The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 281: Sacred Seeds

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Taylor Keen, Clay Newcomb, Phil Taylor, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis. Topics discussed: Denisovan DNA and scooped teeth; Clay on The Joe Rogan Experience; Montana Farm and Ranch Hunter Access Appreciation Sweepstakes; the effect of drought and heat on wildlife in the west; a 2nd Amendment tax in San Jose; the death of Bruno the Bear; how Steve slept in a cave in WY that was slept in by a crazy cowboy who ate people; Clovis Hunters; when smallpox wipes out up to 95% of the population; Cahokia; the race of hairy giants and Bigfoot as important to Indigenous lore; Omaha--the people who move against the current; Steve having less than average Neanderthal DNA and being sour about it; the Ghost Dance prophet; a major bust of blackmarket collecting and trading of Native American objects; Sacred Seeds; and more.Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Go farther, stay longer. Okay, everybody, joined today by very special guest, Taylor Keene. Omaha, Cherokee, correct? That's correct. And part Denisovin, which we'll get into. I am. I am. Part early hominid, as all of us are.

But you never hear Denisovin. It's different, right? Yeah, because I, you know. You alwaysizovan. It's different, right? Yeah. Like, cause I, you know, you always talk about folk like me wind up folk like me wind up throwing a little bit of Neanderthal.

I've got both Western Europeans. Oh, you got a little of that too. I do. Okay. We'll get to that. I bet a lot of people don't even know what it is. I'm not really clear what a Denizovan is other than I know it's another

hominid. Like I did a fair bit of research last night night because I really didn't know what it was. And I'm not saying I'm the expert now, but I had the same question. Just like if you were a deer today, if you were a deer today wandering around, like let's say you're a whitetail deer and you're wandering around and you're like, oh, there's another kind of deer. It's a mule deer. Hey, there's another kind of deer.

It's a black-tailed deer. Once upon a time you could have been a hominid walking around you know i've been oh hey it's another kind of hominid we'll get to that um clay you were on rogan's podcast was that fun yeah it was for sure really unique experience i listened to a little bit of it i didn't quit because i got bored mind you oh wow it's just i just haven't gotten through it yet. I didn't quit because I got bored, mind you. Oh, wow. I just haven't gotten through it yet. Oh, you didn't quit. I thought you said you did quit because you got bored. I was like, well, okay.

If that was true and it's not, I wouldn't have told you that. Give me a break. I would have said something like... Good job, Clay. Yeah, I said, great job, Clay. No, i thought it was good did you enjoy hanging out with him oh yeah and and i didn't get to spend a lot of time

with joe aside from just in the podcast but unique experience going down there i mean you know just being on his podcast was probably the it was it was less it was less intimidating than I thought it would be. And I won't lie. I was slightly intimidated. And just in a normal kind of way. But once you got in there, Joe's a great guy to talk to, great interviewer. He's very generous and gracious. I did not know what he knew about me, so i didn't know what we were going to be talking

about you know the the the conversation flowed along a pretty standard like clay newcomb talking point you know deal other than if there were a few there were a few curveballs which were fun but nah yeah but joe's like uh he's very i feel like he's as an interviewer he's very, I feel like he's, as an interviewer, he's very sensitive to things. It's almost like he picks up things floating through the air. Like, I feel like I could show him your thumbprint and he'd tell you a bunch about the person. Do you know what I'm saying? I feel like he could listen to episodes of Bear Grylls podcast, listen to like two episodes of Bear Grylls podcast, and kind of really like understand what

to talk about what to ask like it's very sensitive that way i can't tell what's there's a good there's good news and bad news i want to talk about drought and heat but i also want to talk about the trcp land access appreciation thing here's the deal uh this is gonna sound montana centric but understand me that it's not Montana-centric. In the state of Montana, there's a program called the Block Management Access Program, and how it works is this. They take revenue drawn from people buying hunting licenses, okay, and they take this revenue and they enlist private landowners, ranchers, farmers, other private landowners.

They enlist private landowners into the block management program. Once private land is in the block management program, you hunt it for free. So non-resident, resident, I mean, we're talking about everything from elk to turkeys live on these places. And you come and hunt block management. And I think a lot, like a lot of things that are cool, such as national forests and other stuff, a lot of people kind of think that it must have like one day fallen from outer

space and there it is. And they don't realize the sort of like effort that goes into it. The landowners do get paid to enroll in block management, but trust me, it is not enough to offset the inconvenience and hassle and risk. It's just like no one is going into block management licking their lips about how rich they're going to get. It just doesn't work that way. It's an act of generosity to put your land in block management.

We got this idea from my brother who was involved in another incarnation. What do you say? Carnation? That's like a kind of condensed milk. What do you say? It's incarnation. Because it's not a reincarnation. Which we got to talk about. Because that

thing about weasels being doomed. So, we'll hit that some other day stay tuned for that that's a titillate phil i'm gonna make phil get my interest meter out when i talk about that much as phil hates that interest meter um what was i saying oh so we're doing a thing called the trcp montana farm and ranch hunter Sweepstakes. A finely crafted title, mind you. Again, Montana. I think I came up with that.

This is what happens when three people try to come up with a title together. It's called the Montana Farm and Ranch Hunter Access Appreciation Sweepstakes. We have gone. What are you smirking about over there, Phil? Just a mouthful of a name. That's all. It's a great name. I like it because it lays it all out.

You don't need a subtitle with a name like that, right? It's a sweepstakes donation. So we got all kinds of crazy things you could win. Tons of things. And you buy tickets, and then what we're going to do is we're going to take all the money that we get from this, every last penny. We're doing this in conjunction with TRCP, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. In conjunction with TRCP, you buy these tickets, and you win a bunch of stuff,

and then we're going to take all the money and buy things to thank people who enroll their land in block management. We're not talking about sending them like coffee mugs and whatnot, like buying them farm and ranch equipment, gate mechanisms for, you know, like automatic gates, calf shelters, stuff people need, help them get stuff they actually need. That's going on right now. Up till when corinne enter by august 1st 2021 at midnight eastern standard five dollars gets you one entry

between 10 and 24 entries you can get for four bucks if you buy more than 25 entries you get them for three bucks a piece you can only do 500 entries per person dude this list like when i try to chainsaws meat grinders oh wow meat crafter knives full first light kit bino harness kit javelin pro hunt bipod when i try to load all the things like smoke comes out of my computer that That's how many things are available. We got to tell them the link. Where'd it go? That's a good idea.

Karen. Tell them. Uh, it's support. Dot. T R C P. Dot. Org.

Forward slash B M a. Yeah. So if you hunt Montana and use BLM, and if you live here, I guarantee almost guarantee you do, or you visit and use block management, jump in and start one of these in your own state to reward and thank people who opened their lands up.

Okay, now onto the bad stuff. Holy cow. The heat wave and extreme drought is so bad, they're air dropping air dropping water to keep bighorn sheep alive. In Nevada.

Yeah. Nevada Department of Wildlife replenishing desert bighorn sheep's only source of water for miles. Without intervention animal populations

will decline. Ecosystem viability is threatened. Nevada is experiencing intense drought for the second year in a row. Last year, I didn't know this, Las Vegas went 240 days without measurable rainfall. Wow. This year, 40% of the state is in what's called exceptional drought, which is the highest level of drought, according to National Weather Service.

Elk, tule elk in California, there's a population of tule elk in California that are dying from lack of water, dying of dehydration. They had a historic water source that they would use at this Point Rees National Seashore. How does that pronounce? Rees? Rees? What is that? I think it's Re at this Point Rees National Seashore. How does that pronounce? Rees? Rees? What is that? I think it's Rees.

Point Rees. There's been an ongoing issue where the elk are using water and feed that was meant for cattle, so they put a fence up, but only some of these elk can get at this fence. 152 elk, about a third of the population died of dehydration. Because they don't have any water source on their, on their ground. They can't get around the fence. Not to the fence, but around the fence. Oh, sorry.

To get to the, you know, food and water. This is a tricky one, I feel like. Yeah. Get into it. Well, one, you have like a cattle lease which is you know the reason the fence went up because the elk are competing with these cattle and so you got to start to think about whether you know what's more important you know these animals that we all own or someone's private cattle you know and again we don't know the nuances well they i know they have a great

they have a grazing lease right they have a great, they have a grazing lease. Right. They have a grazing lease, but most places, I mean, here where you have grazing leases on public land, you don't fence out wildlife. Yeah. Um, so that's interesting. So it was for sure public land. It's national park service land. Hmm. They're being sued.

Hmm. land. They're being sued. So the historic, the historic water on their side of the fence usually would have been enough, but it wasn't this year. Yeah. One of the, you know, I gather it's like this like highly fenced area. And I also gather that it's like a pretty managed herd, but yeah, they're not able to get to water

listen man i've tried this a lot i've tried sitting around telling myself about all you know the insane heat everywhere i've tried sitting around being like there's no such thing as climate change no such thing as climate change it's just hot but son of a bitch man after a while you can hide you can hide it's it's it's like getting hot it's gonna be bad for wildlife it's just yeah you can say that i don't think you can sit around saying it's not you can say like i don't care you can argue about what's causing it you can argue about the cause but it's not if you like to hunt and fish change is coming yeah yeah song dude another interesting thing this is this is a crazy one kevin murphy sent this to me this morning

so san jose san jose california passed a gun like a really weird gun control measure that it's very puzzling to me basically that if you own guns you pay a tax and the tax is supposed to offset what it costs the city to address gun-related phone call, gun-related crime. So you can imagine someone who's got like a pistol they bought on the corner tucked under the back shed, and they're planning on doing armed robbery, and they're like, ah, I forgot to send in my tax money. I mean, come on.

And they're supposed to get liability insurance Yeah buy liability insurance I think if you want to find a parallel San Jose California As I struggle for a parallel I thought of this It'd be like If you One could make the argument

First amendment rights cost Taxpayers money Let's say there's a, there's, there's, there's a protest. There's a protest of, um, there's a massive protest to protest. Uh,

what? It can be something people, let's say there's a massive protest to protest the outcome of the presidential election. And there's a massive counter protest to protest people protesting the outcome of the presidential election. So you have all these people with mixed ideologies exercising First Amendment rights. There's a police presence. There's cost to business because business is closed. There's cost to police because police come out.

They monitor it. There's community meetings that are set aside to plan safe protest spaces to cordon people off. It's very expensive. So someone could say, if you want to exercise First Amendment rights, you need to pay a tax because it costs us money to have First Amendment rights. And someone would say, but the peaceful people aren't committing crimes and burning down buildings why should they be paid tax pay a tax to which i would say wonderful point yeah it's absurd it is absurd yeah it seems like just punishment, a punishment of legal gun owners. It's just grasping.

It's so. Well, Kevin Murphy made the point that it's like a path towards only that the rich and privileged have weapons. Those that can afford. Just like moonshine in the Appalachians. Wait till the next podcast. Clay, can you give us an update on Bruno the bear? First, tell us about what you told us before about Bruno the bear. So Bruno the bear, I did a report on him on this podcast.

He came from Wisconsin and traveled all the way down to Arkansas, and he gained national attention going through crop fields. Did you see that, Taylor? I did not. He gained national attention, like this black bear walking through cornfields and stuff. And he was extremely unalarmed by people. So people would be, masses of people would be following him. And he just kind of of mind his own business. And he never got into any significant

nuisance trouble in like a thousand mile journey or however long it was. Tell him the theory, tell him the theory about how he, why he did what he had to do. So there was, there's lots of theories about why this bear made this journey. And, you know, the biologists chimed in and were like, you know, bears only travel that far if they're looking for new home ranges, new mates or food. There was theories that – so he was heading from the north to Arkansas. We have a bear population in Arkansas. And he walked across all this country that did not have resident bear populations. So there was a theory that he climbed on a boat on the Mississippi River, a grain barge, and was transported.

Dude, one climbed into my garbage can last night. I'll believe that he climbed into a grain boat. Yeah, there was a theory that he climbed into a grain barge and traveled up north and got off the barge, which is bizarre. You know, probably didn't happen. Oh, and then he was just coming home. He was coming home. I love that theory, man.

Because he followed the river corridor. Yeah, homing instinct is really strong. When they trap bears, bears very rarely don't come back to where they came from. That sounds like a good plot for a kid's movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we'll make it a pet dog that gets lost on vacation. It's already been done. So this bear, he wintered in northern Arkansas,

as I understand it. This is where you left off last time, right? Yeah, he wintered in northern Arkansas, as I understand it. This is where you left off last time, right? Yeah, he was just in northern Arkansas. And my mom was texting me saying, Clay, please don't kill Bruno because I'm an Arkansas bear hunter. Yeah, because people were very worried about Bruno showing up in Arkansas because he could have gone into a hunt area. Yeah, that's right. And, and so now this, I don't have all the details on, but he was basically trapped as understand it in Arkansas, potentially in Missouri. He may have gone back over the line into Missouri. He was trapped by gaming fish and relocated to Northern Louisiana because basically the bears out of Arkansas are spreading in all directions,

southern Missouri, northern Louisiana, east Texas, eastern Oklahoma. And for whatever reason, they chose to release him in Louisiana. Sad story, boys. He got hit by a car in Louisiana on Tuesday, and they had to euthanize him. No. Yep. So Bruno is dead. I'm sorry.

The things he's seen, man. Yeah, no doubt. There was a theory that he was a tame bear because of how unusual he was with his, how he interacted with people. You mean tame like not like habituated, but tame like a circus bear? Yeah, like somewhat like it was a bear

that had been like released or something. But I don't buy that either. Just zero fear of humans. Yeah. A tame bear probably wouldn't have survived. No, and a tame bear would have gone and tried to get in somebody's refrigerator in their house. What was so amazing, he traveled that far and never got in trouble. And so they were trying to do him a favor by taking him to Louisiana.

So long live the beast. I think it is not common for bears to go north and south in their migrations, right? Just not that far. Just not that far. I mean, they might travel. You know, there's documentation in Missouri and Arkansas of bears traveling like 150 miles, but 1,000 miles is just not heard of. Maybe he was an evolved bear.

He was kind of an emissary or an ambassador. Yeah. Forrest Gump of the bears, perhaps. Yeah. Yeah, he was a scout. He might have been a scout. Yeah. He was something special.

He's like, if I don't come back, don't go south. Yeah. Yanni, tell about that mountain lion you were telling me about. Oh, that last week I was with our buddy Bart George, and we were filming his mountain lion hazing study that he's doing over in

north of Spokane, Washington. Which you ought to explain real quick. Oh, yeah. I remember we talked about that. You know what? After being there and hanging out with his whole crew for a week, a couple times now, I feel like we should go and do a podcast with the whole crew and chit chat with them because he's got bruce duncan as you know is you know a real wonder of this world i found out the other day bart thinks that he is the man living that has treated the most cats in this country right now. Hmm.

At roughly 1500 cats. Treat. Cause all that research and government work. And just, yeah. And all the outfitting is done and the fact that he's been doing it for over 50 years. Um,

yeah, pretty interesting. I've got two names. I'm not going to say their names. We'll talk later. But he, uh, showdown.

Does he win the cat lady trophy? He should make, should make it. I don't know about that. Uh, and then Jeff Blood, who's the wildlife specialist for the counties up there. Very interesting guy. Been trapping and doing stuff his whole life. But is Bart still with? Yeah, the Kalispell tribe.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. And so the Kalispell tribe is doing, uh, they're the ones that are, uh, funding the study, doing the study, but he's working um in cahoots with uh washington department of game and fish and then like i said the uh stevens and uh came in the name of the other county now but the sheriff's office um a lot of people are kind of chipping in to help on the study but what he's trying to do is because they're having just a they've got a real uptick in depredations and human mountain lion conflict and interactions and so he came up with a study to see if hazing

might help just kind of keep the mountain lions like away from humans a little bit and so how he's doing it is they catch a lion they put a collar on it they come back a week later they know exactly where the lion is they walk towards the lion with a speaker on Bart's chest, just hanging off his backpack, that's playing the Meat Eater podcast. So he still plays the podcast to the lions. That's good. No, I got to while I was there. The problem is the lions are going to hang out because they're so interested. You got to give those lions an interest meter.

Phil, on top, on the collar, put an interest meter dial on that. Well, I'll tell you what, while Sam was explaining the lobster debate that was recently on, we got to within, I think, 11 yards of a mountain lion. They were titillated. Oh, wow. Yeah. I mean, that's a- At 11 yards, could you see it yet?

No, because she's in three or four furs that were all bushy around the bottom. The furs weren't bushy. Did you know she was that close? Yeah, because we're looking at the GPS. So you're like 33 feet away, there's a lion. Did you see her bust out of there? No. What?

Not any of the three lions that we did that to, that we walked up to. The other one was like 50, and then one ran at like 70 yards, and not one did we see. They just slipped out out and you never heard you're kidding me it's trippy so how many of you walked by and this one the closest one 11 yards and it left yeah and then that one literally has been living in this area that if you walk down the hill five minutes you're on like a it's rural highway, but right on the other side of that road is basically like this little community on like a, it's like a lake community. Okay. With all these little houses and condos and stuff.

And there's a trail system where this cat's been hanging out. So that cat sits there in the trees and listens to dogs and humans and stuff going by her and cars all the time. And like totally just, you know, that's her home. Yeah. Wow. It was wild. So anyways, so what he's trying to see is if hazing works. So when he comes back, now he's got this, the cat on a GPS collar.

So he walks towards it playing the podcast at 80 decibels, which is quite loud, mind you. I mean, it's like my voice projected, like if I'm excited, is probably equal to roughly 80 decibels, which is quite loud, mind you. I mean, it's like my voice projected, like if I'm excited, is probably equal to roughly 80 decibels. Doesn't it feel like distinctly sort of postmodern that they will in the future be listening to you talking about them listening to this show?

It's like staring into a mirror and there's a mirror behind you. This is getting deep, deep um yeah he's totally lost i'm just trying to stay on track with how so that everybody can understand how this question that won't throw us off yeah this particular cat had he been in trouble before she had not been okay so we're hazing a cat that's not been in trouble though okay no because you in in these parts or those parts where i was if they've been in actual trouble like if there's been a depredation they're dead gotcha yeah can i let me interject with the thing that bruce told

me the bruce you're talking about after that when when you know, Washington had two summers ago, had the first fatality from a mountain lion, first human fatality from a mountain lion in state history. And then shortly after, like a month or two later, Oregon had its first human fatality from a mountain lion in 98 years. I mean, it just doesn't happen. Right. But then it's, it happens twice in one summer in two states, you know, and then you're like, wow, what's going on? So you want to draw conclusions from this, but maybe there's none to be drawn. And when I put it to Bruce, I was like,

what do you think about that? On one hand, he's like, it's freak, right? We'll go another hundred years and no one will get killed by mountain lion. But if there is something there, what he put out is this, in his whole career of doing work on lion control for the state, in the early days of his career, if someone saw a lion, you came out and killed it. People didn't want them around.

And it'd be like, you see one on your porch, it's a dead lion. It doesn't matter if it did anything wrong killed a dog it's just dead and he said as tolerance has increased and now you know you don't just like kill every single lion that crosses the street in front of a car um he says it's probably going to be that there's just going to be more interactions because our tolerance has shifted and we don't just dust off every single thing we can dust off because someone's scared and there's a lot more lions there's a lot more people there's a lot more people going into wild places so yeah and those wild places are becoming less wild because of you know us moving into them and living in them hey i'll tell you a podcast guest, and I can't say his name, but I know the guy

that tracked down that mountain lion and killed him. I'm being serious. Dead serious. The track down what mountain lion and killed him? The lion. And I don't know if it was

the fatality in Washington or Oregon. Well, if it's Washington, we're talking about, we know the same person. Well, I think this was the Oregon lion. And I know the guy that went to that scene, tracked that lion down. I mean, went to the site where the person was killed. He said it was a wild story.

Was that the two mountain bikers? No, that was Washington. This was a lady. This was a woman well yes yes anyway yeah you want to do one-upsmanship on podcast no no no no no bring it on keep going on no no no hurry up yeah we gotta hurry up because i think we have a great one sitting right here across from us exactly we're running out of time here. So they walk towards him playing this podcast and Bart's watching the GPS

and once the cat leaves its bed or wherever it's sitting or sleeping at the moment, he marks that distance from him to the cat. Then he watches the cat on the GPS and see how far it goes, how far it flees, which he's

taking other like environmental data points as well. And basically he's trying to figure out how much energy is the cat willing to expend once it's been bumped? And then consequently, after it's been hazed multiple times, is it willing to expend more energy because it doesn't want to go through the hazing again? So once he picks up those two data points, they cut the dogs loose, which usually come from however far he had to walk to get to the lion. They track him to where the fresh mountain lion track is. Then they run the lion. It's usually over pretty quickly. They jump the lion into a tree.

The hazing, the first hazing actually is via paintball. So they'll sit there and pop, pop, pop, pop, pop as many times as the cat will take it. The dogs are gone at this point. And as soon as the cat climbs and jumps out of the tree and runs, that's it. That's the hazing. Then they repeat that minus the paintballs three more times and see, you know, they're

again, collecting those data points of how close did they get and how far did the cat run before it stopped and chilled out, you know, after it heard the meter podcast at 80 decibels. In order to determine if there is a problem line, is it possible to get it to change its behavior without euthanizing it? Yeah, and again, it's probably never going to happen with problem lions. It'll probably just happen with lions that, like you were saying, cross the street in a place where there's a bunch of little kids living around,

or there's a lion that's been seen a couple of times near a Boy Scout camp, or whatever. Gotcha. But like I said, as soon as they cause a... To help them not become problem lions. Yeah, right now, they're north of Spokane. There's I said, as soon as they cause a... To help them not become problem lines. Yeah, right now, they're north of Spokane. There's a very, very low tolerance

for cats and public perception is down. It's negative right now with cats, unfortunately, and they aren't happy. A lot of them aren't happy with the way that the Washington Department of Fish and Game

has been handling it. And so they're, you know, that's why Jeff blood, like it gets a little, it gets complicated. Yeah. It's, it's socially, you know, complicated, but, uh, so yeah, it'll just happen with cats that are like in areas amongst people they're seen and hopefully they can haze them a little bit

and keep them alive okay but talk about the super lion oh right so one that it has been tried in the past of relocating lions that were problem lions and again there's so little research done on lions and known about lions that people just we just don't know enough yet right so a lot of times they thought oh oh, it's like one lion causing the problem, you know, but they shoot the lion. And then, you know, three, two weeks later, you know, in the same zone, another sheep gets killed. Right. So it wasn't the same line. Anyways, they, they tried relocating some in one, I forget the exact number, but it was

up there. It was like 7,500500 miles they moved it and it took the cat literally like two days and it was back at the same farm and killed another sheep and it had been ear tagged or marked somehow so they knew that it was the same cat but what was interesting is that it's from that journey its pads were just worn off like there was almost no pad left on his paw man they know they know how to get home spot man wow yeah i don't know if i could pull that off if you blindfolded me and dropped me i'd like to know from a biologist the mechanism that works inside of an animal to have that homing instinct because it's got it's picking up data from somewhere i mean it's not i mean they're picking up they have some there's something happening i'd like to know the mechanics

yeah we had pet pigeons one time and and they the neighbor people were complaining about them in everybody's house and whatnot and my brother had to go to a work meeting he went quite a ways away i can't remember what it was but almost 100 away. He had to go to an overnight work meeting. So he took the pigeons up there and cut them loose. When he got home, they were already home. They beat him home. But they're famous for that. A new paper published in the journal Nature details the release of new DNA evidence extracted from sediment in Denisova cave.

Oh, that's what the Denisova name comes from. Right. Or is it vice versa? Or, or vice versa. Oh, okay. It's a cave in Siberia. Oh, it is. But did, did, did the cave get named that

because of what's there? Or did the, did the, did the. Humans. Humans get named. Help me out. Humans are named after the place. Okay. Because we don't really know what they were called.

Okay, so it wasn't that we named it somewhere else. There was a modern man that lived in the cave that somehow had a name that started with a D, as I understood it. So they called it that kind of cave. This is my understanding of it. And then they went in and found the stuff, and they called the people that name of the cave. Is that what you remember, Taylor? Yes.

Yep. Yeah. I slept in a cave. No, I slept in a cave in Wyoming that had been slept in by a— Welcome to the end of your podcast, Taylor. I slept in a cave in Wyoming that had been slept in by some cowboy that went crazy and ate some people. And they named it after him. I slept in that cave.

You haven't eaten anybody yet. No, but... You're still young. Okay, let me back up. New DNA evidence extracted from sediment in Denisova Cave in Russian Siberia. Previous analysis of ancient DNA extracted from fossils found in Denisova Cave have revealed that it was inhabited by Neanderthals, which sometimes, I think they're back to Thal, but for a while it was Tal, Neanderthal. Neanderthals, Thals,

Denisovans, and a hybrid of the two. But few fossilized remains have been found in the cave, so it's unclear when different groups visited and in what order. But what's the time period, Steve? It's a long time ago. Now this study provides a timeline of occupation with over 700 sediment samples dated from 300,000 to 20,000 years ago. So the cave could have sat there for quite a long time between visits.

How many it's 300,000 years ago. That's interesting, right? Yeah. I think part of the reasons that I have Denisovan DNA, because we don't know the story of how indigenous peoples came to the Americas truly, do we? There's theories about the Bering Strait theory. But when you find DNA going that far back. In Siberia. In Siberia, means that we're different in some sense.

But we don't really know when indigenous peoples came here. But to have that antiquity of DNA that flows into me today is fascinating. Yeah, it's that close. Right. Tell me what you mean by that. I mean, like, are you saying that there was another, you're saying they didn't, there's other theories of, well, I know there's other theories other than the Bering Land Bridge,

you know, water access through the Northwest. God forbid that indigenous peoples got on boats at some point, figured that out. Yeah. But we can get into anthropology and John Wesley Powell and the Powell Doctrine later on, but it just begs the whole question of how indigenous peoples got here. Yeah.

Do you, that's a good question, or not a good question, but it's an interesting point. Do you, do you contest or do you like, if you look at sort of the academic consensus, okay. The academic consensus being like some point in time, probably less than 30,000 years ago, sometime around 30 to 20,000 years ago, the first Americans entered, you know the new world okay entered what's now north america and south america via some sort of land bridge that connected alaska with siberia like when you hear it like do you do you look is your viewpoint i don't know is your viewpoint

that sounds right that that sounds wrong? It sounds right, but I think there's more to the story. Because now we found all sorts of anthropological evidence that indigenous peoples were here 32, 35,000 years ago and beyond. So that goes beyond the Younger Dryas event and makes you question how indigenous peoples got here so so long ago oh yeah where where is that where is that because i'm familiar with cooper's ferry which would have put things back to like 17 000 years ago but 30 000 years ago where where is that 32 000 plus down in the tip of the tierra del fuego i'll have to look at my nose to see exactly who was the researchers doing that but the main fact that points to me is the actual multiplicity

of tribal languages in the americas as a function of mathematical time ten thousand years was not enough to have the diversity of languages oh yeah, yeah, that's an interesting point, man. Explain that a little bit or just go into that a little bit. Well, just the variation. There's six or seven main tribal language families in the Americas, but to have them diversify into such distinct dialects and different language families would take a lot more than 10,000 years to do it. If you're assuming that the foundation group, if you have this assumption that the foundation group

was some single wave of individuals who were- That's not enough. Yeah, I got you. But if there's multiple waves of it. But the question for me is, why is it so inherent that we can only look at the Bering Strait and Landbridge theory? Oh man, I feel like people looked at a lot of theories. You ever hear of the Sleutrian

theory? Sure. Which was dismissed on, I think like dismissed on, well, let me just real quick. If you, if I get it wrong, but there was this idea that if you looked at Paleolithic, when we use the word Paleolithic, we're just talking about Europe. When you look at like paleolithic stone technology right 30 000 years ago 40 000 years ago was remarkably similar to stone technology of indigenous americans from 14 000 years ago so someone rather than being that different groups of people came up kind of with the same idea independently there was this idea that aha they had to have been influenced by Western Europeans.

Or vice versa, Steve. Or vice versa. Oh. And we don't know that. Yeah. But that begs an interesting question of, was there some type of knowledge that was inherent to both, and then it came from somewhere else? Yeah. that was inherent to both and then it came from somewhere else yeah certainly there was a lot of europeans here earlier on than columbus but again that becomes one of those questions why

is the columbus discovery doctrine such a big part of western american thought do you have a theory on why it is i've often wondered that like why is it john wesley powell first head of good marketing yeah but yeah because like columbus never hit he was never even he never hit that he never hit what became the u.s like he landed in the west indies right how did it become to be that school children feel that Columbus – It's a great marketing job. But what were they marketing? How Europeans discovered America and civilized it versus looking at the actual history of how many people were here in America and what they were doing prior to that.

Yeah, we got a lot of balls in the air right now, but let's do this. Let's talk about this one. We got into the question of how indigenous Americans arrived and when they arrived, the question mark. But let's talk for a second. If you could explain how many people were here. Ah, I was hoping we were going to get to that. Yeah.

I mean, we're like out of, you know, we're out of, I don't know, we're not out of order, whatever. How many people were here? A lot of different estimates. A bunch of different camps from anthropology historically have gone over, but it's been a matter of political debate, though. To me, the question is why. There seems to be an influence in anthropology, especially in amateur anthropology, to diminish the number of people that were here. And that gets to –

To make the crime not as severe? Right. Yeah. Right. So what's being ignored entirely, regardless of how many, estimates have gone up to over a hundred million with the bulk of those being in Mesoamerica. So the heartland of the food explosion in the Americas, whether it's Peru or a Central America. That's a high extreme number though, right? That is a high extreme number. But that was, for the most part, that number is in Mesoamerica. Okay. The numbers in North America at the most liberal were around 16 million. 16 million people.

Now, this would have been at the peak pre-European arrival. Pre-disease, right? Pre-disease is the big point. So that's one of the things that most people don't understand when understanding the history of America is looking at what actually happened here before. So we have accounts from the Spanish conquistadors of these advanced societies and vast numbers of people.

And then when they got their butts kicked and then came back upset, then nobody was there. So one of the things that anthropology has been able to uncover now, National Geographic's doing a lot with this, but use of technology, of LIDAR, et cetera, to find all these ancient villages, whether they're in Central America or in South America. But it was smallpox for the most part. You can throw in some plague, whatever else you want. There's been traces of it found. But whether it was Canada, now the United States, Central America, South America, no one was immune to the impact of smallpox. And for the most part, those extremes go between 85% and 95% decimation rates. 95% of the population died.

And so when we're talking about an impact on these societies, if, you know, which 5% is left? Were they the most wise? Probably not. Were they the oldest story keepers? Probably not. But what was left out of the 5% leaves us with a cultural amnesia. Oh, like coming out of a pandemic, it sort of gives you, and we're upset about what actual percentage of people died from the pandemic and we're terrified. It's way sub one. Sub one?

Imagine the world of 95% of everyone you knew and cared and loved about was gone. But that's what I think that I'm not trying to draw a parallel. Please don't think I was trying to draw a parallel between smallpox epidemic and COVID-19. But I was saying for a year we were invited to imagine, right? We learned the sort of lexicon of pandemics. A new generation learned to think and talk about contagion and pandemics. Point being, if you imagine that 95% of Americans were carried off by COVID-19. Some amount of time

elapsed, and then someone showed up and wanted to sort of categorize and describe us culturally, you would probably want to say, oh, no, no, hold on, there's a big misunderstanding. We

all just died, you see see and we're in you know we're in a period of tremendous turmoil right now you know it would be similar to because i think that do you i don't know if you have feelings about the book 1491 have you read 1491 i have he talks in there i like charles man's work a lot. He compares in their accounts of people traveling down the Mississippi, say, post smallpox. They can't find anybody. Right.

But they'd encounter like city or towns and cities and they're like, oh, everybody left, was their idea. Well, I mean. They packed up and went somewhere. It was the best they could come up with. Right. Or unfortunately that those vast cities or trading networks were not made by them.

So that's, you have early anthropology trying to understand what happened when they found all these, this evidence of these mound builder or the Mississippian societies. And the first bit of evidence they did was go to the local tribes and say, hey, what do you know about these? And they're, we don't know. But when you put in to the equation that 95% of the people died, then you're going to have culture amnesia of nearly everything. Perhaps safe stories, cosmology, the remnants of agricultural life ways. If this all would have started happening in the 1500s, pretty much when- Pretty much is what the record says. ... Europeans started coming here and bringing smallpox.

What you're alluding to is that, so that's when the 95% decimation would have started. But then like Cahokia. Yes. You're saying that even at that time, there were remnants of ancient civilizations. Yes. That the natives that were alive knew nothing about. So there was some other, potentially some other catastrophic event that happened pre-European arrival? Is that what we're saying?

Could be or could just be a major change in an urban experiment. So you see the rise of the Mississippian culture somewhere around 900 A.D. and then around 1050, 1054 was the big year. It was a big supernova in the sky. If we were to see a star that hung there 10 times brighter than Venus for two or three months and then hung out for another couple of years, stars in the sky seem to be a very important thing to human beings, influences, religion, et cetera. And so you have at some of these places, first and foremost was Cahokia. Of course, we don't know what the name was, but that was a local name that they found from it,

but began the rise of an urban population and a massive trading network, which goes back to the question of where did they get that model from? Was that an impact of Phoenicians, European societies coming? Did it come from us and went over there? Very, very fascinating. But regardless, places like Cahokia and the rise of the Mississippian cultures dispels the myth that America was an untapped wilderness. That's what I love about Charles Mann's work, especially in 1493. He's talking about the impact of the Columbian exchange.

Flora and fauna going over one direction and flora and fauna coming back. How did the potato get to Ireland? How did baby corn get to China? Why was there corn found in the Ark of the Covenant? These are interesting mysteries. Huh. Yeah.

What happened to a lot of the copper in the Great Lakes that was mined out? Because it probably wasn't mined by indigenous peoples because there's no record of that being in vast cases. So the mysteries of America go well beyond what our understanding is today. But hopefully between anthropology and history and conversations like this, eventually we're going to figure it out. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians

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Can you explain Cahokia a little bit? I mean, I did, but just a little more detail. Massive trading network. It was an empire for sure. There were boundaries. There were markers. There's all sorts of stuff we have in the anthropological record. You have in the Mississippian cultures, the urban center that was Cahokia, and it's at the confluence of the

Missouri, Mississippi, and the Ohio rivers, which effectively give you a north, south, east, and west water passage to bring things there. It was a massive trading network for sure. Because of the rivers. I didn't realize that. Yep. And it's just across from modern day St. Louis and Illinois. Yep. Yeah.

Yep. And it was a trading empire. And with it came boundaries, east coast marine shells, arguably precious stones from the southwest, obsidian, many, many things being traded. But back to what was happening there was these grand stories being told. Ultimately, the primary story or arguably the oldest story in North America was about the first humans. So we have first father and first mother. Oftentimes she's known as Mother Corn or Earth Mother.

And they had a number of progeny depending on the tribes. And ultimately there were ten sons and two daughters. And that was in the time of giants. and the giants were competing with us as well. And we have evidence of this through the anthropological record. Ancestors of my mother tribe, the Omaha, at a place called Picture Cave about 100 miles outside of the urban center of Cahokia. It's one of these places that has been so desecrated that they won't tell you exactly where it is, but there's all these pictographs of all these stories, battles between the giants and first father. And within that tree of life, the first humans, of course, were from above. So they were part of the upper realm. And first father, he also carried the name of White Plume. But ultimately, he became interested

in understanding the powers of the lower realm, but probably that notion of yin and yang, that there's a sacred balance and harmony. And he sent a spirit wolf down to the lower realm to explore. But that was taboo. And so one of the water spirits ate it. First father became upset with that and made his own journey from the upper realm down to the lower watery realm. And some of our stories, he gambled. And some of the stories, they dueled. But the water spirit, it was a beaver spirit,

won the battle, took his life and kept his head and his body ascended back up soulless without it. And thus enters the stories of one of the sons called Redhorn Trilogy. But he was the one that you find all of these wonderful flint and clay card figurines out of Spyro in the outskirts of Cahokia, but tell the story of him. He had a clan name that was probably along the lines of He Who Is Hit With Deer Lungs. Probably had to do with a clan taboo. Probably a deer clan type of name but thing things that you can't touch things that you have the rights to do and things you can't do and that was probably had to refer to that and eventually he became a very very powerful character in this mississippi cosmology and history ultimately, the giants became agitated with the humans and these battles

occurred back and forth and contests. And one there was a race and the giants being bigger were going to win, except for the youngest one, he who was hit with deer lungs, turned himself into an arrow and won the race. Then they had a great stickball match, whether you look at the ball courts of Mesoamerica or the variations today amongst stickball of the Cherokee. We called it the Little Brother of War. Versions of shinny, which has probably influenced a lot of field hockey and, of course, lacrosse. Little Brother of War. Little Brother of War. So the stick games were preparation for future war.

Yes, they were brutal. I played when I was young. Brutal. So that's still something that they did. In Mesoamerica, they were played to the death, weren't they? And they did in this case too, and that's what happened, was he who was hit with deer lungs became the most valuable player, and they beat the Giants.

MVP. MVP, and all of the Giants team were killed except for one woman. And she was a red-haired Giantess. And she said it had been very beautiful. The tribes had different names for her of what she wore, et cetera. And she said, you may kill me or I will take one of you as my husband. And so ultimately that's that union between her and the figure that was to become Redhorn. They had the Thunder Twins.

Ultimately, in a scene of domestic bliss, he who was hit with deer, was then married to the giantess. And depending on the tribe, the stories changed a little bit, but ultimately she was teasing him as she was cleaning the deer and was going to take the lungs and was going to throw them at him. And he says, no, don't do that. And all the brothers said, oh, don't do that. We were just teasing. And he explains to everyone, no, you really shouldn't tease me because I'm not really your brother. I'm from the upper realm and I was sent by Earthmaker.

So he had a series of four trickster heroes that came here and he was the fifth and the final to help bring her of knowledge to humanity. And ultimately after that, he explained his true form and he spit into his hands and covered his big long braid and it became the color of red ochre, thus all things sacred. Back to the impact of the Neanderthals, Neanderthals,

Denisovans, all of these things about ritual and art, etc. That was our version here. Ultimately, after becoming Redhorn, then he also became his star visage as well. He became the Morning Star and there's many, many stories in all the Plains tribe and the Suouan tribes about what that role was, but then became the ultimate battles as his sons, the Thunder Twins, went down and fought the water spirit and defeated it and brought back the head of first father.

And so that his body became unified once again and became the great ascension story of North America. So all great spiritual deaths and rebirths become the focus of cosmology and religion for that matter, whether it's Jesus or Muhammad or first father in this case. This was the story that was celebrated at Cahokia was the spiritual ascension of first father back to the upper realm so our stories are as grand as abraham and many songs many songs had father abraham i mean i just think it's just so interesting that i mean it's something it's something so big and giant which because you're saying it's it possibly was the the largest city ever on this continent, or the earliest biggest city.

And at the time, it was the third largest city in the world. Right. Yet, you know, I'd never heard of it. You ever heard of it, Steve? No, I only heard of, you know, what you would describe as like the Mississippian culture, the mound builders. But no, I'm not familiar with the town. Can we get into the mounds a little bit? Sure, I'd love to.

Because even reading your chapter of the book, I'm not 100% sure what were the mounds all about and why are they associated with these people? I visited that serpent mound. Yeah, I can tell you a lot about that one too. It's absolutely fascinating with its links to archaeoastronomy, as above, so below. So many of the mounds as we're finding, especially through archaeoastronomy, that it was very much looking to the stars and trying to take those stories and to plant them here.

Make a connection between the two. Yeah. And you had the rise of places like Cahokia. Make a connection between the two. exploded of indigenous peoples tied that with the religion of the stories of first father and the ascension and then you have this this this recipe for civilization that's where food and religion came together to form civilization yep at the confluence of those two is where you find civilization here but it became a massive trading network and empire and those stories were shared. Trading for the most part. At the city center, you had 15 to 20,000 people at the actual epicenter of all those mounds there. And there were hundreds of them and we've lost many of them

due to the construction and progress of East St. Louis, etc. But ultimately, you had this grand plaza and the grand mound itself now known as Monk's Mound. But all of those were built in fairly rapid succession. You see the reign of Cahokia from around 1050 to began to wane around 12 to 1300. And we're not exactly sure. How tall are these mounds? Just to give perspective.

Oh, I want to say that Monk's Mound, I have to look at my notes. I mean, they're big. They're big. Maybe 50 feet in elevation. I'm just guessing off pictures. Higher than that, probably 150 150 200 stairs up those and then okay and so the question the question is how did they get built you know right well right but

like how did they or you know one of the questions is how did they move that much earth a lot of people yeah i know the serpent mound they didn't know it was there until air travel. It was recognized from the air. They thought it was like just a natural. Like a hill. Elevation. From the air, you could realize it was this hundreds of yards long serpent with a head and a tongue. Oh, I see.

No one knew. The people that were living there didn't know it was there until someone's like holy cow i mean it's huge and it's got all there's all kinds of stuff about its orientation which is interesting yes a lot of that comes from my dear friend dr william romaine he's probably the leading archaeo astronomy expert and he's done work all around but started in the 80s with serpent mound that the undulations of the curve on one side are are tied to movements of the sun and on the other side movements of the moon but what he discovered even more importantly after that along with others was that its orientation is pointing towards stellar north so the head and the tail line up perfectly but it also helps measure what is at the center what is the pole star

what is it today what was it 5 000 years ago And regardless of the wobble or precession of the earth, it's still different radiance could point to the same thing. But the story itself, you'll find within most of the tribes of Cherokees, we have a story about that. And it's about how the serpent ate the sun, but it's a constellation that you see at sunrise on summer solstice, that that constellation would move towards the rising sun, and it appears that it was eating the sun. But we still have those stories today. Yeah, and there's some aspect of that in the serpent mound, too, or somewhere,

where they used to think it was eating an egg, or some mound effigy they thought was eating an egg, then someone says probably a sun. Yeah. Yeah, it's hard to say, but then you also have parallels between what does the egg mean metaphorically? Is it knowledge, Sophia?

And then you get these comparables to the rest of Europe as well. You know, what is the sacred feminine? What is the sacred masculine? And perhaps that mound work is a combination of both. At the very least,

it was the rise of civilization in the Americas well before we knew about the same type of civilization from Europeans. So typically we define civilization as mass food and religion coming together. So the rise of the three sister agricultural life ways probably came up from Mesoamerica in terms of cosmologies. They're all very similar. Can you explain the term cosmology? Cosmology, you know, just where we come from. All of our stories, our indigenous stories for the most part are very well tied together. But our original stories talk about that originally our homelands were in the Seven Sisters constellation of Pleiades. And that we came here on what most of the tribes called Journey of the Souls.

And my mother's tribal cosmology, the story talks about that in the beginning, our souls were like stars in the sky, thought but no form. And eventually one of those souls, one of those stars, asked the question of itself, who am I? And that question burned within that soul, that star. So that star went to its mother, the moon. That's part of the cosmology, that all things sacred feminine come from the moon. And said, mother, who am I? Oh, my child. She said, I was afraid you were going to ask that question. Hurry, before you forget, go ask your father. So he goes to his father, the son, the sacred masculine. Father, who am I? And he immediately chastised him and says, my child, be very, very careful with that question. Who am I? For that is the most

important question we have as a soul. But that star, that soul was like us today, gossipy, can't keep a secret. And soon there were four of them that asked the same question. And that signals the beginning of the journey of the souls through the dark rift of the Milky Way to here. Our stories say that we're guided by Venus, the morning star, to get here, the planet next to us. And when those souls landed, it was an all watery planet and they took the form of to us. And when those souls landed, it was an all watery planet. And they took the form of four animals. And this story is basically referred to as the earth diver myth. And there's variations almost across all the tribes.

And they took the form of four animals and depending on the tribe, but ultimately one of them dives down into the deep waters and brings back up the clay in the earth. And Turtle was the first one that asked that question. The soul said, who am I? Felt so bad that gotten the other ones into this new mess, this new conundrum that asked to put the clay on its back. And then that became Turtle Island. And that's the story of this continent and us coming to this world.

And the first humans that came out of the water after that, that's the beginnings of the cosmology. The beginning before the beginning. That's the story that's in Braiding Sweetgrass. Yes, because we all have different variations. As you told that story, I thought that's where you were going. Robin's tribe, the Potawatomis, they have a variation of woman who fell from the sky. Sky woman.

Yes. Oh, really? Yeah. So is it fair to say, and just so I'm clear, that then cosmology could be like an indigenous religion based upon the stars. Absolutely. Okay. And so we have all those variations, which is another function of time. Those stories, that story and its origin comes out of Siberia.

So there are... So they have the same... There's a similar narrative that's from people there. Yes. Huh. And then you can measure the variations of the story based over time to try to get an understanding of the antiquity of that story. Huh. From an indigenous perspective, stories are everything.

The watery planet, that's very common right and even in even even in like the judeo-christian tradition it's common sure there's an element of it with the with the notions of the great flood yeah for sure like a watery planet there were a lot of parallels that i saw in uh so the book we discussed this earlier uh taylor and i did about this braiding sweetgrass brook uh robin how do you say your last name robin wall kemer yeah but i saw a lot of parallels between i mean you didn't have to stretch it very far to see parallels between that story at some point and, you know, the book of Genesis. I mean,

there was a tree that had, that people were punished for, for eating the fruit of and different things, but just, yeah, it was, it was interesting. Two different trees,

the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. Yeah. So back to the cosmology, the tree of life is what's at the centerpiece of an understanding of a physical attribute of that. So we have the great tree of life, and it is the axis mundi of the universe. And in its branches is the upper realm ruled by the thunder beings, the thunderers, and their messengers, the thunderbirds. And then the roots of the tree of life is the lower watery realm, which is inhabited by water spirits. Chief amongst them is the underwater panther or the underwater serpent.

Cherokees, we call her Uctana. But parallels to stories from Mesoamerica, for sure. Kukulkan, Kwaitukotal, et cetera. But these are the things, Steve, that I get immersed in, the stories and the storytelling. It's captivating to most people, children and adults alike, I've discovered.

If you, when you look at your history, the history of your people, is it puzzling to you that that people like us like western europeans is it puzzling to you that uh we're probably that we're more drawn to those questions as well like more drawn to the history the deep history of of this continent than we are to the deep history of our own continent where our where our ancestors came from like i really have no desire you know i don't have i don't wonder about western europe

i don't wonder about paleolithic i mean a bit, but I don't like pay attention to the paleolithic tradition there, but I'm very interested in the deep history here. But I could see that you would view it as, you might view it as like not my history at all, but somehow I feel like it is. Is that troubling to you that I feel that way? No, it's not troubling at all because I think that's so important. One of the reasons that I want to come and share on podcasts like this and to learn from others is to have a deeper understanding of what is the provenance of this land. It's fascinating. All those stories that I've just shared, I mean, truth is greater than any fiction. The stories that happen at these places, the stories that were told about the giants and the thunder beings

and all these different aspects of indigenous cosmology. It gives a provenance to this country that most people don't realize is there, but it belongs to us all. A greater understanding of what was happening here. There's lessons in history, things to be gleaned and to be learned. Perhaps even with Cahokia and some of the others, there are forebodings of what happens with large urban experiments. Can you talk about the giant people?

Yes. I have heard Bigfoot enthusiasts enthusiasts we talked about this before this you did bigfoot enthusiasts like that story and they will sometimes say oh you can find evidence of bigfoot in the mythologies of native americans because they talked about a race of giants has to have been bigfoots um do you do you have to be i'm voicing i'm voicing you know a fringe element of you know i'm voicing the the perspective of a fringe element of bigfoot enthusiasts only to i'm only doing that to invite you as a way of inviting you to offer any insights.

Is it a metaphor? Like, is it a metaphor for something? What was the rate? Like in the mythology or in the cosmology, what was the race of giants? Does it refer to a specific thing? You find these stories throughout a lot of the tribes.

Back home in Nebraska, but we say, that's the Omaha word for the Platte River. It means flat water. Say it again. That's a beautiful word. Yeah, yeah. And I think Corinne might talk about this. Someone's like, that was called the plat.

Or the Missouri River, which we call Nishuda, which means smoke on the water. And all the Plains tribes give it the same name in their language. But what it refers to is before that river was dammed up and it had this powerful kinetic motion, especially in the winter, back when winters used to be really cold, then you would see this frozen fog bank that would go above the water. And that's what it means, smoke on the water. And we have lots of stories around that. I want to get – I got to interrupt him. There's two questions here. There's going to be three in a second. around that. I want to get, I got to interrupt him. There's two questions here. There's going to be three in a second.

Well, I want to hear him talk about Bigfoot, but I also want him to answer your question about where the giants came from. Yeah, but I want him to say a whole sentence

in your native language. I don't care what the hell, you could say something bad about me. I just want to hear it because I like hearing the river names. Well, I would be

truly remiss if I didn't introduce myself properly. There you go. Aho'ewi'le-wang'e, Ix'axe, Wiwita, Bagija, Hanga-shinu, Nkesibe, Tongwangala, Umahabadi.

So that's our standard introduction that we would say in our tribe about the name that we carry. So, Ewi'le-wang'e means that we're say in our tribe about the name that we carry. So, Ewi La Wanga, that means that we're all related. So, whether it's white man and Indian or from whatever part of the world you're from, we are all related. So, in a greeting, you would say that. We always greet each other.

This is meeting a new person. Yep. You would say, we're all one. Say it again. Ewi La Wanga, they. Okay. You're not off the hook on Bigfoot. We're going to get to Bigfoot.

Okay, so that's the beginning of the greeting. Yep, and so that translation, I carry the name of Bison Mane, of the earthen bison clan, of the people that move against the current. That's what Omaha is, the corruption of

Omaha, means the people that move against the current. What it had to do with our brother and sister tribes within our language family. And at a certain point, we separated from each other, probably in the diaspora coming out of the Great Lakes region. Those movements probably referred to our separation along the Mississippi or the great old man. Oh, Hormat. People that move against the current because this is a group of people that traveled upriver. We went upriver. Upstream is another word.

And dispersed. Yeah. Omaha. Yeah, Omaha. And then you have- Oh, shit. That's pretty good. Kwapa, down from your neck of the woods.

We say Gahpa. It means the downstream people. And then you have the Osage. Wajaje means children of the middle waters. Really? Mm-hmm. So all of those, I think Correa and I were talking about this before, but so many American place names are indigenous. That we have no idea.

We transliterate it into English and say Osage and Quapaw. I like the word you used, corruption. It's powerful. My kids are always like, why is that place named that? And I assume like, ah, it's probably some guy's name. Yeah. I mean, Taylor, like go through them. I mean, it's like, it's just the states, cities, everything. States, the cities, Dakota, Missouri, Iowa, Kansa, Oklahoma.

Kansa is interpretation of what we say Konse, which means the wind people. They were a clan of a larger group of our language family. But it goes on and on and on. I assume Michigan, Wisconsin, Massachusetts. It is kind of interesting, though, that there was some sort of want or interest in not completely just renaming it and calling the next state Steve. And then the one after that, Newcomb. Well, they did that up in the one after that new well they well they did that up in the northeast sure certainly they did but all right i mean some of some of

those names would have been more european like new york sure uh but then the further they got these territories were more wild and i know arkansas is a is a native name and i've heard the name translates into downstream people i don't know if you have heard that before but anyway i'm just guessing where uh i grew up in muskegon county in michigan that's for sure indigenous yeah my my understanding there's a huge swamp there and it's it's like the muskegon river delta but it's the muskegon river flowing and the delta that the muskegon river makes as it flows into lake michigan so my understanding um and you know the way everybody explains it it's a it's big swamp okay like swamp area whatever but just to kind of give you this

i'm not gonna tell you anything new here's a joke that would be trafficked when I was a kid. It would be that, oh, an Indian was water skiing and his ski broke here. And he said, musky gone. Right? You need to cut that out. No, it'd be like, no, I'm just, I'm like. Taylor's laughing. Yeah, but I'm not, I'm like. Taylor's laughing. Yeah, but I'm not telling him. I don't think he's going to be shocked that people tell Indian jokes that are derogatory.

I mean, I didn't make the damn thing up. I'm just saying it's like a thing people, it's like a stupid ass thing people say. And why is that, do you think? I don't know. I don't know. Why do people like to belittle things? Maybe they don't know what I don't know. Why do people like to belittle things? Maybe they don't know what the real history is. Yeah.

Why do you like to, I can't explain why people like to belittle stuff. I don't know. It's a part of it. Like why would you want to diminish something? I don't know. That's why I wrote a chapter in my book manuscript called The Founder's Dilemma of America. Why do we have to create stories like Thanksgiving when in reality, the majority of what we think about as Thanksgiving is a lie and definitely belittles the Indian slave trade in New England, the Mohegan Pequot Wars. There's so much history that we

just don't know about, but it's much more convenient, much more easy to say, oh, well, there's the pilgrims and they were saved by the local Native Americans. Had a hell of a party. Had a hell of a party. The only time Thanksgiving was used was the Governor Winthrop, I believe, was his name after he sent a military party to slaughter over 100 different tribal warriors. And when they came back, that's when they had a Thanksgiving. So when you juxtapose reality versus the myths that we come up with, but this is also part of the myth of in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

I don't know if they still teach that to school children, but most of us know that, right? As a parent who's raising kids in America, I don't know how helpful it is to them to – I'm not really interested in bringing them up in an atmosphere of self-loathing. Do you know what I mean? I don't know that it's doing them, that it's setting them up in a good path. So I think that there are complexities. There are astounding complexities to history. But I think that the way we communicate with kids is parable. Sure.

Right. And if, if you find there's, if there's like, there's a value in love of your place, there's value in love of your country, there's value in love of your fellow man. I think that it's, it's like,

there's a pretty good argument to be made for giving them when they're young, somewhat of an optimistic vision. Right? I think that that's probably – this is not like the Muskegon stupid shit like that. Just communicating to them there's something here that you should – that you probably want to take care of. Right? But I mean, they could be equally enthralled with the story of turtles saving this planet. Yeah, but I don't know that story.

Other than Sturgill Simpson mentions it and turtles all the way down. But you know it now. I've shared it with you. I'll tell them. I'm going to read up on it so I don't get the details wrong. Listen, I'd love to tell them that story.

They'd be entranced. What I think you're saying is just that we've distilled down our history into very simple, like, you know, just flashpoints that are easy to communicate. So, I mean, like, yeah, humans want to live in the now and sometimes want to look back at the past and just see it as this like thing that could be subbed up in one sentence. And for whatever reason, Columbus was able to market the world marketed that Columbus found this place. So that's what we still teach. I mean, I think what you're I hear what you're saying. It's like it's easy to simplify things like really small and those things then become wrong. I mean, because you can't tell complex stories

with very simple things you can't sit them all down and be like you know there's arguments we made that uh um there's no free will right that everything's spelled out already you're either going to be the way you are or not nothing you can do about it people are horrible good luck that's not a good way of going about it why is it one or the other and also what does it say to our collective consciousness if we

exist on myth and continue to be okay with that I don't know well I think the thing is, is that now because of the world we live in, we can find the accuracy in stories. So here, and you talk about Thanksgiving helps,

you know, and I've heard this before, but like that helps us understand probably the way that we've been marketed, well, for sure been marketed to. And so we can bring out more truth inside of the way that we've been marketed, well, for sure been marketed to. And so we can bring out more truth inside of the way that we exist from here on out just because we know. And I think you can find more separation

between the optimism that you're talking about, Steve, and like these bastardizations that are harmful and have implications today. Just stuff we tell our kids. Yeah. And the truth shall set them free. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. I told, listen, what I'm saying is like, what I'm saying is probably like, I'm not doing a good job of articulating it. I'm just trying to, I'm expressing the idea that there are certain sort of legends and mythologies that are, that are told because they're effective. Sure. You know? And I don't think people sit around weighing them out too thoroughly. I get that. Okay.

It's much easier to have history tied up in a pretty little bow and arrow, right? Totally. It's like the Blitzkrieg hypothesis, right? It's much easier to believe that there was one event that killed all the megafauna, right? Yeah. You know, I was surprised to see that Wikipedia still really hangs on to the Blitzkrieg hypothesis.

Academia's moved on, but Wikipedia's doubled down. It's like the Bering Strait theory. There's a lot of work been done. Graham Hancock did a wonderful job in America, B.C.? No, America before. But he goes into this whole understanding of what you have in American anthropology around the Clovis First Peoples and how anthropology just held on to that, held on onto that. Academics careers were

destroyed whenever they found something counter to that. And so you have this whole uncovered history, this provenance of America that may go back a lot, lot longer than what most people are comfortable with. When I first started dabbling in anthropology, just like reading academic works, it was right around when the Clovis first idea was falling apart. And there were still people that held on to it. But that was a debate that was happening back then.

But to get back to where we're supposed to get, do you, is the, is there a metaphor to be found in the giant people or like, what do you think that that meant? I think that they were giants. Um, they were a competing race from our stories that Earthmaker made before us. And they became, they lacked humility. And they were too pompous. And then ultimately, depending upon the stories, but there's an incredible place right outside of Omaha. The Ski-Dee people, the Pawnees and the Rickerers,

it changes a little bit based on the dialect, but Pawhook is what it's called, and it was the origin place for the Ski-Dee people. And there was a number of the Council of the Animals out of the five sacred sites. Only one of them is left, and that's Pawhook. And from it, it was said that back in the time of giants and sacrifice, that was a very important place. And ultimately, that's where Earthmaker, creator, decided to flood the earth to get rid of the giants.

And he bade all of the human beings and the smaller animals to go underneath into the council of the animals. And therefore, they rode out the flood. And then they were led by Yellow Buffalo Woman. And they came back out and emerged there. So that became a very central place for a lot of the Plains people. They survived the flood. Survived the flood by going underneath the ground. And you have a lot of those types of stories.

Kiowas have those stories too. There's biblical reference to giants too. The Anak and Genesis. Yeah. So there's a theme. But not the kind of giant that Goliath was. Yes. Goliath was just a huge dude, wasn't he?

He was a giant. Yeah. Ammonite. They weren't all big. Yeah, he was a little bit of a phenom amongst his people. But, I mean, I don't think they were all giants, were they? I mean, that was the land of Canaan, correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you think there's any chance that there could be cultural memory of, um, that would survive. Like how many, tell me Neanderthal and how many, like tens of thousands of years, cultural memory that could survive long enough to recollect interaction with Neanderthals.

It's an excellent question, but we find that legacy in our art. The use of red ochre can be tied back to the Neanderthals. And one of the hypotheses is who were the Denisovans? Were they some remnant of this giant race? We don't know because that's different within my DNA than everyone else here. So what was that? I do know that there are some anthropological markers that make indigenous peoples different, one of which is our teeth.

And that's why it was so important about what was found in those caves in Siberia. But we have different types of teeth. The main thing is we have shovel-shaped incisors, which is the only dominant genetic trait, but on the backside of front teeth are scooped. We have the Mongolian spot that comes out of Asia. And I brought all my DNA stuff. What does that mean, the Mongolian spot? It's a little blue spot on the behind of babies and sometimes on the back or the stomach. And it's just a genetic marker. We don't know.

And it fades. And it fades. Okay. Yeah. But we do have different DNA. We have different mitochondrial DNA as well. So the stuff that I, when I originally got into the DNA stuff, when I was doing all my research for the book, was really trying to understand, are we different?

And National Geographic, who seems to be a central player in all this, have done an incredible job of trying to understand some of this ancient past. And from the DNA perspective, they started this project called Genomic, which was trying to isolate the fact that we have different haplogroups for our mitochondrial DNA. So I have some of those markers that would be the dominant European ones, but then we have this mitochondrial DNA that's very, very different from others. When you did a DNA test, what are the services have you done? I did the genomic project. And then more recently, I think I did the ancestry one. Okay.

So the genomic project was you were actually involved in a research project. Yeah. I mean, my, my DNA was a part of that study. That's why I signed up for it. I see. So what can you, what did it tell you about you? One that I had a similar part of Neanderthal, which is probably my Irish heritage, maybe some of the French or German I have in there as well. But it also shows that I've got, let me see, I've got 2.3% of Neanderthal and 1.7% Denisovan.

But probably most evidenced through teeth and other structures. Is that common amongst Native Americans? Not at all. Steve is jealous. What are the percentages again? 2.3. Neanderthal. You think that you have more Neanderthal.

No, I remember being a little light. He said he doesn't have. The 23 of me told me I was a little light more Neanderthal. No, I remember being a little light. He said he doesn't have. The 23 and me told me I was a little light on Neanderthal, man. But it goes back to- Lighter than average. I mean, I guess it's natural within human beings to feel like one type of hominid is superior to the others. But I think it goes back to that core value that we have as indigenous peoples that we're all related. So whether it's Homo sapien, Homo sapien, or Neanderthal, or Denisovan, all part of

humanity as we now know it. But when you, okay, is there enough information out there that you can get into, like my understanding when they do these projects is it kind of depends on how many samples are taken. So there's some spots on the planet that there just hasn't been enough people. They haven't done their genomes. They haven't done their genetics.

And so some spots are hazy. Some spots, like Western Europe, a lot of participants, a lot of people have done it. You start getting these really detailed pictures, but you talk to people whose ancestors came from Asia, and it's not as satisfying when you do it there because it's not filled in in a detailed sense. And you'll be told, like, ah, you're kind of generally Asian. With yours, where is that at now? Are they able to talk about regions within what's now the united states

i don't think it's going to ever be able to get that granular because no tribe is a fluid thing you know but i was really surprised i mean i know that i'm majority native american but the the formal test both of them came out around the same percentage, 46%. But what I was surprised at was based off one of the tests that there was a lot more Peruvian bloodlines. And in both tests was consistent percentage of descendancy from the Ainu of Japan, the indigenous peoples of Japan. Wow. Chinese for sure.

Peruvian. Mm-hmm. And the other one that was a big curveball was the nearly quarter percent that said I was Russian. Huh. And that I was related to Tolstoy. Can you track back?

Can you track back in your history? That's got to be encouraging as a writer. Really? So that's where I got that talent. Can you track back in your history where some of this stuff comes from?

I mean, could you say my great-grandfather was a Caucasian guy? I mean, I finally found people who know more, a lot more about this

But your mother and father were members of the tribe, the Omaha tribe, Cherokee. I mean, I can go back 14, 17 generations on almost both sides. But you're.

And there's nothing along those lines. But what it, when I finally did talk to somebody who knew what they were talking about a lot more than I did, was probably had to do with this mixing of Siberian and Eurasian bloodlines. And it went back and forth for a time before they came over to Siberia and arguably some of them maybe even came back. Oh, so you don't think that was

that was anything recent like in the last couple hundred years? Oh, no, yeah. That was all pre-contact stuff. Yeah.

Oh, wow. Okay. Can I make a correction real quick? I said Anak in Genesis. It was Nephilim. Nephilim were the giants.

Nephilim. Yeah, yeah. Irrelevant, but I just It was Nephilim. Nephilim were the giants. Nephilim. Yeah, yeah. Irrelevant, but I just had to clear that up. Nephilim. And I've been fascinated with all of the understanding of what happened in Mesoamerica, what happened in South America. I really enjoy

reading about those British explorers who finally went down to South America and tried to find the lost city of Zed, Colonel Fawcett. It's a fascinating story. But on behalf of the Royal Geographic Society,

he went down in the early 1900s and began to explore. And his hypothesis was there was the lost city of Zed, which was a complex society in South America. Charles Mann in his book, 1493, he talks a lot about terra preta and some of the agricultural practices involving the use of biochar and how to take very alkaline soils and turn them into productive things,

and these are ancient. But many years after Fawcett's disappearance into the Amazon, no one knows ever what happened to him. But many people tried to go and find out through the use of technology. We're finding all these ancient cities now. And more and more evidence that the population numbers were a lot bigger. But that's the first point in having any of these conversations about ancient America is how many people, how many bison, et cetera. All those become really interesting topics about what happened to them. Why did they leave or disappear, what

was the role of disease and genocide, how much of it was purposeful. I think all those things are important for people to understand so that at the very least we don't repeat those bad portions of history. Tribal peoples have a prophecy. It's primarily in the plains, but it's all around. It has to do with the seventh generation prophecy. And ultimately, you can look to sad symbolic events in history, such as the original Battle of Wounded Knee, Very powerful, the ghost dance religion and its prophet, Walvoca, up around Pine Ridge there. And I believe it was in the 1870s, but it was such a horrific event that many viewed it as the breaking of the great sacred hoop of the Siouan peoples.

And at that point, it was said that that was the beginning of a very tough time for indigenous peoples, that for six generations we would suffer greatly, and Lord knows we've suffered. And that with the markings, then, I think you wrote about this some too, stories about white buffalo calf woman that she would return. And so we had those markings in actuality in the physical manifestation of white buffalo calves. So we had the first one in 2001. And by 2007, there were four of them. And that means that that was the time for the return of the seventh generation. I had actually been writing a scholarly

paper with a legal scholar who also happened to be a Dakota spiritualist. And she's the one who explained it to me at the time. But with the coming of the fourth white buffalo calf, then all of the children born after that would be of the seventh generation. So for those tribal peoples, that generation would be the ones that would lead them to those nations to stand tall again and be proud. For all those children that are non-indigenous that were born after that time frame, they're also part of the seventh generation. And as non-Indigenous, they're going to be the population that's finally ready for our knowledge. And it was pointed out to me that I was a part of the sixth generation, that I was supposed to be a teacher. And then I didn't know all my stories, and she was right. So that began that journey for me from going from general person in corporate America, trying to find out who am I and where do I come from

so that when it comes time, I can tell these stories in the hopes that it's going to make the world a better place. Can you explain to people the ghost dancers? Because there was two – there? Because there was two occurrences where someone tried to unite. What was the one related to the – he was from Indiana, right? Tecumseh, right? Yeah, there's two separate stories. Yeah, like a person, a sort of prophet.

Yes. That wanted to unite people. Yes. That would try to like patch up and inform an allegiance of, of indigenous people. Yeah. Confederacy to, to fight.

And then the ghost dance prophet or teacher, whatever. It was prophet. He was similar to, he was trying to, he too. He was trying to communicate with a bunch of historical enemies to bind them together. It was a derivation

out of the Pottawatomie Dreaming Dance Society. And ultimately, he had these visions where the followers could, through dance and song, could put themselves into a mental state where they could see the other side. And it was their hope that despite what had happened with the loss of the bison and our traditional life ways

that the old world would come back, and that's what they were seeking. Of course, it was seen by the United States military as insurrection, and they were summarily attacked and killed up at Wounded Knee, and the prophet was killed at that point. What was the second, like when did the second Wounded Knee massacre, that was the 1890s,

right? No, that was in the 1970s. That had to do with the Red Power Movement and the American Indian Movement. Oh, no, no. Okay. I must, I know, I thought that there was like two wounded knee things in close proximity. Not that I'm aware of. Oh, okay.

The first one was pretty brutal and tribes didn't respond back from that till many, many years later. And then wounded knee became a, became a focal point in the seventies. Yes. Of the American Indian movement. Yes.

That's after they became militant for sure yeah what other questions not what other questions oh yeah no no we covered off on that bigfoot no we didn't you hadn't heard him talk about bigfoot yet i don't think he's a bigfoot enthusiast i am a bigfoot no no he he has something to say oh i'll tell you why steve because bigfoot is not an American icon. It's a tribal icon. All the tribes we have Bigfoot. The Omaha's Hinscabay, it means the hairy race of people.

Really? All the tribes. Many of the tribes, especially up in the Pacific Northwest. I mean, it is a spiritual part of their formation. Some of the clans up there are even responsible for protecting the anonymity and the sacredness of them. But it's become something out of American popular lore. But that's where that comes from. That's what he said that helped correct me because when we were walking here he said what do you think about bigfoot and uh and he told me he said bigfoot is not

doesn't belong to america i mean you know america as in like white european culture that dominates america he said it belongs to the tribes and then he i don't want to take your i don't want to tell what you're going to say about that he's a spirit being but i just did many of our stories say that there's a relationship between them and the sky people and so um perhaps they can move between different planes of existence i mean who are we to say what is real and what's not, what's happening in the spirit world and what's happening here? Many say that they move in between those realms. That's been adopted.

That attribute has been also adopted by Bigfoot's researchers to explain why you cannot catch them on a trail camera. Because they, they, they like move out of, they move into the ethereal realm and can't be photographed. Do you believe Steve? No,

Mitch Hedberg, the comedian, Mitch Hedberg thinks they're just blurry. And it's not the photographer's fault. You think it's a bear on two legs? See, what I – I don't know. To me, what he told me gave me – I mean, it just gave me another perspective.

Sure. That explains this. And I knew that Bigfoot would have been connected to indigenous Americans, but I guess I didn't realize that it was something sacred and that it was something that's really valued, that's kind of been hijacked in a way. Because I told him, I said, no, I don't believe in Bigfoot. Well, this is before I heard his story. I said, no, I don't believe in Bigfoot. I think people are seeing bipedal bears that have had wounded front feet and are walking on their back legs. Which we know for a fact happens. That happens, for sure happens.

But no, it just expanded this idea because, I mean, the Bigfoot or the hairy hominid-like bipedal lore goes so deep. I mean, it's bizarre how deep it goes. I mean, we were talking about the Koyukan. The Koyukan have a very distinct Bigfoot-like character that is up in Alaska. Every tribe does. Yeah. And they're all complex and deep and rich.

I know in Southeast Alaska, some of the groups have a, there's an otter man, which Haida and Tsimshian people have mentioned to me. The Koyukan have the woodsman. They call them woodsman. Kind of a wilding, right? Yeah. And it's not exactly a Bigfoot, but that's kind of how they treated it and they said they were supernatural they could move in and out of you know being able to be seen and whatnot but they were almost like a feral human that was real hairy and then of course you have the counterpart to the giants we all have stories of little people as well and um they're a very powerful race and they move in and out of this existence.

The story that I always like to tell about it, I'm a descendant of Baptiste Dorian. That's the French part of my Omaha bloodlines. And he was an interpreter for Lewis and Clark. And whenever Lewis and Clark met with the Iowa and the Oto at what is now Council Bluffs, Iowa, which is where I live, the Omaha's were not present because they were on bison hunt. But eventually, some of the translators and explorers went along, and my ancestor was a part of it. And they got up near Vermillion, South Dakota. And Lewis and Clark wanted to dispatch all of the tribal representatives to go and to explore this basically rock mound at Spirit Lake. And the Omaha's dug in their heels and said, uh-uh, we ain't going.

And they asked him why. And they said, because we have a story. Uh, there were a number of our warriors. There were 300 of them that were on a, um, horse raiding trip, uh, which was not honorable. And on their return going past the rock edifice there at Spirit Lake, that the little people came out and attacked them and killed over half of them. And so our stories about giants and little people, all the tribes have stories like that. I only know the ones that I've been told. But they go so far back into our history that there has to be something to them.

But I mean there's parallels with the Gaelic cultures and little people, et cetera. The mound builders you find very strong similarities between the cares and rock mounds of Northern Europe and what you see in the Mississippian plain as well. So for me, it's just a lot of questions back to that whole tenet of we're all related, but how did all these things rise around the same time and then collapse? You know, I think when I hear you talk, just kind of a broad general statement about hearing you talk is that we so bad want to be able to explain everything that we know. And science is by very essence only able to discern and understand what is physically observable. I mean, that's the definition of science. Like science does not delve into, you know, things that are metaphysical.

And what I like about hearing some of these like ancient deep time stories of indigenous people is that we really like to think that we know everything and we just don't. I mean, I did an interview with one of the top wildlife biologists in the country that deals with white oak trees and acorns. And he, when I started drilling down questions about white oak trees, like he was like, Clay, you don't have to dig very far to realize science does not know all the answers even about something so simple and not that seemingly important and just as i hear you talk about even qualms about how long humans have been in north america and you know our our the archaeology we know you know says x you. We've been here this long, and that's just the best that we've got. But your stories say that it goes way back further than that.

And I just feel like we really don't know. And it's okay for us to say we don't know. And it's okay for us to say that the measurements of science do have limitations hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew! Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know,

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Just back to the field of anthropology and its separation from folklore, because that was the scientific part of anthropology, which says we have to have physical evidence for everything. And it ignored folklore. And it was only until the last 10 years or so, that was one of the works that really inspired me to start my book was reading Tim Pocktat's work on Cahokia. And he was the first mainstream anthropologist to bust out of the mold and say, hey, we need to look at tribal stories here to help figure out. And that's how we come up with the stories of – And science has been really good at ostracizing people that have spoken against it. You can look back a thousand years and find that.

Right. So, yeah. Stories are everything still. Let me ask you about something. We've had this debate on and off over the years, and I'd just like to get your perspective on it. Many of the earth mountains have been ransacked. Okay.

You have a term like pot hunters, right? So people that would just go dig up caves, dig up... It starts with arrowheads. Yeah. Well, that's where I'm going. So people would dig up caves. People would dig up effigy mounds. People would dig up cities,

haul off the stuff that they thought was of value and destroy it from an archaeological perspective and then desecrate it from a religious perspective, say. Let's put that at an extreme. At the other end is you're out tilling a field and up pops a broken arrowhead. Sure. Okay.

And you put that arrowhead in your pocket because you're thinking, I'm going to till this field all the time. I just kicked it up. My field. Yeah. So two questions for you. What's your take on that, on that impulse? Well, the. And then I want you to judge that impulse.

Well, there's two different kinds of people in the world, right? There's people who want to lump everybody into two groups. Arrowhead pickers and arrowhead leavers. Right, right. Speaking of. The analogy that I thought was interesting at this point was if we all walked up and found a wallet and there was money in it, half of us are going to take it and give it to someone to give it back, right? The other half is going to take the money, pocket it, and throw the wallet. Yeah, that's probably about right.

So I think the same thing. The percentages. Right? But it goes to how we think about objects that we don't understand. Arrowheads would be one of those. On the one end of the extreme is people love to collect arrowheads. My dad did. I've got his collection at home.

Your father did? My dad did. And he loved it. He actively hunted arrowheads. He did, and he gave them to me. And so I understand that. At the same time, I know that what is in that act, why is that so important philosophically when your average American is

walking somewhere and sees this arrowhead? What is it that compels them to want to pick it up and to take it for their own? Some may admire the beauty and the history as it is and was and says, that's pretty powerful. And maybe if we leave it in the ground maybe this was an important place maybe that arrowhead told a story of how these people lived maybe it explains the time period of when that was made maybe it's tied to an animal that was ancient that this arrowhead went into there's so much that could be there and then there's the other perspective is my land i found it it's mine and perhaps something will happen to it okay been there a long time by itself yeah that's a good point but i think you can't discount the rarity of it and that's what i think compels a

lot of people to not leave it because it's i don't know it'd be it i mean they want it's magic for themselves yeah exactly i was with some i was with some anthropologists who were doing work in the npra so the national petroleum reserve alaska what they were doing is ahead of oil exploration which is probably inevitable They were trying to make a map of cultural sites. Because when they do, you know, ESA process and all the other processes to go into extract oil, there needs to be an accounting of what might be destroyed. Sure. And it would, and the finding of cultural sites would impact where you would build roads, put in wellheads, whatnot. You're in a place that you can't even, it's so far out, you can't get a helicopter there on a tank of gas.

You got to like take a plane and kick out barrels of gas and then hopscotch from barrel to barrel in a helicopter. That's how like remote you are. But anyways, there's just stuff laying out, man. It's been sitting there thousands of years. There's no one around to pick it up. Hasn't been. And I'm telling you, those guys would photograph the projectile points

and they would draw the projectile points and they would stick them back in the moss. It was painful for me. Painful. I would have visions of coming back out and getting them. I wanted them so bad. Why? I don't know, man.

It's just like, because it's so cool. I'd be like, oh, like every part of me. I mean, I would go and revisit. Like I remember one time at camp, leaving camp, walking down, not to take it, but leaving camp, walking down, getting it back out of the moss, looking at it for a long time sticking it back in the moss and just like yeah it'd be like if i don't know man like if you put a box of nerds out on the ground and my kids found

it they'd be like man i'll tell you what i'm gonna do with those nerds well it's very there's. I can't explain it. Although there are a lot of things in the natural world that do connect us to way back history. There's very few things that are that physical that you can just look at and hold, and it takes you way back. It's not. This is such a new. Go ahead. I want to say just one thing. It's a lot of things. I don't understand. I can tell you what it's not connected. This is such a new. Go ahead. I want to see this one thing.

It's a lot of things. I don't understand. I can tell you what it's not. It's not meant as an act of disrespect for the person that owned that thing. For some. And I want to get quite the opposite. I think it's a thing of deep reverence, curiosity about, fascination with, the person that made that thing. Sure.

But if one takes that, you lose the context of where it was and whatever science might be able to tell us about it. Yeah, that's a good point. I wanted to bring up two serious things on this topic. So that's on one end of the extreme. And then you have in the wake of the passing of the legislation to protect tribal remains and funerary objects known as the Native American Engraves Repatriation Act in the 1990s. And prior to that, you have the Archaeological Resource Protection Act. And you have aberrations of this benign mindset about things like arrowheads.

And on this other extreme, you have this event that happened with the National Park Service at Effigy mounds in Iowa. And as the rise of NAGPRA and state of Iowa also passed an early law saying that if there are skeletal remains or funerary objects and ultimately what became the language of Native American Graves and Repatriation Act is anything that is sacred needs to be returned back to the people. And what happened there was they had a number of skeletal remains and the superintendent of the site, I believe his name was Tom Munson. He was so frustrated with the potential that these objects would be out of their collection. And I believe it was a combination of 24 different human remains from different individuals. That were on display. and as the potential risk of this law taking them away from the anthropological,

archaeological collection, he stole them and tucked them to his house and then lied about it for years. And ultimately, there had to be an accounting of it. But we're talking about skeletal remains. What do you think was going on in his head? I have to take this so that we don't have to give them back to the Indians, and eventually everyone's going to forget, and then we can have them back. So you have this unhealthy relationship between objects that have a tribal provenance

and what we would like to see happen to them, any skeletal remains. There's an exception in the Americas because of archaeology and anthropology that science came in and says, it's okay to take Indian bones. There's been numerous examples of cemeteries that were damaged during construction, et cetera. They find the white people bones and they bury them properly. And the Indian bones go to state archaeological societies. Ultimately, it took enforcement of NAGPRA to come in and to convict him for keeping and stealing all those remains.

The tribes were very upset about that. And there was no accountability of it. Even further and more political goes to archaeological rich sites like down in – outside of Blanding, Utah. And there was a raid that – there was 24 individuals that were ultimately indicted. And in between them, they had 40,000 objects that they had illegally taken out of the ground, some of which had provenance to 6,000 B.C. Pottery shards, human remains, funerary sandals, et cetera. And foremost of those was a doctor by the name of James Redd. And it was certainly viewed as an overzealous overreach of the FBI and the Bureau of Land Management. But the facts of the case are still the same. There was over 40,000 objects that were gotten in that sting.

The economics of it is what is mind-boggling to me because this is the serious part about Arrowheads, et cetera, was of the 240 objects that they found there, they used an informant to try to lure these individuals who were illegally trading them and fueling the black market and Native American objects. I think they spent around $330,000, which averaged around $1,340 per object for those 250. So if we use that as a proxy and run the numbers, then that collection, which they hauled away from those 24 individuals, a collection of 40,000 would be over $53 million. So this is one subset of what happens with the black market trade around Native American objects, which have been fetishized beyond the object

and their provenance into a horrible black market. So why would the individual who finds the arrowhead or the pottery shard, I can get a hundred bucks for this. And then it goes on and on and on. Dr. Red and the informant sadly committed suicide rather than face the charges. The informant killed himself. He did. A year later.

And if you look up stories on this, you're going to find more that this was an illustration of the huge black market around Native American objects, especially things that are sacred, human remains, funerary objects, things that should be sacred and left alone. So there's a serious side to hunting objects. Oh, I get the serious side for sure and i think that you if you went and talked to people um just like polled people who are hobbyists you know about they don't think they're doing anything wrong well you i think you'd find if you said like hey if you found a human skeleton what would you do i think you know the vast majority of people would would recognize it they they wouldn't take it or they would tell someone or whatever you know but i think people sort of spread it out and they view the arrowhead isn't of significance or it was it wasn't purposefully placed it was perhaps

lost it was broken that's where i want it was just it was discarded and it wasn't like someone putting something somewhere the same way we might look at our own. Like we might look at a cemetery. Um, like I might look at a Sam cemetery that my ancestors were buried in and have a very different feeling about it than I would if I found, uh, like an old rusty pistol laying out in the woods.

Uh, I'd be like, yeah, I could dig up the graveyard, but I just found an old rusty pistol laying out in the woods, uh, I'd be like, yeah, I could dig up the graveyard, but I just found an old rusty pistol out in the woods. I'm going to take it home with me. You know what I mean?

Like we, we sort of hold these two, like we distinguish these things or we, we, we separate these things out in our head. Um, I can't tell you where the line falls for everybody,

but I think a lot of people view there being some line somewhere. If it's the bone of a human, leave it alone. Tell somebody. Well, I think I really want some clarity from you, just your personal opinion. So obviously there are some legal ramifications. I mean, there's legal boundaries that guide us.

Obviously we can't mess with human bones. You can't take any kind of artifacts off public land. So let's go to private land. If I'm on my land and see an arrowhead, should I pick that up? Should Clay Newcomb pick it up? Well, if you found a wallet with 500 bucks, would you pick it up or give it back? I would pick it up and give it back. But I'm just being totally honest with you.

I'm struggling to find the complete apples to apples connection there. And because, I mean, what am I supposed to do? If I find an airhead on my land, am I supposed to call the, you know, the Osage or the Choctaws that would have been there? It would be interesting for you to do that, though. For you as a landowner. And that's one of the serious parts that I'm hoping comes out of talks with people like me is that there's so much more to the provenance of this land. You've said that word.

Can you tell me what that word means? Provenance? Yeah. I mean, that there's a much more to the provenance of this land. You've said that word. Can you tell me what that word means? Provenance? Yeah. I mean, that there's a history. Okay. Yeah. It's like in artwork or in wine or whatever, it's the ownership history.

Ownership history. Got it. Like, you know, like some painting comes up, you know. The provenance. People are very interested in its flow through time. I'm impressed, Steve. You nailed that one according to Merriam-Webster. The provenance. People are very interested in its flow through time. I'm impressed, Steve. You nailed that one according to Merriam-Webster.

Number one, because I had to Merriam-Webster it while we've been talking because he's used it so many times. And the first definition is just straight origin or source. But then number two is the history of ownership of a valued object or work of art or literature. The reason it's real important in paintings and antiquities is the more solid the provenance is, the less worried you are that it emerged out of somewhere as a phony. Yeah. Like, all you know is like, I don't know, it just appeared out of nowhere in 1920. No one knows the whole- No provenance. I don't know, there's some guy made a- Okay, let me ask you this.

So I'm from Western Arkansas, close to where you're from originally. And there's a lot of airheads, you know, atlatl points, spear points, a lot of stone points everywhere. I mean, I'm convinced that they are distributed across the landscape. Everywhere. Everywhere. And so think about this, or this is just a thought pattern that I would have. Like we have destroyed so much of the earth's surface through civilization,

covered it with concrete, moved it. Crops. Crops. Like we've, so, and I'm okay driving on a road that has destroyed Native American arrowheads. But in my mule pasture where my mules tear up the ground and they have trails of dirt that have exposed the ground, I find some stone points and that's what I would ask you and just a totally heartfelt question

is like when I when I pick up a stone point that came out came off my place which I have seen many I call my kids and usually I'll call them out before I pick it up

if they're home and say look at that I'll say the last human to touch that was planning to cook his dinner over a fire with an animal that he killed with that point. I mean, it's a moment, man. I mean, it's not just like, oh, look at this. Does that count for some value? Like, what should I do with those? Well, I mean, perhaps. What would you do with them? That's a good question. The example that I would point to was Steve's example of finding a bison skull. You go on a journey and you find out the true provenance of that animal and its histories.

And I reported it. And you reported it. Yeah. But it's in my house. Yeah. After learning all that i've learned i would want to leave it there and at a certain point would want to introduce science into it to see what we could understand about what that piece was like what period was it from what were they

hunting who was doing the hunting just a a lot of questions. And hopefully layering into the history as we know it from the object that's looking at it on the ground, coupled with science and then a layer of indigenous history or provenance unto it can only add to the value of the history of the object. And that's my whole point with all of this is that wherever you look across America America there's all these objects there's all this history it's there for all of us to understand and to help

enhance our own experience as Americans speaking of history now that we haven't speaking about anything besides history can you explain to everybody about the Sacred Seeds Project? Absolutely. When I began to write the book, it became pretty apparent after doing a lot of research that the rise of the Mississippian mound builder culture had a lot to do with the food that they were eating. And around the same time frame, actually a little bit earlier, one of my mentors in life, Dr. Duard Walker, he's the chair emeritus of anthropology at CU Boulder, he began to watch some of the trends that was happening with some of the big seed companies like Monsanto, Syngenta,

and what they were doing in other countries, like the country of India. And, uh, ultimately. I mean, like trademarking seeds and. Yes. You know, intellectual property protection, but was also displacing them of their indigenous seeds and getting them their own contract bound genetically modified organism seeds. And which is basically what the American farmer does.

Those seeds, the corn that we see in fields is clones. And it's one small variation of corn compared to the thousands of types of corn that were here before. And so I began to study the Mississippian record and basically where there was corn in abundance, there were people in abundance. And where there was corn, there were people and there was life. And so from a cosmological perspective, that was the gift of old woman who gave us seeds and she gave us corn and all the tribes have different stories but it's so integral to our life ways and cosmology and survival that you can't get around it and so I began my own journey of trying

to find some of these ancient seeds and what it meant we were talking about this before the podcast Yanni about what happens when 95% of your ancestors are gone at some point. Did it all happen at once? No. It was very devastating. The examples in Nebraska was because of our proximity to the middle of the country, the tribes there, we weren't hit until the late 1700s and early 1800s. It was a wave in late 1700, 1830, 1860, and perhaps more waves. But the cumulative effect was 95% decimation rates. So it just may have happened at 1500 in one place and 1800s in the

other, but the net effect was loss of knowledge for sure. And so whatever we can do to find our way back to that, what I found was starting with basically 30 seeds from the Cherokee Nation Seed Saving Project and planting those in the ground, there was something about understanding that history, understanding how we planted, when we planted, why, what shape, what seeds, how did you plant them and began to piece together this companion planting agricultural life ways that was at the center of how people survived on this continent for at least a thousand years ago and probably much beyond that. And by putting my hands in the soil, by understanding the rhythms,

talking with elders, piecing together these things back, I began to find all these little tidbits. We're supposed to plant on the new moon in May. There's a flower that grows. The first one that flowers, that's when you plant other parts of the crop. When we left them, they were drought-resistant seeds.

And all of these things began to impact how I felt. And I truly felt by doing these acts, by having a good heart, by doing them for the right reasons, not for money, back to the whole notion of Robin's work on sacred economies and sacred reciprocity, that it began to change me in a way. I'm very familiar with intergenerational trauma and the impact of what colonization has had on indigenous peoples. And it's rough. It's really hard. But on the converse side, perhaps it has to do with epigenetics.

But by getting my hands in the soil, by growing these plants, by learning from them, that it's healing me and that it can heal others. And we have a notion of blood memory that somehow the ancestors through our DNA will help us understand how to put this all back together. How can we live better again? I look at the landscape and I see things differently after doing all this work, after studying to be a teacher of the sixth generation. I look across this landscape and I see the land that once was. I see the land that could be again. I see bison herds, massive, where everyone could hunt them again. The food that they eat is back again. The switchgrass, the bison grass, the buffalo commons, reintroduction of all these things

that we're beginning to see again. Things that were important to tribal peoples that are part of our clan systems. The role of wolf and elk and bison and how these, this is what the land here was meant to produce to sustain people. But I look and see every tillable acre planted. I see invasive species of cows everywhere.

When those resources are scant, who wins? Who has priority? The private landholder and the cow? The elk? The natural order of things? These are the things that I ponder. But ultimately, that's what Sacred Seed is about, is exploring those journeys, going backwards in time, but also in the age of monocrop cultures, potential failures of those. Hopefully someday people are going to be glad that people like me find all these diverse seeds, all these different types of

corn, that we have this multiplicity of seeds so that someday we're going to be glad that we have it. And not to mention just the richness and the beauty that comes from all these different types of seeds. Do you have somewhere a facility or, you know, how are you storing these things and sort of codifying, you know, whatever knowledge is there? I brought some in. This is, there's corn, bean, and squash in here. Oh, there is? Yep.

And this is an ancient variety. Actually, in my studies to find all this stuff, ultimately, we found these older collections. And one of the things that I was so curious to find all this stuff. Ultimately, we found these older collections. And one of the things that I was so curious to find was an Omaha rainbow flint, which I couldn't find anywhere. And ultimately in the collections of Carl Barnes, who's a Cherokee individual who over the course of his 85 years here, he collected over 1500 different types of seeds across all the Americas. And some of them are still viable. Well, you're looking at some right here. So, yeah, he has a, I mean, it's like a jet black, I don't know, like a deep purplish jet black.

That's a red. Red. Yep, and those seeds. Corn, it's about the size of what you sort of consider to be a real big carrot. They can be a lot bigger than that. That was one of the small ears. That's the only one that wasn't shelled, but that is a ruby flint.

Wow. Blood red. Blood red. What does it taste like? Probably the difference between commercial white rice and wild rice that you'd find up around the Great Lakes. Just has a much deeper, richy, earthy taste to that. Not as sweet, right? Just has a much deeper, richy, earthy taste to that. Now, they wouldn't have used this. You know, sweet is one variety.

There's flower, there's flint, there's popping corn, and there's sweet corn. And I've never had much luck with growing the sweet varieties because it's sugar and all things in nature like sugar. So bugs, raccoons, they love it. Deer. So these seeds would have been, you don't think they would have been hybridized with modern varieties? I mean, as much as we can tell. I mean, they were all turned into hybrids to grow well locally, which is basically what I'm attempting to do too. So the version that I originally had was a rainbow flint. And some of these seeds are

more sacred to others. So we were talking earlier about clan taboos, et cetera. So amongst my mother's tribe, the Omaha, my clan is responsible for keeping the sacred red corn. And now I'm glad to say that we have our own varieties of our sacred red back. One of the clan taboos is that who is better to keep the red corn than those that can't even touch it, which is why it was in the bag and why I didn't touch it. Because my clan is not allowed to touch that. It's one of the clan taboos. What do you do with it? I'm the protector of it.

So you wouldn't eat that? I can't touch it. I can't eat it. So your clan would have grown it, and then what would they have done with it? Shared it with the rest of the tribe, and every clan has their own taboo. Oh, so your clan is inside of your tribe. Yep. Okay.

Yep. So it's a bigger tribe, but your particular clan had this job. Yep. Understood. And so that's part of my job. I like that idea that who better to keep it than the one that can't touch it. Right. Wow.

Yeah. A lot of people have trouble with that. No, it's good, man. Give it to him. He can't eat it. Right? It'll be there when you come looking for it. It will be.

So what would they have used this corn for? Would they have ground it up? Probably. Could you boil that and eat it like corn on a cob, like sweet corn? You could, but that's not the best way to make it healthy. Historically, it's one of the things that we found from the anthropological record was that in its raw form or ground, flints have a thicker. I'd like to see that. Sure.

You can pass it around. And there's also beans there that are from the Cherokee side, the trail of tear beans would literally sustain this. And those are indigenous squash seeds there. So the three grown together is very important. Corn takes a lot of nitrogen out of the soil. Beans put it back. Squash keeps a lot of things out of their deer, raccoon. Raccoons love corn. And so when you plant them all together,

you have a whole different perspective of growing that is more sustainable, so to speak. Because when you look at the differences between Euro-American ag methodologies, one is put them in rows and then switch out the fields, whereas ours were rarely moved except for like a 10-year time period. So a little more sustainable from that perspective. But it's just been my journey with these seeds to educate. Going back to Robin's work on braiding sweetgrass, she had a dream after visiting, I believe it was a trading market in South America. And in her dream, she went and money was no good, only the sacred currency of other things that you could trade. And my students caught that for sure.

And when I began Sacred Seed, we looked at being a seed bank for money, taking on USDA grants, millions of dollars. And they finally said, no, let's just leave it as it is. And that's how it got the name. So rather than trying to exploit the plant nation for corn here, I just utilize it to share and to educate and to show people the beauty because this is not what we think of the corn. This whole plant is red-purple. Oh, is that right?

Oh, even the stalks. That's why I brought this in broken because you think of the corn. This whole plant is red purple. Oh, is that right? Oh, even the stalk? That's why I brought this in broken because you can see the cob is red. So the stalk is red? The stalk starts green and then turns a deep purple red. Really? And usually we'll make it about three quarters away before the seeds are ready. So is there like this seed with the organization, would there be a way for, I mean, are you distributing seed in any way to tribes or to other people? I do.

When we first started, it was really a matter of, you know, I had just a handful of different type of seeds. And I've got so many different stories of how seeds came to us. There was one fun story. There was a guy that was a descendant of the original homesteader. I want to say it was fifth grade grandfather. I don't know what it was, but he was a nice man and he had been digging on his land and found an old corn grist stone. And he did the right thing and he contacted, did his research and found out the tribe that it came from. It was the Pawnees. And he contacted them, and they told him, it sounds like one of ours.

Why don't you come on down and we'll talk about it? So he did. Mind you, that's a trip from western Nebraska down to Oklahoma. And when they got there, their tribal historic preservation officer pulled out one similar and says, yep, that looks like one of ours. And in a true sacred reciprocity trading agreement, they said, you know what? We're going to take this, but we're going to give you these bean seeds here. And I can never remember if it's spotted like a horse or painted like a horse beans,

but they're absolutely gorgeous. And it's a bush bean and it's what the Pawnees used. And I love it. I knew the story is for real when he told me all these things. One, they made him go down there. There's no put it in a mail package and let's talk about it later. They're like, bring it down on this talk. Once they got there, once they gave him the seeds, they said, no white man's ever had these before.

Oh, really? Are they in the collection now? Well, he was afraid to plant them. So when he heard one of my podcasts or stories, he contacted me and says, I'm afraid to screw this up. And, of course, I said, well, why don't you put them in the mail? And he said, no, why don't you come get them? Oh, really? So I had to go get them.

Oh, that's great, man. So there's all sorts of stories with this project. This has been really beautiful. It's an educational content to explain to people and ultimately keep finding all these different hybrids that ultimately should be helpful to us as human beings someday. Can I just ask one little baby question? Let her rip. Yeah, one. It's not a little baby question, but I'm wondering because we talked about it while we were having our snacks before the podcast, and we were talking about the problem of smallpox that really decimated the population and thus decimated the oral history that was there. Yes.

So knowing that that's sort of like a chink in the armor of this history. Cultural amnesia, perhaps. Sure. And maybe that's just a part of it, and then your people just accept that as a part of being people that do oral history. But now you, as someone, as a historian, you're gaining all these stories and you're learning more and more. Are you just going oral history or are you now writing it down and trying to preserve it in another way to prevent what's happened in the past? I think it's important to look at a combination of both. For someone who's written a book manuscript, as Steve knows, it's got to be the hardest thing I've ever tried to do and one of the coolest because it opens up

so many doors. But hopefully it's going to be a combination of both that I can, in this research and in these teachings, that I can help others understand things that we've missed. Just the understanding that there's a reason why we forgot so many things. The impact of colonization, impact of being acculturated into the American society. And there's a ton of history there and federal policies, and a lot of it's really sad. But regardless of that, you can still own your own history. You can find the seeds that your people once ate, and you can find them. A quick nod to the land back topic.

I know that's originally how I was thought of in coming on to here. But one of the richest examples that I can say, not to do with public lands, it has to do with private lands. And one of the best examples I can point to was the author Roger Welsh, who's a longtime friend of the Pawnee. And in the process of the 150th anniversary of Lewis and Clark, he gave the Pawnee Nation some of his private land out near Kearney, Nebraska. Oh, really? And asked them properly what they wanted to do with it. And it was a really powerful moment.

They said two things. They're traditional bands of chiefs. One was, we want to plant our corn, which they've done. And it's an incredible project. Deb Elkohock and what she's done there is amazing. And two, they said they wanted to dance. But ultimately, that goes back to the call to arms. What can people do who are interested in this topic and want to learn more?

At the very least, wherever your family lands might be, your provenance is important. Perhaps your family has been there since homesteaders. Maybe they've been there for seven generations in Western Arkansas. But if you go and look, you're going to find a provenance so much deeper. And if you have it within your heart to find those people that used to live there, welcome them back with open arms, then only incredible treasures can await you and any American who wants to explore the provenance of this land and history. And it's only going to help us get along better and to have a richer history of the lands that we share. How do people find you specifically if they're curious about your book that you've worked on,

if they're curious about Sacred Seeds, if it's other tribal members who want to connect with you and share notes? Sure. Share seeds? Absolutely. Sacredseed.org is the website for the project, and that's really what I'm wanting to support

doing podcasts like this but you can find me on Instagram taylorkeen7 I put up a lot of images

of the corn and plant oh you do plant nation I'm gonna get on that right now so Taylor Keen is a full time

instructor at Creighton am I saying that right that's right Creighton University's College of Business. Also the founder of Sacred Seeds. If you want to find out more, I'm sure you can dig in on that route. Can you repeat your Instagram handle?

Oh, yeah. Hit us with that. Is it TaylorKeene7? TaylorKeene7. T-A-Y-L-O-R-K-E-E-N, the number seven. All right, man. Thanks so much for joining us you got it clay i've got one last thing here that i wanted to share big old arrowhead oh look at that whoa this is is an ancient type of war club. Huh.

And it was adorned by a member of my tribe. Those are objects that are used during our war dance for younger men than myself. But I wanted to share that with you, Steve. Oh, it's beautiful, man. Thanks for inviting me on the show. Oh. Like we get to have that in our studio? You do. Oh, really?

Oh, wow. That's cool. Was this war club Made of wood Yes It was always Made of wood Yeah like a burl

Typically But it's origins Go back to a symbol Of power in ancient Native America The symbol of the mace What kind of feathers Are these

All kinds of different Things in there There's some pheasant There's some Southern birds that are in there, some pretty colorful ones. Those are cockatoos. I can straighten those out a little bit. I had to sneak it into my bag there. That's beautiful, man.

That's cool. Very cool. Thank you, because as our wall works around we're gonna that's gonna we're gonna find a good spot for that one so would this be omaha or cherokee that would have been just a probably goes back to the mississippian period because that symbol of the mace of power when we talk about it in the future what what would we say how would we describe this when a podcast guest goes what's that uh that's a war mace a war m mace. Uh-huh. From? The plains traditions.

The plains, okay. Omaha, Osage, all of us would have used those. Great. But you wouldn't want to get conked on the head with that. No. All right. Taylor Keene, thanks very much for joining us, man. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

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