Tag Archives: Great Plains

Reality, an American Indian Tale « zendictive

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Reality, an American Indian Tale « zendictive.

A Sioux Story
Author: Unknown

The Creator gathered all of Creation and said:

“I want to hide something from the humans until they are ready for it. It is the realization that they create their own reality.”

The eagle said, “Give it to me, I will take it to the moon.”

The Creator said, “No. One day they will go there and find it.”

The salmon said, “I will bury it on the bottom of the ocean.”

“No. They will go there too.”

The buffalo said, “I will bury it on the Great Plains.”

The Creator said, “They will cut into the skin of the Earth and find it even there.”

Grandmother Mole, who lives in the breast of Mother Earth, and who has no physical eyes but sees with spiritual eyes, said, “Put it inside of them.”

And the Creator said, “It is done.”

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Moral: We create our own reality. We create our lives; life is not about finding ones self, life is about creating ones self. I have heard it said that, “we are a direct result of our enviornment,” all that we have been exposed to growing up and all that we endulge in as adults. We are given the ability to choose and with that little distinction we create our lives. We are the artist that paint ourselves, be it light, bright, colorful or dark and/or grey, we create our own way.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Romance of the Sun and Moon

The Sun journeyed every day, across the skies in search of a lake of magical powers. This lake will grant any wish if you drink of it. Now the Sun’s wish is that he can find his love that comes to him in the darkest night of the month…she’ll slide beside him…and love him like no other. His heart waits anxiously every month for her sweet loving…but it disturbs him that he knows her not.”

After many years of this romance he figures out a plan…and on her next visit he will try it…so when the darkest night of the month came and she slid next to him and loved him like no other…he put his hand in the dying fires ambers and filled his fingers with ash…and brushed his loves face as they made love.

The next morning she was gone…this shy one had left him again so Sun got up and went out into his day and searched for the lake as well as his love. The day was long and he found neither his heart sank as he fell to the other side of the earth. Then in the distant twilight he caught a glimpse of Moon. A lovely women who kept to herself and rarely seen by Sun. As he fell to the other side, he spotted the smudge marks on Moons face as he caught his last glimpse of her as night took over. Sun then knew who his love was and cursed that they lived so far away from each other. He was storming around for days.

Realizing they will never be together…unless he looks for the magical lake. That he can drink from it and ask for his wish to be with Moon always. Not just once a month when you see them both in the twilight. If you look real good she still wears the smudge marks as a reminder that she belongs to Sun.

Sun was granted his wish and an eclipse occurred. Sun and moon stood before the world together, a marriage that will last forever. Every so often an eclipse occurs and Sun and Moon renew their vows, and still, once a month they hold each other in the same sky.

have a harmonious day

Grasped from the WordPress Blog: Zendictive

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Uncovering the First City in Modern-Day America

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Uncovering the First City in Modern-Day America | The Mark.

Construction projects in East St. Louis have revealed the full breadth of Cahokia, the largest city north of the Rio Grande before the arrival of Europeans.

East St. Louis might have one of the highest crime rates in the U.S., and it might have seen two-thirds of its population flee since the 1960s, but a thousand years ago, it was the site of the largest and most cosmopolitan city north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Archaeologists have long known about a settlement called Cahokia that now lies beneath the Illinois city, but only just recently have they pieced together just how big the city would have been. Last year, construction teams discovered all sorts of artifacts and buildings when they were excavating the banks of the Mississippi to construct a new bridge in the area. According to research published in the journal Science, Cahokia was not the temporary encampment that many historians had believed it to be. Rather, it was sprawling, cosmopolitan city, 13 kilometres wide and spanning both sides of the Mississippi River, making it by far the largest city in either Canada or the United States before the arrival of European settlers. (Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan, both Aztec cities in modern-day Mexico, were significantly larger and more, umm, blood-splattered.) First settled around 1000 AD, Cahokia’s residents built hundreds of thatched-roof homes, massive monumental mounds of dirt, and ceremonial plazas. The population at its peak numbered in the tens of thousands, and drew in Native Americans from all around the Mississippi and Great Plains. However, by about 1200, Cahokia’s population had been halved, perhaps due to drought, and by 1350, the first North American city had been all but abandoned.

Family Planning on the Range: The Battle Over Bison Contraceptives

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Family Planning on the Range: The Battle Over Bison Contraceptives – Sarah Yager – Technology – The Atlantic.

Family Planning on the Range: The Battle Over Bison Contraceptives - Sarah Yager - Technology - The Atlantic

At feeding time, residents of the Brogan Bison Facility cluster around a hay bale, blinking at flecks of alfalfa dust that swirl in the air and settle in their shaggy coats. The herd, chewing and lowing, mills in a holding pasture near Corwin Springs, Montana, surrounded by sweeping mountain views and a seven-strand wire fence. Blue-painted squeeze chutes are settled in the dirt nearby, bordered by a swath of prairie grass that stretches for a few miles until it meets the northern border of Yellowstone National Park. This, under a graying sky beginning to spit the first snowflakes of another long winter, is the unlikely center of a contentious debate over birth control.

The bison, gathered after drifting out of Yellowstone earlier this year, are potential subjects of a USDA study of GonaCon, a contraceptive vaccine for wildlife. Originally developed by the USDA as a non-lethal form of pest control, GonaCon works by lowering the concentration of sex hormones in the bloodstream to weaken fertility and the urge to mate. The contraceptive was recently approved in Maryland and New Jersey for curbing the population of wild deer. Now researchers are hoping to use GonaCon to stop the spread of brucellosis, an infectious bacterial disease that causes pregnant ungulates to abort their calves.

The Greater Yellowstone Area is the last known reservoir of Brucella abortus bacteria, believed to have been introduced to the park’s bison by domestic cattle at the beginning of the 20th century. Roughly half the bison population in Yellowstone tests positive for exposure to the disease, which is primarily transmitted by contaminated birthing materials deposited on grazing grounds. Brucellosis also poses a threat to neighboring cattle herds when infected animals wander over the park’s invisible boundaries. Researchers from the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) are interested in whether temporary sterilization with GonaCon can prevent the shedding of bacteria-riddled afterbirth and help block disease transmission.

The USDA has spent close to two billion dollars over nearly eight decades trying to stamp out the disease, which carries hulking environmental and financial consequences. Bison who leave the park to seek food at lower elevations are routinely rounded up and quarantined, and those found to have the disease are slaughtered. When brucellosis crops up on cattle ranches, herds must be quarantined and infected members butchered. Additionally, the bacteria can pass to humans through unpasteurized milk. Jack Rhyan, a veterinarian medical officer and wildlife pathologist with APHIS, and the study’s principal investigator, said that the focus on brucellosis is driven in part by its implications for public safety. “Animal health is directly related to human health,” he said.

But while the GonaCon study is still in the nascent stages, some conservationists are already voicing concerns. Stephany Seay, media coordinator of Buffalo Field Campaign, a group that advocates for protection of the Yellowstone herd, views the USDA study as an experiment in population control. “Brucellosis is being used as a tool to manipulate the movement of wild bison,” she told me. According to Seay, GonaCon is a means of catering to ranchers who don’t want to compete with bison for grassland. “This is a centuries-old range war,” she continued.

Indeed, the interests of land-users have historically clashed with bison and their habitat. Once scattered over the Great Plains, the American bison population was demolished in the late 1800s by settlers hungry for meat, hides, and room for westward expansion. Numbers dwindled from an estimated 30 million to fewer than one thousand. By the turn of the century, Yellowstone held the nation’s only remaining wild population of plains bison. Biologists have determined in recent years that the herd is one of the last to retain genetic purity, with no traces of interbreeding with cattle.

From Seay’s perspective, the significance of the Yellowstone herd is reason to encourage tolerance over further tampering. She and the Buffalo Field Campaign have fought to expand range rights for bison. “The dispersal of wildlife lessens the prevalence of disease,” she said. “By allowing bison to roam, you’re thereby also reducing risks.” Ranchers anxious about contagion, she suggested, could immunize their animals against brucellosis rather than meddle with neighboring wildlife.

But while bison remain in the essentially artificial environment of Yellowstone National Park, bounded by a patchwork of land and legal rights, some degree of management may be necessary–even beneficial–for the animals inside. Marty Zaluski, Montana’s state veterinarian, pointed out that the goals of the USDA and bison advocates are, to some degree, in alignment. “It’s a non-lethal method to reduce the infection rate while slowing the population growth, and therefore reducing the number of animals that go to slaughter,” he said. “I really don’t comprehend why this is such a lightning rod for conservationists’ concerns when you look at the alternatives.”

Zaluski, who has also been a vocal advocate of immunization, sees GonaCon as a valuable addition to the disease-fighting quiver. He maintained that birth control could do more than buffer direct impacts of the disease in Yellowstone’s herd. “Brucellosis is limiting the ability to take the bison from this area and restore them in other parts of the country,” he said. GonaCon, with its potential to wipe out infection, could make the public more open to the concept of a free-roaming herd. “Ultimately, the entire nation loses by not being able to benefit from and enjoy Yellowstone bison.”

USDA APHIS is in the process of conducting an environmental assessment to determine whether the proposed study should move ahead. The assessment is scheduled to wrap up by early January, and the results will be made available for public comment. If approved, work could begin this spring–around the time a new generation of bison calves tests their wobbly legs.

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