Sunny, high 50s, and just a light breeze: It’s a perfect California December morning for rock climbing at the Owens River Gorge and Alex Honnold has just offered to give me a belay — meaning, he’s offered to attend to the safety rope for me on a climb. The official reason I’m here is to get the scoop on Honnold’s environmental foundation. But, for a climber, getting offered a belay by Honnold is probably the closest thing we have to getting thrown a ball by Peyton Manning or LeBron James.
Because his crazy free-solo (climbing without ropes) ascents in places like Zion, Utah, and Yosemite, Calif., have landed him front-page features in Outside, National Geographic, and on 60 Minutes, Honnold has probably done more than anyone else to bring the historically fringe sport of climbing into the U.S. mainstream. When he started climbing full-time in 2005, he got used to living the dirtbag life of a rock-obsessed vagabond on about $8,000 a year. Now, the 28-year-old does stuff like star in commercials for Citibank and Dewar’s Scotch.
So, in considering whether to take him up on the offer to do the climb, I’m intimidated. I step back and tell myself I’m here to learn about what he’s up to away from the crag, anyway. Through his namesake foundation, he’s dropping some of his extra cash into environmental projects like Solar Aid and Grid Alternatives.
He’s bringing a can-do attitude to it, too: Instead of looking down at how far the planet could stumble, he’s looking for the next hold. “I feel like a lot of the traditional environmental stuff is sort of depressing,” he says. “You know, ‘the world is fucked, things are going downhill, we’re going to have to drastically change our lifestyles in order to keep the world from being so fucked.’ I’m not really that pessimistic by nature … There are so many solutions that only take, like, doing it,” Honnold says.
For now, he sees the next handhold as solar power, hence his next trip: a 2.5 week tour he’s embarking on Friday that will combine climbing desert towers, biking, and working for his foundation installing solar panels in Navajo Territory. The Honnold Foundation will work with Eagle Energy to install solar power systems into the homes of 30 Navajo elders who are currently living without access to electricity, and a total of 200 solar lights into five schools.
“There’s something like 18,000 households on reservations there that don’t have access to power,” Honnold told me over the phone recently. “And, in sunny Arizona, especially, solar is the ideal solution. It seems like we should be powering people who are on the grid with it, let alone people who are off the grid.”
For the record, I did suck it up and do the climb. Later in the day, a hush came over the crowded crag — everyone around me was looking up. There was Honnold, at the top of that same climb, totally solo.
Here’s some footage I took of Honnold on the climb:
Honnold and Wright leave for their trip on Friday. Look out for their movie Sufferfest 2.0about it next year.
Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.
Using a new method for exploring ancient relationships among languages, linguists have found evidence further illuminating the peopling of North America about 14,000 years ago. Their findings follow a recent proposal that the ancestors of Native Americans were marooned for some 15,000 years on a now sunken plain before they reached North America.
This idea, known as the Beringian standstill hypothesis, has been developed by geneticists and archaeologists over the last seven years. It holds that the ancestors of Native Americans did not trek directly across the land bridge that joined Siberia to Alaska until the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. Rather, geneticists say, these ancestors must have lived in isolation for some 15,000 years to accumulate the amount of DNA mutations now seen specifically in Native Americans.
Archaeologists examining deep sea cores from the Bering Strait believe that a special ecological zone known as shrub tundra existed there during the Last Glacial Maximum, an exceptionally cold period that lasted from about 30,000 to 15,000 years ago. Though often referred to as a bridge, the now sunken region, known as Beringia, was in fact a broad plain. It was also relatively warm, and supported trees such as spruce and birch, as well as grazing animals.
Writing in the journal Science last month, John F. Hoffecker, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado, summarized the evidence for thinking the Beringian plain was the refuge for the ancestral Native American population identified by the geneticists. “The shrub tundra zone in central Beringia represents the most plausible home for the isolated standstill population,” he and colleagues wrote.
Dr. Hoffecker believes that the ancestral Native Americans could have kept warm with fires of animal bones and wood, and that their range was restricted by the availability of wood. “The paleoecological data is consistent with the idea of a refugium, and the wood might be a key variable,” he said in an interview.
Linguists have until now been unable to contribute to this synthesis of genetic and archaeological data. The first migrations to North America occurred between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, but most linguists have long believed that language trees cannot be reconstructed back further than 8,500 years. Vocabulary changes so fast that the signal of relationship between two languages is soon swamped by the noise of borrowed words and fortuitous resemblances.
But in 2008, Edward Vajda, a linguist at Western Washington University, said he had documented a relationship between Yeniseian, a group of mostly extinct languages spoken along the Yenisei River in central Siberia, and Na-Dene.
The Na-Dene languages are spoken in Alaska and western Canada, with two outliers in the American Southwest, Navajo and Apache. His assertion that the two families of languages had descended from a common tongue implied that he was seeing back in time at least 12,000 years or so, to the arrival of Na-Dene speakers in North America.
Many linguists accepted Dr. Vajda’s analysis, despite its time depth. He relied heavily on structural features of language, which turn out to be more resistant to change than vocabulary. In particular, he looked at Yeniseian and Na-Dene verbs, since languages in both groups have a template of fixed positions before and after the verb for specifying various attributes.
Building on Dr. Vajda’s success, two linguists, Mark A. Sicoli of Georgetown University and Gary Holton of the University of Alaska, have assessed the relationship of the two language families based on shared grammatical features, rather than vocabulary.
In a paper published in the journal PLoS One on Wednesday, they report their surprising finding that Na-Dene is not a descendant of Yeniseian, as would be expected if the Yeniseian speakers in Siberia were the source population of the Na-Dene migration. Rather, they say, both language families are descendants of some lost mother tongue. Their explanation is that this lost language was spoken in Beringia, and that its speakers migrated both east and west. The eastward group reached North America and became the Na-Dene speakers, while the westward group returned to Siberia and settled along the Yenisei River.
The Na-Dene migration from Beringia came after the main migration of 15,000 years ago, but the relationship between the two populations remains to be settled. “There may have been multiple streams of people moving out of that single source at different times,” said Dennis H. O’Rourke, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Utah.
If Yeniseian represents a return migration from Beringia, the question of the source population in Siberia of Native Americans is thrust back into obscurity. “If Yeniseian is off the table as a back-migration, there is no other candidate,” Dr. Sicoli said.
Several Yeniseian languages are known only from czarist fur tax records. Pumpokol, Arin, Assan and Kott have not been spoken for two centuries. The only surviving language, Ket, has fewer than 200 living speakers.
A German museum dedicated to much-loved Wild West adventure author Karl May has gotten caught in a row with Native Americans over human remains in its display. The tribes have called for their return – to no avail.
Germany’s fascination with the Wild West is largely down to one man – Karl May, the celebrated adventure author whose stories of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand fed the dreams of countless German children from the late 19th century on. The highpoint of his fame arrived in the 1960s with the still fondly-remembered movie adaptations.
Now the Karl May Museum in Radebeul outside Dresden has been caught in a row with two Native American tribes over a set of scalps in its display cases. Cecil Pavlat, cultural repatriation specialist of the Ojibwe Nation – to which one of the scalps is said to belong – wrote a letter to the museum earlier this month about the offense caused by the “insensitive display” of these “ancestral remains” – and asking for their return.
The Winnetou movies are much-loved classics in Germany
“It’s a part of that human being,” Pavlat told DW. “It’d be no different to cutting a hand off, or an arm and displaying that – it’s just not culturally appropriate or even acceptable by most ethnic groups, whether they’re Native American or not.”
Pavlat also sees the display itself as part of an age-old misrepresentation of Native Americans. “That’s the way we view it, as ancestral remains, even speaking the word ‘scalps’ – it creeps me out,” he said. “Some say that this was a practice created by our people. History tells us that this has been practiced throughout history in other places, including Europe.”
Tough negotiations
The museum got most of its collection of scalps from Karl May fanatic Ernst Tobis, an eccentric traveller and sometime acrobat who went by the pseudonym Patty Frank. The Austrian bequeathed his huge collection of Native American artifacts to the museum in 1926.
So far the museum has been cagey about responding to the requests, which go back further than Pavlat’s letter. Mark Worth, an American living in Berlin, was outraged when he first saw the scalps on display and brought the display to the attention of Karen Little Coyote of the Arapaho-Cheyenne Tribes in Oklahoma. She wrote a letter to the museum last fall. After correspondence with the US embassy, a cultural attaché from the Leipzig consulate went to the museum and, according to an e-mail she sent to Little Coyote later, handed over a copy of the letter in person.
Ojibwe repatriation specialist Pavlat accused the museum of an ‘insensitive display’
Yet the US embassy, for its part, has largely left the matter to the tribes to deal with, recommending that the tribes contact the museum directly, and adding, in an e-mailed statement to DW, “The Consulate in Leipzig shared the information in the letter with the Karl May Museum earlier this year during the course of a meeting that touched upon a variety of other matters.”
Museum director Claudia Kaulfuss at first refused to acknowledge that any “official request” had arrived, but told DW: “In principle we are ready to talk, but first we want to understand what is wanted. We have four scalps on display, and it’s not even clear which tribes they belong to. We have two from white people, two from Indians – one of them is more or less just a plait of hair, and whether any really belongs to an Ojibwe Indian we don’t know.”
But the history of the Karl May Museum, published on the Karl May Foundation website describes in dramatic detail how Tobis bought the first of his scalps in 1904 – “the most sought-after collector’s item.” On a night-time trip to an Indian reservation, Tobis held “tough negotiations” with Dakota chief Swift Hawk, “who had won the scalp in a fight with an Ojibwe,” and bought the “trophy” for two bottles of whisky, a bottle of apricot brandy, and $1,100.
A piece of history
“We’re just showing a piece of history,” Kaulfuss told DW. “It’s an ethnological exhibition. We don’t want to falsify the history of the Indians in America.”
The museum contains a number of Native American cultural items
“Of course we’d enter into dialogue,” she added. “But we’d also want to put forward our side. We’re a museum in Germany, subject to German law, and we’d like to explain why we want to show a piece of history, and that we aren’t pillorying anything with it. But they can’t just expect us to hand something over without talking to anyone about it first, because then more people might come and soon our museum would be empty.”
Tugs-of-war between museums and indigenous cultures have become an issue in recent decades all over the world. The US passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, which forced federal institutions to return all “cultural items” to the relevant tribes. There was, moreover, a significant precedent only this month, when the University of Freiburg returned some 14 skulls to Namibia.
Worth thinks that human remains should hold a special position in such negotiations. “We should start with pieces of human beings. If we can’t agree that parts of human beings should go back to their families and communities, where are we?” he told DW. “That should be a minimum standard of dignity in this world.”
For some, it’s more disconcerting that the Karl May Museum is based around the work of an author who wrote the bulk of his fiction before he ever visited the US. As Worth put it: “It is fitting that the Karl May Museum – whose limited knowledge and false impressions of Native Americans have their foundation in fictional characters invented by someone who had spent limited time with Native Americans – is now claiming to know the best resting place for remains of Native Americans.”
AP Photo/The Spokesman-Review, Colin Mulvany Washington State University instructor David Warner is seen in Spokane, Washington on June 27, 2013. Warner was assaulted on March 30, 2013, in Pullman, Washington. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and has trouble speaking and getting around.
Alysa Landry, Indian Country Today Media Network
David Warner was not expected to survive.
The culture, gender and race studies professor at Washington State University suffered a traumatic brain injury March 30, 2013, when he was assaulted outside a bar near the Pullman, Washington, campus. Warner, 42, doesn’t remember trying to prevent a verbal confrontation close to 2 a.m. that day or being tackled to the ground and striking his head against the asphalt.
Warner, whose heritage comes from Canada’s First Nations, was transported by helicopter from Pullman to Spokane, a distance of about 75 miles. Surgeons discovered that Warner’s skull had cracked into three pieces and his brain was swelling. They removed a four-by-six-inch piece of his skull to manage the pressure.
“My skull shattered on impact,” Warner said during a phone interview this month. “They didn’t expect me to survive.”
Warner doesn’t remember the two weeks he was in critical condition at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center, or the following two weeks at a separate facility for serious head trauma. He remembers waking up at St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute and struggling to put words together.
“I lost about a month and a half,” he said. “My vocabulary was reduced to five words. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t come up with words except the five that were in my vocabulary.”
The situation was a new one for Warner, who earned his PhD in American Studies in August of 2012 and was teaching courses in gender and race. Before the injury, he was characterized as a prolific reader, writer and poet, said his mother, Cherie Warner.
“He was a voracious reader his whole life,” Cherie said of her son. “He would go through books and remember them. He has a library that would rival the town’s library.”
David Warner is seen here before the assault. (Courtesy Warner family)
Warner always wanted to be a teacher, his mother said. He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in American Studies at Washington State University. When the university offered him a teaching position, he jumped at the opportunity to teach classes about gender and race and to research topics like tribal sovereignty, self-determination, genocide studies and critical race theory.
“He’s very passionate about that subject area and the marginalization of minority people,” Cherie said. “He has a lot of knowledge in that. He knows and understands it.”
Warner’s life changed when his head hit the ground. During the weeks in the rehabilitation hospital, speech and physical therapists worked every day to help him relearn skills that at one point were second nature. He returned home at the end of May, still facing a long road to recovery.
A year after the injury, Warner is able to live alone and take care of himself, his mother said. He goes to conferences with colleagues and attends classes at the university. Some of the lingering effects include problems remembering names and difficulty with reading and comprehension.
“I can read books and understand words,” Warner said. “Before, I could read a book and remember all of it. I’m not retaining it now. I can’t recall the words and get the message. At the present time, my brain needs to heal some more.”
As Warner was in initial stages of recovery, Pullman police arrested five people who were connected with the assault. According to the police report, Warner was drinking with a friend that night at a bar called Stubblefields. Just before 2 a.m., Warner’s friend confronted a group of people and began insulting them.
Surveillance footage shows Warner trying to prevent the confrontation from getting physical. He stretched out his arms between the parties as his friend advanced and threw a punch. Warner and his friend were tackled, but cars obstruct the video and it is unclear whether Warner was injured when he hit the ground or if one of the assailants kicked him in the head.
David Warner is seen here after the assault. (Courtesy Warner family)
Because the video surveillance was inconclusive, prosecutors ultimately dropped the charges, said Bill Gilbert, an attorney representing Warner in a civil suit. Gilbert is in the process of investigating the incident. He may file civil claims against the people involved in the assault or against the bar and seek damages topping $250,000 to cover medical bills and expenses.
“It was a drunken, stupid episode,” Gilbert said of the incident. “The value in this case, you can’t put numbers on it. You’ve got a guy who’s brilliant, who has a PhD, who’s going to be messed up for life.”
Warner believes that, in time, he will heal and once again teach at Washington State University.
“There’s a quote I give my students,” he said. “I tell them I constantly think about hope. It makes me stronger and filled with life.”
Beginning in the 2014 season, the Spokane Indians baseball team will sport the team name in Salish on home jerseys.
When the Spokane Indians baseball players take the field this summer, the team name will be blazoned across their chests: “Sp’q’n’i.”
That’s the Spokane Salish language version of the name. On opening day, June 13, this Short Season Class A minor league baseball team will become the first-ever professional baseball team to use a Native American language in this way.
The jersey is the fruit of an unusual collaboration between a team and a tribe. Unusual, because in several high-profile examples – the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, to name two – the issue of Indian-related team names and mascots has generated more controversy than collaboration. In Cleveland, the “Chief Wahoo” mascot has been derided as a demeaning cartoon; in Washington, D.C., the team name has been derided as just plain racist.
In Spokane – or should we say Sp’q’n’i – both the tribe and its namesake team have worked hard in recent decades to establish the name Spokane Indians as a tribute, as opposed to just a mascot. In 2006, the tribe helped to create new circular team logo, with words written in the Salish language. This year, the tribe worked with the team in creating the new Sp’q’n’i jersey, and supplied the team with an accurate rendering of the word (which also includes a final symbol not found in the English alphabet).
Both Rudy Peone, chairman of the Spokane Tribe of Indians, and Otto Klein, senior vice president of the Spokane Indians baseball team, are acutely aware of how sensitive these issues can be. That’s why the two institutions have developed a collaboration.
“The team, the name, it’s not named for a vague group,” said Peone. “… This is the Spokane Indians, named specifically for our tribe. We’ve accepted that and have a very close working relationship, in a respectful way.”
“We work with them, not against them,” Klein said. “We meet with the tribal chairman each year and say, ‘What have we done to promote the tribe, and what can we do?’ “
Barry Moses, a Spokane Tribe member who teaches Salish language classes at the Salish School of Spokane, has mixed feelings about it.
“On the one hand, Indian mascots in general are problematic and troublesome,” Moses said. “But it is a positive thing that they reached out to the tribe. It’s also a positive thing that it will give the Salish language wider representation in the culture.”
Peone believes this is the first time a professional baseball team has used a native language in this way on a uniform.
“There have been Native American teams that have done it, but, yes, this is the first time that we know of that a professional team has done so,” said Peone.
Meanwhile, the baseball team is working on giving Salish an even higher profile throughout Avista Stadium. Many of the signs in the park will be in both English and Salish. The team is also expanding its existing historical exhibit about the tribe, and moving it to more prominent positions around the park. The game jerseys themselves will be auctioned off at the end of the season, and proceeds will go to tribal youth programs.
Klein said he thinks local fans will quickly grasp the meaning and significance of the name. But what about visiting fans from out of town? Might they be confused about that word on the front of the uniforms? Klein said the section leaders will have information cards about the name and they will be happy to use the question as a “conversation piece” about the team’s 100-plus year tribal connection.
The preservation of the Salish language is particularly close to the hearts of many tribal members, because, as the decades go by, fewer and fewer people are fluent in the Spokane dialect of Salish. Peone called the new jerseys a way to “educate thousands of baseball fans about the language and culture” of the city’s first inhabitants.
Many Northwest tribes shared the Salish language, yet many had their own distinct dialect. In Moses’ estimation, there are only five or six fluent Spokane Salish speakers left, most of them elderly. However, there has been a recent resurgence of interest among younger generations. The Salish School of Spokane even has full-immersion Salish preschool.
The team won’t be able to wear the jerseys in every home game – at least not this year. The baseball team originally hoped the new Salish jerseys could be their everyday 2014 home jerseys. However, the team didn’t get the designs submitted to the league office before the deadline, so the Sp’q’n’i jerseys can only be used as “alternate” jerseys in 2014, which means they can be worn in under half of the home games. Klein said the team will wear them at most of 2014’s “biggest” home games, including Fridays, Saturdays and holidays, and also at the home opener. Then, in 2015, the Sp’q’n’i jerseys will be the primary home jerseys.
Klein said the collaboration has given his team a unique identity, steeped in history.
“We truly found our identity when we came up with that logo,” he said, referring to the 2006 Salish language logo. “We truly found our home.”
Klein said that, in recent years, the team has not received any kind of “flak” about its name. Yet Peone is certainly aware that there are “folks sensitive to the mascot issue.” The American Indian Movement’s National Coalition on Racism in Sport and Media has issued the following statement about Indian-themed sports mascots in general: “American Indians are a People. Not mascots for America’s fun and games.”
The coalition decries the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo, the “tomahawk chop” and the name Washington Redskins. Yet there is no consensus on this complicated issue, as evidenced by the fact that the sports teams at Wellpinit High School, the main high school on the Spokane Reservation, are named the Redskins.
The Spokane Indians baseball team does not use an Indian-costumed mascot. The team’s mascot is Otto, a bright blue “reptile with style.” Nor does the team lead its fans in the tomahawk chop. To Peone, the use of the Salish language in the logo and jerseys makes the Spokane Indians “more than a mascot.” He said the tribe has been generally supportive of the partnership because of the way in which it kas been done.
Meanwhile, the unique Sp’q’n’i jerseys may prove to be a big hit at the merchandise store – although Klein said that was certainly not the team’s motivation. A portion of those proceeds, too, will go toward tribal youth programs.
Irish culture is filled with tales of fairies, banshees and leprechauns, and there is nothing as Irish as a good story. It only makes sense then that there could be a good Native American story about the Irish, maybe as unprovable as the others, but as one archaeologist said, “Anything is possible.”
There are records that suggest the Irish came to America before Christopher Columbus, but while there is no solid evidence, there certainly are hints.
One of the first recorded curiosities originated in 1521, when Spaniard Peter Martyr took reports from Columbus and other explorers who had investigated the Southeast coast of today’s South Carolina and Georgia. A baptized Chicora Native and a Spanish explorer reported to Martyr that they had come upon a group of people who called themselves the Duhare.
The Duhare were different than the Chicora Natives in the area. While all of the local Natives were described as having varying degrees of brown skin, the Duhare were described as white-skinned with brown hair that hung to their heels. They were said to herd deer in the way that Europeans herded cattle. Martyr wrote that the fawns were kept in the houses and the deer would go out to pasture during the day, returning at night to suckle their fawns. After the deer had nursed their young, they were milked and the milk was turned to cheese.
Deer milk has been celebrated in Gaelic poetry but usually in mythical situations. Reindeer were herded in Scotland until the 1300s, and a paper by Erin NhaMinerva, from Ireland, mentions deer being milked, but more in mythic terms than as a regular part of the diet.
Three Irish Men by Albert Durer, 1521.
There was other evidence that these Duhare could have been Irish. They were said to keep poultry, chickens, ducks, geese and other similar fowl, and potatoes were said to have been grown in the area, though they were not yet an important food in Ireland.
While the word Duhare may have a bit of an Irish ring to it, no Irish historian could be found to say it was derived from the old Irish language. And besides the few unusual incidents above, the Duhare lived as the neighboring Natives did.
In West Virginia, there was a ruckus when Dr. Barry Fell, a professor emeritus at Harvard University, said he found writing on a rock he described as “Christian messages in old Irish script.” Although he was the editor and co-author of eight books that deciphered ancient writings, Fell found himself discredited by other experts when it came to this particular rock writing. In a blog called Bad Archeology, Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews says Fell’s arguments were not convincing. Fitzpatrick-Matthews wrote, “His [Fell’s] analysis of supposedly Celtic elements in Native American placenames and languages is fanciful; his identification of scratches on rock surfaces as Irish Ogham script shows his lack of familiarity with real Ogham.”
These petroglyphs in West Viriginia were thought to be carved in Ogam, an Irish script used from the 6th to 8th centuries. (Courtesy Roger Wise)
Nicholas Freidin, doctor of philosophy and anthropology professor at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia said: “The whole thing is simply rubbish, part of the ‘lunatic fringe’. There is no evidence whatsoever of any European presence in West Virginia before the 17th century. To perpetuate this nonsense would be a disservice to both Native peoples and professional archaeologists.”
And yet, in the 1500s, the Vikings described the Irish as able seamen who traveled extensively and great distances, as far as Iceland in the 10th century. In 2000, adventurer Tim Severin published a book called The Brendan Voyage about a journey he made in a leather-bound boat built to sixth-century Irish standards. His goal was to see if he could follow the path of an Irish monk who is said to have sailed from Ireland to Greenland and then Newfoundland.
According to the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, Saint Brendan, the Irish monk who sailed to a wooded paradise, lush with fruits. He had endured a “pelting with rock from an island of fire, seeing a pillar of crystal and encountering a moving island before finally coming upon the Promised Land, which came to be referred to as the Fortunate Islands.
St. Brendan and his Brethren setting sail, artist unknown. From Rev. Denis O’Donoghue, St. Brendan the Voyager (Dublin: Brown & Nolan, 1893) frontispiece.
Brendan explored the area for seven years before returning to Ireland, his boats filled with gems. No one is exactly certain where the Fortunate Islands were, although Columbus mentioned them in Martyr’s book.
The New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia and other sources speak of the Irish being the first white men to come to the Americas before Columbus, perhaps as many as 1,000 years before. The glory of that adventure is given to “MacCarthy, Rafn, Beamish, O’Hanlon, Beauvois, and Gafarel,” in a book called Saints In The Limelight by Siglind Bruin.
Those accounts match the Vikings’ claims that the Irish occupied an area south of the Chesapeake Bay called Hvitramamaland (Land of the White Men) or Irland ed mikla (Greater Ireland), notes the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia.
The New Advent says the Shawano Indians recognized a white tribe in Florida, said to have had iron implements. “In regard to Brendan himself the point is made that he could only have gained a knowledge of foreign animals and plants, such as are described in the legend, by visiting the western continent,” New Advent writes.
Interestingly, Martyr’s book refers to islands within Columbus’s route along the North American coast as the Fortunate Islands.
“All things are possible,” Kent Reilly, professor of archaeology at Texas State University and field anthropologist consultant for the Muscogee Nation of Florida, said. “There were many Europeans here; there were the Welsh in 1288, and the Vikings. But there is no archaeological evidence, no ceramics or metal, and as far as I know, there are no stories among the Southeast peoples about white-skinned, blue-eyed people in that area. There is no archaeological evidence, as far as I know.”
According to a website called, “Hidden Ireland: A Guide to Irish Fairies,” Saint Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland but, “from among the ancient tribes and kingdoms of ancient Ireland, whose religions worshipped the trees and lakes, stones and animals of the wild landscape. Such gods and beliefs would not die easily.”
Would it be so hard to imagine if the Irish left their increasingly Christian homelands in search of a place they could follow their ancestral traditions? In any case, it makes a nice story, and as History.com notes, “Spinning exciting tales to remember history has always been a part of the Irish way of life.”
WSDOT announced Thursday the manufacturer of the drill, Japan’s Hitachi-Zosen, has come up with a tentative plan to dig a shaft to the machine stalled 120-feet below the surface to determine the cause of the problems that halted drilling in December. (WSDOT image)
Ancient artifacts could be in the path of new drilling to reach the broken Seattle tunnel machine known as “Bertha,” says an expert with the Washington Department of Transportation.
WSDOT announced Thursday the manufacturer of the drill, Japan’s Hitachi-Zosen, has come up with a tentative plan to dig a shaft to the machine stalled 120-feet below the surface to determine the cause of the problems that halted drilling in December.
Workers started boring a series of 4-inch wide probes Thursday to determine if archaeological work is needed.
It’s a part of the tunnel project’s environmental review process, and because of changes in WSDOT’s digging depths, they must complete additional cultural resources survey work.
“This work is being coordinated with the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation (DAHP) and tribal governments that are consulting on the project,” said WSDOT in a news release.
The shaft will be dug through an area filled in years ago along the Seattle waterfront that predates settlement of the city and could contain historical artifacts, says WSDOT cultural resources manager Steve Archer.
The drilling is expected to take about a week and shouldn’t delay the project even if artifacts of cultural significance are discovered, Publicola reports.
WSDOT Deputy Administrator Matt Preedy says contractors hope to announce a plan next week for the 120-foot shaft. The big question is whether crews will be able to simply replace damaged seals that protect the massive bearing that helps turn the machine’s cutter head or whether it will require workers to pull the cutter head itself out to the surface from its current location.
While Hitachi has been considering three different sized shafts, Preedy says the company is favoring the smaller of the three options, which would be faster and less expensive than the other options.
Correction: An earlier version of this story said ‘Indian artifacts’. WSDOT says the purpose of the soil testing is to look for anything of archaeological significance, which includes several possibilities, native artifacts among them.
NORMAN, Okla. (AP) – The University of Oklahoma College of Law has received a gift from the Chickasaw Nation for the Chickasaw Nation Native American Law Chair.
The position is the first endowed chair of its kind in the nation. It will allow OU to attract and retain national scholars in Native American law.
OU Law offers three different programs providing specialization in Native American law: the Juris Doctor Certificate, the Master of Laws and the new Master of Legal Studies.
The OU College of Law has maintained the highest average enrollment of Native American students among law schools nationwide over the past 10 years. This year, 11.1 percent of the incoming first-year class is Native American.
The college also has one of the most important collections of Native American art in the country.
PARKER, Ariz. (AP) — Authorities are searching for a homicide suspect who remains at large after escaping from the Colorado River Indian Tribes jail in Parker in western Arizona.
Authorities in La Paz County say 25-year-old Mickey Anderson was among three men who escaped Sunday by assaulting a detention officer but that the others were apprehended within hours.
A La Paz County Sheriff’s spokesman referred questions about the homicide case to a jail police official, Capt. Stuart Harper, who did not immediately return a call Tuesday.
Anderson is described as Native American with close-cropped brown hair or a shaved head and brown eyes. He’s 6-foot-1 and weighs 155 pounds.
A $1,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the apprehension of Anderson.
A construction crew in central Texas may have unearthed the remains of an ancient Indian cemetery. Earlier this week, human bones were discovered at the site of a future 225-home subdivision in Round Rock, about 100 miles northeast of San Antonio. Work was halted after the bones were discovered and the police were called in to investigate.
According to Associated Press, after examining photos of the bones, an FBI anthropologist said that they appeared to be the remains of a Native American. On Friday, Texas State University anthropologists were called to the site to excavate the area, which has long been a popular spot to search for Indian arrowheads.
Because the possible Native American remains were found on private land, the developers, KB Home, are responsible for preserving the site or hiring a professional archaeologist to remove and relocate the remains. Texas state law says that even a single body constitutes a cemetery and a qualified anthropologist must determine if there are other remains in the area.
“You get more than a couple and people start to go, ‘whoa,’” Mark Denton, with the Texas Historical Commission, told AP. “We better wait and back off. We have to figure how we can preserve and protect this area rather than remove all of them.”
Historically, central Texas was home to several Native American tribes, including the Tonkawa, Apache and Comanche. According to the Star-Telegram, if investigators can determine to which tribe the ancient remains belonged, they would contact any present-day members of the tribe so the remains could be handled according to that group’s customs.
