FOOTNOTES

 

*1 Many ornithologists have made similar observations. Konrad Lorenz’s book Here Am I—Where Are You? The Behavior of the Greylag Goose provides many insights into the communication styles of geese and ducks, both wild and tame, starting with the book’s title.

*2 See “Twelve Birds” for the complete story.

*3 Evehema is widely considered the last Native American to live totally without dependence on the capitalist system or on the utility grid.

*4 Translations differ as to whether it was a dove or like a dove. The King James version of the Bible says “like a dove,” as does The Modern Language Bible; but The Living Bible says “Holy Spirit in the form of a dove,” and The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Edition says “the Holy Spirit descended as a dove,” and in fact, Andrew accepted Jesus as the Messiah almost immediately afterward.

*5 A scientist of Potowatomi descent and citizenship, Kimmerer is the author of Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses and many influential magazine articles helping to establish TEK as a “way of knowing.” There is also a group of Hawaiian scientists that are making breakthroughs with TEK, notably Jonatha Giddens. Parks Canada has also opened a department of Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

*6 These flightless birds apparently evolved from a feathered dinosaur called the dromaeosaur, such as those recently discovered in China from 130 million years ago. (Norell, “The Proof Is in the Plumage,” 58.)

*7 The oldest known term for all Algonquian-speaking people as a group is Anishinaabeg, or “good people.” However this term is now used by scholars to refer only to the Odawa, Ojibway (Chippewa), and Algonquin specifically; therefore another term is needed. Algonquin is used in official state and federal publications in the United States and by the Catholic Church for this purpose, but this does not work in Canada, as it would cause confusion with the single nation Algonquin (Mamawinini). Therefore, in this book I will use Algonkin-ode, a word that has no other meaning. Ode, “family” or “clan” in Anishinaabe, is the root of dodem, which is known to many as totem. Odey, a closely related word, means “heart.” The term implies not only “the Algonquin family” (of nations) but “allies of the heart.” As I will be referring frequently to both types of Algonquins, I will use Algonquin (Mamawinini) to refer to the single nation and Algonkin-ode to refer to the culture.

*8 Extensive videography from the conference can be found at www.wittenbergcenter.org/id5.html. For additional transcriptions and videos, please write to The Wittenberg Center, 17 Jonet Lane, Bearsville, NY 12409.

*9 Modern shamans north of the Arctic Circle still use the same symbols and still participate in an ancient “cult of the eagle.” The shaman appears as a radiant heavenly bird. (See Henry N. Michael, Studies in Siberian Shamanism, 129.)

*10 Perrot was in what is now Green Bay, Wisconsin, between 1654 and 1670. His “memoir,” Memoir on the Manners, Customs, and Religion of the Savages of North America, was translated and included in Emma Helen Blair’s The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes and quoted in W. Vernon Kinietz’s Indians of the Western Great Lakes, 1615–1760. Kinietz states that although well-informed about tribal customs and highly influential among the people, Perrot let personal grievances cloud his writing and was unclear about which tribes or nations he was describing (Kinietz 335).

*11 This is according to the current Medicine Wheel teachings of the Mi’kmaq of the Miramichi Valley; others may differ widely.

*12 For additional information about eagles and hawks, including sites where you can view them, log on to www.hawkmountain.org and check out their “Raptorpedia” section.

*13 The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior includes a gray hawk as a smaller relative of the Buteo family. In any case, it is clear that we are not to see these birds literally as brothers, that is from the same mother. These raptors are “brothers” in a broader sense.

*14 This is commonly held information. My descriptions here are based on a dozen mainstream sources, not Native sources. Similar descriptions can be found in any encyclopedia.

*15 A Washo elder gave me this story in its traditional form to share in my book Native American Stories of the Sacred. Such stories are meant to instruct and entertain the youth, and not surprisingly, often include birds.

*16 The Cherokee perform a talking stick ceremony, so there the bird question is moot.

*17 Some names in this book have been changed in the interest of privacy.

*18 This is no exaggeration. When Helen was first pregnant, a neighbor said it was improper to live outdoors when you’re expecting, especially in Maine, where the winters are hard. So she got a hammer and built herself a house! This story is told in my Aunt Helen’s Little Herb Book.

*19 All Mohawk kastowah have three feathers. See illustration.

*20 This is a quite literal translation, based on my interview with Rainbow Weaver on December 14, 2012 in Highland, New York. I also recommend the booklet rendered beautifully in English by the late Jake Swamp, in which the ending is “. . . and now we will be of one mind.”

*21 We will explore this idea further in the section “Crow Councils: The Return of the Corvid Tribe”.

*22 Benson Lossing writes in his classic book The Hudson, “between two rocky bluffs was a sheltered bay (now filled with wharves) into the upper part of which leaped, in rapids and cascades, the Winnakee, called Fall Kill by the Dutch.” (Lossing, The Hudson, 187). Winnakee means “beautiful land” in the old Mohican, and was adopted by the Wappingers as a name for this river and falls. Cranes and herons still gather at the bottom to snare fish coming down the chute.

*23 Platt’s History of Poughkeepsie, published in 1799, shows that many of the earliest colonial homes were built along the east side of this stretch of road. This suggests that the drinking water available here was somehow preferable to that of the Winnakee (now Valkill) and this we can surmise would have been true for the Wappingers people as well. In my experience, the Wappingers today still seem to have a special fondness for the crow.

*24 This project is an independent 501(c)(3) multicultural agency working with the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska and Iowa as the designated Omaha Cultural Authority in perpetuity by formal resolution.

*25 The footnote on that page is very interesting as well. Eliade writes, “Among the Mohave and the Yuma power comes from the mythical beings who transmitted it to shamans at the beginning of the world. Transmission takes place in dreams and includes an initiatory scenario. In his dreams the Yuma shaman witnesses the beginnings of the world and lives in mythical times. (132: A.L. Kroeber, Handbook . . . C.D. Forde, Ethnography of the Yuma Indians, pp. 201 ff. Initiation into the shamanic secret society, the Mide’wiwin, also involves a return to the mythical times of the beginnings of the world, when the Great Spirit revealed the mysteries to the first ‘great doctors.’ We shall see that these initiatory rituals include the same communication between earth and heaven as was established at the creation of the world.”

*26 See part 6, summarizing the Balmori studies from Spain and other European studies.

*27 Conversation with Woody Vasquel, Elders’ Spiritual Gathering at William Commanda’s place, Maniwaki, Quebec, Canada, August 7, 2010. He also noted that in Hawaiian the “little people” are called menehune.

*28 However, see my story “Blue Jay Answers a Prayer”.

*29 See the DVD Good Enough for Two by Valerie Pouyanne.

*30 In an e-mail on December 13, 2012, Margery Coffey explained this term, which has a nasal n sound: “Wakoⁿda is often defined as ‘The Creator’ by Euro-American cultures who are God-focused. The Omaha see Wakoⁿda as the collection of all spirits. It is not limited to humans but encompasses all life forms of plant and animal including the spirits of water, rocks, soil—the part of the planet that Euro-Americans do not see as alive but the Omaha do. Wakoⁿda is not limited to this planet, it includes the spirits of the Universe. As such it contains all wisdom.”

*31 Bali and Australia were once united by the ancient Sunda Shelf, which is now three hundred feet under the ocean. That water rose a mere 9,000 years ago, whereas the birds have been singing those chromatic songs for 60 million years at least. Stephen Oppenheimer was able to trace the migration of the Sunda Shelf ’s human gene pool northward from Australia by linking it to its most unusual feature—immunity to malaria—and plotting the appearances of this remarkable quality out into the Pacific Ocean. Along this trail, we should expect to find musical and linguistic markers as well.

*32 A Native woman living in New York City said she heard a whippoorwill calling in Central Park in the spring of 2012.

*33 In fact, there is an author and historian, Chuck Wills, who writes about everyone from Lincoln to Jerry Garcia, but he is very much alive.

*34 Some of these descriptions are from personal encounters; some are based on live recordings included in Donald Kroodsma’s The Backyard Birdsong Guide.

*35 Brébeuf “spoke their language” and was so popular among the Huron that his charismatic presence helped to create a rift between “traditional” and “missionized” Huron. Bruce Trigger of the Smithsonian has commented that this split, along with smallpox, left them vulnerable to attack from the Haudenosaunee.

*36 The word manitou (or the plural, manitouak) is analogous to “a spirit.” When capitalized, Manitou can be considered short for Kitchi Manitou and refers to the Great Spirit.

*37 Preening is a cornerstone of bird self-maintenance. The bird ruffs its feathers, squeezes preening oil from the base of its tail, rubs the oil on its feathers with its bill, and then uses the bill to correctly align the substructures of the feather (something like the way a zipper works) to make sure they are interlocking. The oil keeps the feathers from drying out and also prevents mites, lice, and fungus from eating away at the feathers. There is a possibility that the radiation from cell towers dries up the preening oil in birds, based on the change in the feathers of exposed birds, but no studies have been done. Nothing in this section is meant to suggest that preening has only psychological or ritual uses. Kaplan is merely suggesting that there are additional dimensions to the everyday grooming process. (See Kaplan and Rogers, Songs, Roars, and Rituals, 19–20.)

*38 Lynn did not have her camera in hand, but wildlife photographer Jan Henriksen was able to document a similar group of egrets.

*39 Tobacco is classified as contraband for all U.S. prisoners, so the use of it is strictly controlled. Blessing Bird, Eddy Stevenson, Grandfather Turtle, William Commanda, Tom Porter, and a number of others mentioned in this book have volunteered their services again and again as pipe carriers for incarcerated Native Americans so that they can still practice the sacraments of their faith while serving time.

*40 According to several sources, the tufted titmouse’s original territory was as far north as New Jersey. Now it is found in Canada year-round.

*41 Anthropologists talk about shamans identifying power spots, but Forrest Carter in the book The Education of Little Tree writes about the importance of having a secret place (see Carter, p. 203) and talks of being made clean there by the presence of birds. Most of the seagull photos included in this book were taken near my grandfather’s secret place, by his great-granddaughter Becky, who was named after his mother-in-law.

*42 According to an article in City Parrots: Urban Parrot Conservation, dated December 12th, 2012, titled “Volutneers Work to Provide Temporary Nests for Edgewater Parakeets,” nearly half of the two hundred parakeets in Edgewater will need shelter as many of the trees they live in are being cut down for various reasons. I visited Veteran’s Memorial Park on December 16th, 2012, and the nests had all been removed. Volunteers are now creating makeshift shelters elsewhere. (http://cityparrots.org/journal/2012/12/12/volunteers-work-to-provide-temporary-nests-for-edgewater-mon.html.)

*43 Full name, Claude Charles le Roy Bacqueville de la Potherie, he wrote History of the Savage Peoples Who are Allies of New France, published in Paris in 1716, and quoted throughout Kinietz’s Indians of the Western Great Lakes, 1615–1760. La Potherie relied on the accounts of French explorers and missionaries such as Perrot.

*44 Mohawk speaker Kevin Deer, mentioned earlier, is from Kahnawake, a reserve on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, opposite Montreal. He spells the word kastowah, while John Fadden, a Mohawk speaker from Ahkwesashne, situated on the banks of the St. Lawrence at the junction of the St. Regis and Racquette rivers, spells the same word kastoweh. Some other communities spell it gustoweh.

*45 Fadden added in e-mails to me (April 9, 2012 and August 8, 2012) that although the kastoweh are traditional, they are not always ceremonial. They are also worn at festivals that are meant for entertainment, such as at Joe Bruchac’s summer festivals at Saratoga, or as a political symbol when meeting with officials from Albany or Washington, D.C.; they are worn to show that the wearers “know who they are, Haudenosaunee.” They are also worn by other Iroquois (who are not part of the Six Nations, or who follow a different form of government) as a cultural icon. As these hats can be worn only by Haudenosaunee, the wearing of them helps to identify those of this ethnicity from others, and helps to keep their culture and language intact by increasing ethnic pride and self-identification, so that they will always “know who they are!”

*46 Though carefully observant of details, Diliette was disrespectful toward indigenous spirituality as he encountered it, and wrote of it seldom. This is alluded to in this passage, which speaks of the nation’s “superstition.”

*47 This can be surmised, as the common folk from around the world eat pigeon eggs. An Asian man shared his pigeon egg lunch with me on a bus while crossing the Malaysian jungle northward to Thailand. As the chicken is not an indigenous bird, and raptor eggs were not eaten (at least not by Algonkin-ode), the eggs of pigeons were probably the best available kind in the Hudson Valley in 1609.

*48 Île de Fort George is on the northeastern shore of James Bay with a beachhead crossing over into Nunavut. Chisasibi is the nearest major Cree community.

*49 In addition to his book on Rachel Carson, Bruchac is coauthor of the bestseller Keepers of the Earth: Native American Stories and Environmental Activities for Children, with Michael Kaduto. He has a deep personal involvement in Native American traditions and lifeways, and as author of The Native American Sweat Lodge, he was a national spokesperson for Native American culture in the aftermath of the Sedona sweat lodge deaths of 2009.

 

†1 These rights were first recognized in The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, then further codified in the 1993 Religoius Freedom Restoration Act.

†2 See A Change of Heart to read about his life-changing encounter with a bird.

†3 The duck decoy, a staple of Americana and primitive art, is actually a Native American invention. In 1924, eleven canvasback duck decoys were found in Lovelock Cave, Nevada, estimated to be 2,160 years old. For more about duck decoys, see my article “American Art Before 1609: The Fine Art of Fooling a Duck” in the Fall 2009 Hudson River Museum and Gallery Guide (pages 26–39).