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“Some months ago I attended a meeting between the Rancheria’s tribal council and an energy company. The meeting took place at Balch Camp, the disputed sacred site that I mentioned in an earlier post. I brought my video camera along so I could collect footage of the meeting and the sacred sites we would be visiting. The air was heavy with the animosity between these opposing parties. Passive aggression flowed like a river. LB lead representatives from the forest service and the energy company, along with myself, on a tour of sacred objects along the Western bank of the Dinkee Creek. With this context the energy company could no longer claim that they were surprised last year when they struck the body of a 10,000 year old woman nearby. LB’s anger was felt in his bounding pace, his impatience and hostility towards the energy company and the forest service. We struggled to keep up with him as he gestured to countless pounding stones and ceremonial boulders, a fly by tour of incredible things that had me lagging behind as I tried to collect footage of it all (such a rare experience). As we crossed a long pasture, I was distracted by a noose dangling from a tree. I shot a quick pan around this noose then jogged to catch up with LB. The ground was unsure so I was watching my oxfords awkward tumble about the stones, an eye out for rattlesnakes. While crossing a broad flat boulder I noticed a brief flash, some incandescent ore within the otherwise uniformly granular stone. I am a bit of a “perma-stoner” so I quickly backed up to soak up this brief glimpse of celestial beauty captured in stone. It was then that I saw a pattern in the glinting star-like chips in the stone, a sort of tumbling infinite figure eight not unlike a strand of DNA. I shot a quick video of the dots then galloped to catch up with LB. I remember thinking at the time that some kid must’ve drawn them. The form didn’t strike me as having originated with the Mono Indians and these dots regressed in my mind, my ignorance of the rich cultural heritage of this region. Yesterday, I was logging the footage. When I saw the dots, I called LB into the room to see what he thought of it. Suddenly, others were being called in and finally CB said: “Remember what our aunt said?” LB went told a story about when he was first engaged to his ex-wife. His aunt had lunch with him and his then-fiance. Beneath a tree, the Elder woman drew a path in the dust of two lines. They met in the beginning, grew distant from each other, then met again, grew distant, and again met. “This is good, this is what your families have done. We meet, then we go away, then come again. This keeps our blood strong.” The pattern did not look unlike a strand of DNA and resembled the image in the video. I got goosebumps as I realized that I may have found an ancient ceremonial stone. This is of course not for sure. We have to go find it again and verify the method and the form. For now though I am enlivened by discovery, and of something formally different than what I’ve known to come from the Mono Indians, holes bored deep into stones. This shows my relative ignorance of the incredible holism that weaves together the Mono people, whose history and spirituality are not just simplified renderings of those natural and psychical processes that birthed such complex symbolic systems as Christianity of Hinduism, but fundamentally different from these two examples”. Leave a Reply |
