting!
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4 comments:

Rachel said...

He actually told us an interesting story about an Indian burial ground. Apparently Shell oil wanted to make it into a parking lot, and wanted to move the body. However there is actually no ritual for bodies being moved because they believed once one was buried there they stayed there. The Shell people finally found a chief and his son to do a ceremony and had the bodies moved. Apparently a week later the chief got into a car accident, he was forced through his windshield and died. His seat belt didn't even save him. And in that same week his son got into a car accident and died to, so he said the moral of the story was to never dig up a burial Indian ground.

January 14, 2010 at 7:37 PM
Shiloh said...

Also, the area we did our service on apparently was where ancient Natives lives. Grey Hawk joked that his family had been living where he worked for 6000 years. He also told us about how two archaeological sites have been found around the area. The two sites were pronounced mittens, I'm not sure how it's spelled, but basically they're garbage spots. So they've found clay pots and all sorts of stuff. He even talked about how one site contained around four thousand pieces, which is a huge find.

January 14, 2010 at 7:44 PM
Maddie B said...

He also said that because it is a state park they are not allowed to "dig" in order to find artifacts. But that they have wild pigs that run along certain trails ,and when they create mud Greyhawk will go along after them and look for different things that have surfaced. He said he has found many many different pieces. I thought that was pretty neato!

January 15, 2010 at 7:28 AM
blond007 said...

Indian middens are prolific in the coastal Lousiana area. I have seen many Indian middens out and about with my husband as he studies the coastal Lousiana marsh and wetland areas. In the places I have visited (the Rigolets - the tidal channel between Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico, and also various places on the Northshore), these middens look like huge piles of shells, like an island of shells that rise above the marsh and surrounding area. When you look at an Indian midden in coastal Lousiana, it stands out in stark contrast to the surrounding marsh, and it is obvious that the shells have been dumped there as refuse by a previous community that inhabited the region.

From wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden, A midden, also known as a kitchen midden, or a shell heap[1], is a dump for domestic waste. The word is of Scandinavian via Middle English derivation, but is used by archaeologists worldwide to describe any kind of feature containing waste products relating to day-to-day human life. They may be convenient, single-use pits created by nomadic groups or long-term, designated dumps used by sedentary communities that accumulate over several generations.

January 21, 2010 at 10:59 PM

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