This is downright sickening:
TOPOCK, Ariz. — In the Mojave Desert, just west of the California-Arizona border, an ancient pattern of lines inscribed on the desert floor marks out the pathway to heaven for a small group of American Indians.
Once covering 50 acres, the so-called Topock Maze is held sacred by the Fort Mojave tribe as a place of final atonement, the destination of a soul’s lifetime journey along the Colorado River from Spirit Mountain, 40 miles to the north in Nevada.
These days, however, tribe members say that modern civilization — in the form of a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. water treatment plant — is blocking their road to the afterlife. The tribe claims that the plant, completed but not yet operating, is close enough to a surviving portion of the maze to disrupt their spiritual journeys. It is suing the utility and state regulators in an effort to have the facility torn down or moved.
It’s revenge for the smallpox.
And on another front, we see the same sort of squirreliness:
When a science museum is loath to show an IMAX film because it refers to evolution, we need to ponder the role of religion in our society.
“Volcanoes of the Deep Sea” has been rejected by some IMAX theaters in the South out of fear that it might offend people with fundamental religious beliefs, The Associated Press reported.
“If it’s not going to sell, we’re not going to take it,” said Lisa Buzzelli, director of an IMAX theater in Charleston. “Many people here believe in creationism, not evolution.
How do we defeat religiously-motivated terrorists when we have this sort of crap in our own backyards?
The native “path to heaven” thing might not be logical but it is at least understandable – if they had ripped up an old graveyard the local non-natives would be hooting even if it was so old that none of the remains remained and no stones were visible people would still throw a hissy.
As for the Imax thing, maybe they will make a version for PBS. Oh wait, PBS is loosing funds because their news is too liberal and it has too many of those dirty monkey nature shows (Damn evolving sex-crazed, feces-throwing monkeys!) They probably would not be able to afford it. Maybe they will show it in schools as long as they give equal time to some kind of claymation movie about Noah and his magical boat.
My point was that the Casino-American path to heaven is at the same level as creationism; it’s patent bullshit.
I just reread the piece. I had read it too quickly and I thought they had torn up the maze. They are just saying the plant is just too close to their heavenly runway? Do water treatment plants confuse the dead or something?
I would however, gladly see them get a holy buffer zone if they would stop pulverizing archaeological finds in order to “protect” their ancestors from evil scientists, even though most archaeological remains are not directly related to modern reservations.
Indeed.
FYI I grew up in Needles Calif. and first saw the “Mystic Maze” you refer to in the very early 1960’s before Conn Edison destroyed part of it by building a settling pond to the South of it, the Northern portions were destroyed by the “New_ highway 66 and Santa fe road bed.
At one time the pattern that remains today was a design on the skirt of a female figure, the area of the new settling pond was unmarked desert with a single trail runnint out of (or into) the maze from the canyon behind the site, to god only knows whwere in the mountains there.
In a small “cave” where that trail dropped off the mesa into the wash directly south of the site was found a pottery jar still sealed wioth a wood plug and mesquite gum, filled with seed which i planted at Needles.
A few came up producing a type of native melon which the local Mojaves called “Ah Nine” (pronounced Ah-9), and a curious type of Zea Maiz which the locals used to call “Bronce,”
I was unsuccessful in learning a name for the Maze in Mac-Hav, and the oldest living in the area in the early 1960’s flatly stated that the Maze was not built by the Aha Mac-hav but was already there when they moved into the area, probably around the year 1000 A.D.; left by a far older culture who were long extinct, probably the same ones who did the intaglios at Blythe, and the two human figures (Male and Female) at the Joy Ranch site south of Fort Mohave in Arizona, the Hairpin south of the old santa Fe Ice House ruin, and the bi-sected circles at the head of the canyon containing Davis Dam, just north of Davis Camp, which is just north of Bullhead City (Which had dirt streets and frame tents when I first saw it) and in Nevada North of today’s Laughlin, which didn’t exist when I left the area in December of 1972.
The Circle in Arizona is bi-sected true North-South, the one in Navada is bi-sected solar east-west, and NO, I don’t think Aliens (Legal or Illegal) had a damned thing to do with either one.
If the Maze had anything to do with Aha Mac-hav religion it may have represented Havasu Nee Klopp or Frog Woman, Mastamho’s bitchy sister who, being torqued off by his tail wind when passing her bed at night, killed him through Ahn Yeelk, a form of witchery accomplished by swallowing his “Voidings” (which should have killed both of them!) according to the Creation story, but if so older Mojaves such as the late Hal Davidson never said so.
Hope this helps you out, or just consider it the ravings of a now 60 year old man who is probably better off forgotten.
Some of the same European-Americans who “throw a hissy fit” every time somebody writes an obscenity on the statue of some dead businessman or knocks down the tombstone of one of their dead ancestors (or worse yet, digs up that self-same ancestor’s remains for the purposes of ‘scientific research’ finds it A) amusing that American-Americans care about the cultural and religious heritage of THEIR land, B) troubling that any American-American would be offended at the idea of putting a treatment plant that stinks like European-American excrement right by a holy site older than ANY of the European-American churches in OUR land, and C) obvious that none of the American-Americans alive today have ANY sort of relationship to the stuff built here a thousand or ten thousand years ago. To those European-Americans I say this: either go back to your homeland that you worship so much and stay there or learn to love this land the way that we have grown to love it — like your very own father.
That latter task, by the way is what we here in this land, America, call Patriotism.
After you, Kos. The so-called American-Americans aren’t the first humans to inhabit the land we now call the Americas, but probably the second or third wave of immigrants. So it’s no more reasonable to suggest that the second wave of immigrants owns the remains of the first wave than it is to assign ownership to the third wave. Our ancestors all come from Africa, regardless of what your witch doctors tell you.
And there’s also the question of purposes. We want to study the remains of the early Americans in order to better understand history, not simply to bolster a claim to victimization that keeps the sacred casinos open. Big difference, dude.