Beneath All of Us Is Native History

If you live in North America––or any of the Americas––you live on Native land full of Native history.

Native history is all around us and beneath us if we care to notice. I've been lucky to live in an area rich in Native culture, while writing my debut novel, BLOOD TO RUBIES, about Chief Joseph and the cataclysmic clash of white and Native cultures. It's been a tremendous inspiration for me to be surrounded by Native American footprints, relics of pioneer life and the wonderful natural world.

I live on the shores of Lake Michigan out in the country in Wisconsin. I also live on what was once a main thoroughfare of tribes traveling and trading up and down the Great Lakes along Lake Michigan, as far north as what it today Michigan and Canada and as far south as Chicago and St Louis and beyond. In fact, major roads in many cities were once main trails of the Native tribes who lived there originally. The ancient paths of Native tribes live on in our modern highway systems.

This life-size bronze statue (above) of the French explorers Marquette and Jolliet is perched majesticallyt on a high cliff overlooking the shoreline of Lake Michigan less than a half mile from my home! In 1673––350 years ago––the two explorers canoed up the shores of Lake Michican exploring the land. I love to imagine that the Native people who lived on the land I now live on watched them from the shoreline!

I'm also lucky that I live in an area that is full of Native and pioneer history. Within a quarter of a mile of my home are three pioneer log cabins that date back to 1840 and the remnants of stone fences that were built when those homesteaders cleared their land for farming. The land is also lined with stone fences and remnants of stone fences, now buried by undergrowth, leaves and soil.

I have found several fascinating Indian artifacts in our backwoods: arrowheads, a grinding stone embedded in the earth and what we believe to be stone scrapers. (See picture below,) The grinding stone, which looks to be granite, has a deep channel worn down the middle with obivious scraping marks in the stone. I wonder how long it took to wear down that granite with stone scrapers? I would think generations. Can any archeologists or Native artifact experts comment on this picture? Do the two rocks below the grinding stone look like Indigenous scrapers?

This is a Native grinding stone that is still embedded in our back woods in Wisconsin. In the middle of the stone, slightly smaller than the size of basketball, is a trough that was worn down by grinding perhaps corn, nuts, berries and other foodstuffs with stone scrapers. We found what appear to be stone scrapers on our land, but not near the grinding stone. When I discovered this amazing artifact from perhaps centuries or thousands of years ago, I had chills down my spine.

Our two acres of land includes a woods that we believe was once part of much larger oak savannah. Only a few of the giants oaks remain, two of them on our land.

The standing oak shown below, top, has a trunk about three feet wide. Another nearby old-growth oak fell on our property, I felt the ground shake in our home, when it fell. It was about the same size as our still-standing oak . The grinding stone embedded in the ground is about six feet from the standing oak tree, below.

I like to believe that there was a Native village or a family who lived on this land. I've found no evidence of Indian burial mounds in the area, although Wisconsin has many. Pioneer farmers and developers in more recent times often plowed over or dug up Indian mounds to clear the land and robbed bones and funerary artifacts as souvenirs. That is a brutal and tragic fact. I often wonder where their graves were?

Do you have any stories about the land you live on? Please share them here! These discoveries always remind me that we are only passing through, only stewards of the land.

You can read a synopsis and great reviews of my bestselling and award-winning debut novel, BLOOD TO RUBIES, at this Amazon link:

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Rubies-Deborah-Hufford/dp/B0CBVZ2WTX/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

"Beneath Us Is Native History" was first posted on Notes from the Frontier and Facebook on August 17, 2024.

You may be interested in these related posts from Notes from the Frontier :

• "My Childhood Haunts: Indian Mounds"

https://www.notesfromthefrontier.com/post/my-childhood-haunts-iowa-indian-mounds

• "States with Indian Names"

https://www.notesfromthefrontier.com/post/states-with-indian-names

• "America's Earliest Cities Were Native"

https://www.notesfromthefrontier.com/post/america-s-earliest-cities-were-native-american-spanish 

• "Today's Largest Indian Tribes"

https://www.notesfromthefrontier.com/post/today-s-largest-indian-tribes 

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