I became fascinated with Native petroglyphs, or carvings in stone, largely through reading scholarly reports when I was a social sciences research associate at Indiana University. The readings had nothing to bear on my paid work, but they did touch on some of the poetry I was engaging. I had no idea I would actually be viewing these in the wild barely two years later.
And here I am, 50 years later, living in a landscape at the other edge of the continent and aware that Native petroglyphs and petrographs, or painted images, are found hereabouts, though their precise location is kept secret.
Here are ten points I noted from the field notes.
- Were the drawings (petroglyphs) made during ceremonies before an important hunt? Did the hunting leader draw them? Or were they done by the young, during puberty rites?
- A given rock surface had “power” to bring good luck. If it worked, he drew again on the same rock. Others, seeing this, added their own pictures.
- Dummy hunters were erected as piled rocks.
- Pictures were used only when food, or the particular animal, was hard to obtain.
- In the sheep cult, the immortal sheep had certain supernatural powers.
- Salmon ascended the streams to benefit mankind, died, and then returned to life as a race of supernatural beings who lived in a great house under the sea. When the time came for the run, they would assume the form of fish to sacrifice themselves. (Sounds to me like prototype Jesus.)
- Eskimo keep the bladder of a whale, seal, or walrus they have killed and kept that in a jar of water all winter. Come springtime, it is taken to the edge of the sea, poured back in, and its soul is told to swim far out where it will find one of its own kind about to be born.
- The cult priests, or shamans, talked to these animal spirits.
- Did the advent of the bow allow excessive hunting?
- Appearance includes desert varnish, a patina where high summer temperatures and thunderstorms were found together. Lichen will grow in the drawings but not the surrounding rock.
Jnana's Red Barn 