Medicine Wheels In Danger

 

On top of a wind-swept hill in southeastern Saskatchewan there's a
cairn of boulders connected to a large circle of rocks surrounding it by
five lines of stones resembling spokes in a wheel. The Moose Mountain
Medicine Wheel has been a sacred site for Northern Plains Indians for
more than 2,000 years. And yet its origins and purpose remain hidden
within the fog of pre-history and the story telling of village elders.

Theories, from the scientific to the other-worldly, abound. But one thing
is certain: medicine wheels like the one at Moose Mountain are
disappearing, one stone at a time. And First Nations peoples and
archaeologists, alike, fear they may be gone by the next generation.

The Moose Mountain MedicineWheel was first noted by Canadians
of European ancestry in an 1895 report written by land surveyors.
The report describedthe central cairn of the wheel as
being about 14 feet high, says IanBrace, an archaeologist with the
Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina.

"The central rock cairn is now about a foot-and-a-half high," says
Brace. "There've been people from all points on the globe who've not
only visited the site, but taken a rock home with them."

Theft, vandalism and agriculture have reduced to about 170 the number
of medicine wheels on the Northern Plains of North America. Brace
says he can't even guess how many wheels once graced the plains. But
if the destruction of tipi rings is any indication of the degree of desecration
besetting medicine wheels, "in my life time, they might just disappear".

Though medicine wheels are sacred to all plains Indian groups, their
symbolism and meaning vary from tribe to tribe.

The oldest wheels date back about 4,000 years, to the time of the
Egyptian pyramids and the English megaliths like Stonehenge. (Moose
Mountain has been radio-carbon dated to 800 BC, however, Brace
says it's possible an older boulder alignment exists beneath the exposed
one.) The Blackfoot, first of the current Indian groups on the plains of
what are now Saskatchewan and Alberta, arrived about 800 AD.

When the Blackfoot arrived in the new environment it was already
populated by two groups of people called the "Tunaxa" and the
"Tunaha", according to Blackfoot oral history. Brace and others believe
the three groups assimilated and the Blackfoot carried on the tradition
of building medicine wheel monuments. Alberta and Saskatchewan host
the majority of known medicine wheels. Others are located in North
Dakota, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

Like the Blackfoot before them, Indian groups who migrated to the
Northern Plains adopted the medicine wheel as a cultural and spiritual icon.

Simon Kytwayhat, a Cree elder who lives in Saskatoon, says he
learned his Cree perspective on the meaning of the medicine wheel
from elders. Kytwayhat's interpretation associates the four directions
represented on the wheel with the four races and their attributes -- the
circle and the number four are sacred symbols in First Nations' spirituality.

South, says Kytwayhat, stands for the color yellow, the Asian people,
the Sun, and intellect, while west represents the black race, the color
black, the Thunderbird, and emotion.

North is associated with the color white, the white man, winter and
physicality -- "white people sometimes rush into things without
considering the consequences" -- and east is identified with the color
red, the Indian person, spirituality and the eagle.

"The eagle has great vision, and so do those who follow the spiritual path in life."

Kytwayhat said he used to blame the white man for all the troubles
of Indians. "In time, I came to see the real meaning of the medicine wheel is the
brotherhood of man. How you treat others comes back to you around the circle."

If First Nations' peoples have divergent views on the meaning of the
medicine wheel, members of the non-Native community, including
scientists, are often poles apart.

The Mormon Church believes the wheels were built by the Aztecs, and
Swiss author Erich von Daniken contends they're a link to pre-historic
astronauts. New-Agers, meanwhile, embrace them as spiritual symbols
and construct their own near existing sites.

In the 1970s, Colorado astronomer John Eddy proposed wheels like
Moose Mountain and Bighorn, in Wyoming, were calendars whose
cairns and spokes aligned with celestial markers like Rigel, Aldebaran
and Sirius to forecast events like the return of the buffalo.

"It's all over the map," says Ernie Walker, head of the Department of
Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

"We don't know whether some have astronomical alignments or not --
if some do, they're very much in the minority. A lot of (archaeologists) doubt it."

Brace says the astronomical theory is easily debunked by simply
imagining someone trying to carry out celestial alignments over the
17-foot crest that separates one side of the Moose Mountain wheel from the other.

"Even standing on a horse, you can't see the other side."

Archaeologists and Blackfoot elders appear to agree on at least one
kind of medicine wheel.

Walker says most archaeologists of the Northern Plains recognize eight
different classes or styles of medicine wheels.

"Lo-and-behold, the Blackfoot elders have routinely referred to one of
these eight styles -- although they don't call it that -- and they strongly
indicate these were monuments to particular people, or events that
happened in the past. I think there's some consensus on that."

Brace points out the most recent wheel was constructed in Alberta in
1938, as a memorial to a renowned Blackfoot leader.

Brace has come up with a medicine wheel definition that allows him to
categorize the 12 to 14 Saskatchewan wheels, which range in diameter
from 45 to 144 metres (160 yards), into four groups: burial; surrogate
burial; fertility symbol; and "medicine hunting".

Burial and surrogate burials, are grave sites and memorials
. The longest line of boulders in such wheels points to the direction
of the honoree's birth, while shorter ones point to places of courageous
acts or remarkable deeds. Fertility wheels have the same pattern of
radiating lines and circles employed as fertility symbols on the pottery and
birch-bark "bitings" of other pre-historic, North American cultures,
he says. The fertility wheels contain buried offerings their builders believed
would increase the number of buffalo.

"Medicine hunting", meanwhile, may explain the origin of the Moose
Mountain Medicine Wheel, says Brace.

"If the people went into a particular place and they were without
resources, they'd take the shoulder blade of the animal they wanted to
hunt and put it in the fire. As the bone dried out, it would crack, and at
the end of the crack you'd get blobs of fat.

"They would interpret (the cracks with the blobs of fat) as indicating the
directions they'd have to go to find those food resources, or people
who had food to share. The cracks where fat did not accumulate would
indicate a poor direction to go."

Brace suspects the medicine hunting wheel was created, and likely
amended over time, to serve as a permanent hunting guide to
succeeding generations of nomadic Indians. Permanent, that is, until the
white culture came into contact with the red.

In the 1980s, the land encompassing the Moose Mountain Medicine
Wheel came under the jurisdiction of a First Nation band. Because
visitors wishing to view it must first get permission from the band
council, at least some degree of security is now assured, says Brace.

But most of Saskatchewan's medicine wheels are on Crown, public
and privately-owned land. Although they're "protected" under
provincial legislation that allows for fines of up to $3,000 for anyone
caught desecrating a medicine wheel, enforcement is difficult.

Most of the surviving medicine wheels are situated "off the beaten
path", accessible only to those bent on finding them, says Brace. The
same remoteness that protects the wheels from the ravages of high foot
traffic, however, also protects the unscrupulous from being caught.

It's a problem that has no easy solution, but Brace says there may be
hope in the Indian land-claims process. If ownership of the
medicine-wheel sites located on public and Crown land could be
transferred to Indian bands, and if Indian families could be induced to
reside on the sites, security would be greatly enhanced.

In the mean time, people wishing to see a medicine wheel might
consider a visit to Wanuskewin Heritage Park, near Saskatoon. There's
no better place to learn about the people to whom the circles remain
sacred, and the science that seeks to know why.

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Suggested Reading
Some of these books may be out of print so ask your local library to obtain them through the inter-library loan program.

TALKING TO THE DEAD:
Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism
By Barbara Weisberg
HarperSanFrancisco
New York, New York
2004

HANDBOOK OF PROFESSIONAL HYPNOSIS:
An Advanced Course for Hypnotherapists and Hypnotechnicians
By Harry Arons and M. F. H. Bubeck
Power Publishers, Inc.
So. Orange, N. J. 07079
1971

THE SECRET OF THE SOUL:
Using Out-of-Body Experiences
To Understand Our True Nature
By William Buhlman
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
New York, New York
2001

OUR SOLARIAN LEGACY:
Multidimensional Humans In a Self-learning Universe
By Paul Von Ward
Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.
Charlottesville, VA 22902
2001

THE PSYCHIC IN YOU:
Understand and Harness
Your Natural Psychic Power
By Jeffrey A. Wands
With Tom Philbin
Atria Books
New York, New York 10020
2004

THE DAY AFTER ROSEWELL:
A Former Pentagon Offical Reveals
The U.S. Government's
Shocking UFO Cover-up
By Col. Philip J. Corso, (Ret.)
Pocket Books, a division of Simon and Schuster, Inc.
New York, NY 10020
1997

WHITE EAGLE ON THE GREAT SPIRIT
The White Eagle Publishing Trust
New Lands, Liss, Hampshire, England
1975, 2003

PAST LIVES, FUTURE LIVES REVEALED
By Bruce Goldberg
The Career Press, Inc.
Franklin Lakes, NJ 07417
2004

MIRACLES OF MIND:
Exploring Nonlocal Consciousness
and Spiritual Healing
By Russell Targ and Jane Katra, Ph.D.
New World Library
Novato, California
1998, 1999

THE ART OF SPIRITUAL HEALING
By Joel Goldsmith
Harper & Row, Publishers
New York, Evanston, and London
1959

THE CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE:
The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena
Dean Radin, Ph.D.
HarperEdge
New York, NY
1997

THE POWER OF PSYCHIC AWARENESS
By Kingdon L. Brown
Parker Publishing
West Nyack, NY
1969

THE LIVING AURA:
Radiation Field Photography And The Kirlian Effect
By Kendall Johnson
With a Foreword by Thelma Moss
Hawthorn Books, Inc.
New York
1975

REMOTE VIEWING SECRETS:
A Handbook
By Joseph McMoneagle
Hampton Roads
Charlottesville, Virginia
2000

HERE, MR.SPLITFOOT:
An Informal Exploration into Modern Occultism
By Robert Smoerlott
The Viking Press
New York
1971

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