THE ANCIENT CELTIC , NATIVE AMERICAN INDIAN LINKS
New Evidence Puts Man In North America 50,000 Years Ago
The dawn of modern homo sapiens occurred in Africa between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago. Evidence of modern man’s migration out of the African continent has been documented in Australia and Central Asia at 50,000 years and in Europe at 40,000 years. The fact that humans could have been in North America at or near the same time is expected to spark debate among archaeologists worldwide, raising new questions on the origin and migration of the human species.
“Topper is the oldest radiocarbon dated site in North America,” Goodyear says. “However, other early sites in Brazil and Chile, as well as a site in Oklahoma also suggest that humans were in the Western Hemisphere as early as 30,000 years ago to perhaps 60,000.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041118104010.htm
“It poses some real problems trying to explain how you have people arriving in Central Asia almost at the same time as people in the Eastern United States.”
“There was considerable diversity among the early people(of America); they were much more diverse than Native Americans today. So somehow that diversity was reduced,”
says Richard Jantz, the University of Tennessee anthropologist who has been studying these ancient crania.
SO FAR THE CELTIC PEOPLES DNA HAS BEEN CONFIRMED IN AMERICA FOR c25,000 YEARS
Who Really Discovered America? • June 22nd, 2010
The old “out-of-Siberia” theory can no longer be taken seriously as the only sourse of modern Native Americans.In fact we know there was a pre-Clovis culture. This culture was probably destroyed ,along with the newer Clovis culture ,in a cataclismic event around 10,000BC
The fact that the Earth did see a major catastrophe in 10,000 BC. That period roughly marked the end of the Last Ice Age, whereby it is known that ice melted and consequently water levels rose. Dare anyone call it a Deluge?
It is also a fact that at the end of the Ice Age, species like the woolly mammoth, which roamed the North American content, died extremely sudden. In fact, an often quoted statement about their demise is that some mammoths in Siberia were found to be frozen, having undigested food in their stomachs. Clear evidence – in the eyes of some – of their cataclysmic demise. However, a more detailed study reveals that these mammoths did not “freeze-dry”, as some claim, but were mummified – a process that is not as instantaneous as freeze-drying.
Still, it remains a fact that the end of the Ice Age did away with some species, including the woolly mammoth. Most interestingly, the climate record shows that while the Ice Age was drawing to a close, an event occurred that resulted in an extension of the Ice Age with a further 1300 years. What this event was, remains a matter of intense scientific speculation. But geophysicist Allen West has proposed that an asteroid or comet exploded just above the Earth’s surface. The claim seems to have come straight out of Immanuel Velikovsky’s books and was thus treated with the same disrespect – the only difference, it seemed was that Velikovsky had the audacity to let his scenario play itself out in historical times, whereas West opted for the – only slightly – safer period known as prehistory.
West argued that the explosion occurred over Canada and created a shock wave that set large parts of the northern hemisphere ablaze. And that a truly global, earthshaking if not shattering event occurred, is shown by the presence of diamonds in Ohio and Indiana. Diamonds, it seems, are not merely a girl’s best friend – they might be the same for catastrophists – whether male or female.
Indeed, Ken Tankersley, professor of Anthropology at the University of Cincinnati, studied diamonds recovered in Ohio and Indiana and his analyses conclusively show that these originated from the diamond fields region of Canada.
West believes that the object that exploded over Canada was a three-mile wide comet, creating an explosion that West compares to being 10,000 Tunguska explosions going off at once. With such a powerful explosion over an area where the soil contained diamonds, gold and silver, it is assumed that the blast threw these metals and diamonds into the sky, whereby some of them fell down further south, in Indiana and Ohio. He believes such a shower might have continued for several months after the initial strike. “Some of them you couldn’t see, and animals would’ve been breathing them in,” West states. “But other ones would clearly have been visible. They might’ve even hurt if they hit you.” The larger diamonds were visible to the naked eye and dropped like hail stones within seconds of the blasts.
For West, it is clear what caused the mass extinction of the woolly mammoth: the heat from the blast set the air on fire. North America’s grassland, the furs of animals, the hair and clothing of humans – everything was set ablaze, and would soon die. But it were not merely mammoths that died. Another casualty of this tremendous explosion was man itself: the Clovis culture, a Stone Age culture that had only relatively recently arrived on the American content, ceased to exist as a consequence of this explosion too.
http://www.philipcoppens.com/10000bc.html
THE ANCIENT CELTIC CONNECTION
The Celts carried the early Y chromosome, which provides the first clear evidence of a close relationship in the paternal heritage of Basque and Celtic speaking populations. “They were statistically indistinguishable’, we also noticed that there’s something quite striking about the Celtic populations, and that is that there’s not a lot of genetic variation on the male Y-chromosome, We conclude that both the Basques and Celts are reflecting pre-farming Europe.
Somehow these people have remained in isolation from the rest of Europe up until the Bronze age where their genes begin to indicate an influx of female genes from mainland Europe” said Prof Goldstein.
Geneticist Prof Steve Jones, who recently published a book called Y – The Descent of Man, said;
“Genetics provided more reliable clues to the distant past than language did”. He and colleagues at University College, London, have spent years creating a genetic map of the Y chromosome, which is passed by males from generation to generation. The results show that the Welsh are related to the Basques of northern Spain and southern France and to native Americans. He said: “There has been much less interbreeding in Wales than you might expect. Wales and Ireland have the most homogenous group of males of anywhere in the world, from the research that’s been done so far”.
He said; “The Y chromosome common among Welsh males was an ancient one. Most native Americans have the same one
The Solutreans of Spain are now believed to have crossed the Atlantic using the southern Equatorial current and entered the Caribbean and Central America between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago to become known as the Clovis hunters of America. Recent genetic findings suggest that the people now known as Gaelic speaking Celts (including Irish, Welsh, Scots, Basques and Berbers) are a remnant of a group of people who also left Spain between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago
During the most recent ice age (at its maximum about 20,000 years ago) the world’s sea level was about 130 m lower than today, due to the large amount of sea water that had evaporated and been deposited as snow and ice, mostly in the Laurentide ice sheet. The majority of this had melted by about 10,000 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level#Changes_through_geologic_time
Recent studies of the tool kits of the first Americans suggest an entry from Spain and not from Siberia. Not only this, but paleolithic Caucasian genes appear to form the basal layer of the genetic makeup of many native Americans, helping to confirm a trans-Atlantic entry into Central America between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago. Recent discoveries of three 13,000 year old Cro magnon man skeletons in an underwater cave in the Bahamas suggests that the above is true and correct.
In 1977, University of Kentucky archaeologist Thomas Dillehay began excavating this ancient settlement, which had been remarkably preserved under a blanket of peat. Radiocarbon dating fixed the site at 14,850 years old, centuries before the Clovis had even begun their trek southward.
“There was considerable diversity among the early people(of America); they were much more diverse than Native Americans today. So somehow that diversity was reduced,”
says Richard Jantz, the University of Tennessee anthropologist who has been studying these ancient crania.
In the DNA profile of the Ichigua Native American tribe he identified a lineage that was clearly European in origin, too old to be due to genetic mixing since Columbus’ discovery of the New World. Instead it dated to Solutrean times. The genetic timelines show the Ice Age prompted a number of migrations from Europe to America. It looks highly likely that the Solutreans were one.
While most of northern Europe and Canada were under ice sheets, argues Stanford, these ancient Solutreans could simply have followed the sea-ice round the north Atlantic and down to the north-east coast of America.
These new discoveries suggests humans may have crossed the land bridge into the Americas much earlier — possibly during an ice age — and rapidly colonized the two continents.
“It poses some real problems trying to explain how you have people arriving in Central Asia almost at the same time as people in the Eastern United States.”
This documentry looks at the Florida bog mummies,just like celtic bog mummies, even thier DNA says so.
DNA of The Florida Windover Bog Mummies – Europeans Are the REAL First Americans – 1 of 2.avi
DNA of The Florida Windover Bog Mummies – Europeans Are the REAL First Americans – 2 of 2.avi
This documentry looks at the cultural links between the Solutreans culture and the Pre-Clovis culture.
Who were the first people in North America? From where did they come? How did they arrive? The prehistory of the Americas has been widely studied. Over 70 years a consensus became so established that dissenters felt uneasy challenging it. Yet in 2001, genetics, anthropology and a few shards of flint combined to overturn the accepted facts and to push back one of the greatest technological changes that the Americas have ever seen by over five millennia.
Traditional history tells us that European settlers discovered America about the time of the Renaissance. But revolutionary new archaeological data and the latest DNA research reveal that Europeans visited our shores far earlier some 17,000 years before Columbus was even born.
BBC Horizon: Stone Age Columbus (Complete)
These Solutreans Celtic people probably brought with them Bear Cults and rudimentry Druidism
BEAR CULTS
Bear worship (also known as the Bear Cult or Arctolatry) is the religious practice of the worshiping of bears found in many North American and North Eurasian ethnic circumpolar religions such as the Sami, Nivkhs, Ainu, and pre-christian Finns. There are also a number of deities from Celtic Gaul and Britain associated with the bear and the bear is featured on many totems throughout northern cultures that carve them. Bear worship may have been practiced as far back as the Middle paleolithic period amongst Neanderthal societies c.300,000 to 30,000 BC
THE HOPI BELIEF ,SIMILAR TO CELTIC PAGAN BELIEFS , THEY EVEN HAVE A CREATOR GODDESS AND A MALE SUN GOD!
“Spider Woman” is the creative agency among the Hopi who personally created the four “colors” of mankind. “She” attributes to the Sun the power of Creation of all things and origin of all spiritual wisdom and in this way the Sun becomes the living manifestation for the Hopi of the Great Mystery which is personally “known” as Sotuknang
In Hopi tradition, life is defined as a process of change and prevailing and persistent human concepts across time are known as distinct “worlds.” This concept of life as a process of change is so prevalent that a person is acknowledged as a new identity each day and there is no such thing as a static personal identity upon which to create such static speculative religious concepts as an eternal Heaven or Hell as a “final destination.” The spiritual teachings to the Hopi attributed to Sotuknang are functionally equivalent to those of the Great Mystery as “known” by all other Turtle Island nations in that they specifically guide the individual and the nation as opposed to creating the speculative religious framework for universalism, conquest and domination enshrined in a ritualistic faith or dogmatic religion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Spirit
http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/TheCreationofMankind-Hopi.html
These concepts are very similar to ancient Druidic beliefs ,distinct “worlds” , concept of life as a process of change ,etc . But these are very ancient concepts shared with many different cultures. This would suggest a very ancient date for these beliefs to have spread so far through so many cultures and to have been adapted into each culture.
Proto-Indo-European religion is the hypothesized religion of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) peoples based on the existence of similarities among the deities, religious practices and mythologies of the Indo-European peoples. Reconstruction of the hypotheses below is based on linguistic evidence using the comparative method. Archaeological evidence is difficult to match to any specific culture in the period of early Indo-European culture in the Chalcolithic (Mallory, 1989)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_religion
A good example of the Proto-Indo-European religion would be a comparison between Indian Brahimism and Celtic Druidism
One of the most striking comparisons to be found between the Celtic and Vedic pantheon is that of a Goddess named Danu and the myths surrounding her (also known in Celtic traditions as Don, Dana and possibly also Anu or Ana). A Goddess named Danu appears both in Celtic and Vedic mythology. She features heavily in Celtic mythology as the Mother Goddess (and a river Goddess). She is one of the most ancient known of all Celtic Goddesses, from whom the hierarchy of Gods received it’s name of Tuatha De Danann, “Folk of the Goddess Danu” Among the ancient Celts, Danu was regarded as the “Mother Goddess.” The Irish Gods and Goddesses were the Tuatha De Danaan (“Children of Danu”).
Successful comparisons may also be drawn between Lug and Indra.Throughout the Rig Veda there are many hymns to Indra (more than any other God or Goddess) and many of these contain references that associate Indra with the Sun and light. In the Celtic myth the Goddess Domnu is regarded as being of “Chaos and Old Night”, the abyss, from whence came the Fomors the deities of the dark waters who were conquered by Lug, the Celtic Sun God, and the Tuatha De Danann.
https://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/druidism-was-it-western-hinduism-18000-years-old/
https://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/the-history-of-the-celtic-people/
Where these beliefs share some distant common sourse or whether these beliefs naturally develope in human civilisations is still a matter from debate.
THE HISTORICAL LINKS BETWEEN SCOTTISH HIGHLAND CLANS AND NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBES
THE NEXT MEETING OF THESE GREAT PEOPLES WAS OVER 12,000 YEARS LATER……BOTH OF THESE ANCIENT PEOPLE AND THIER CULTURES WHERE FACING GENOCIDE FROM A SPREADING SAXON PEOPLE
There are many Celtic tales of brave adventures sailing West and discovering a New Land.
Did the Welsh Discover America? (3:19)
Welsh legend indicates that Prince Madoc sailed to America in 1150 A.D., but can science prove the theory.
http://www.history.com/videos/did-the-welsh-discover-america#did-the-welsh-discover-america
Madog Owain and the Mandan people.
The Mandan indian tribe also know as the “White Indians” is conjectured to have mixed with and therefore were descendants of prince Madog (Madoc) Owain of Wales who may be assumed an ancestor of the Madogs of Llanfydnach Wales.Prince Madog ap Owain Gwynedd was a younger son of Owain Gwynedd, King of North Wales, and Queen Brenda, daughter of the Lord of Camo, it is likely that he was born at Dolwyddelan castle in the twelfth century.
Prince Madoc of Wales and his people may have discovered America in 1170 or some 322 years before Christopher Columbus would arrive . British historian Richard Deacon writes in his book Madoc and the Discovery of America ;
“Prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd son of a king of Wales, was born in 1150 the story goes. He sailed from Wales and landed near the present site of Mobile, Alabama. He returned home, then made another voyage to the continent. This time he went up the Alabama River and other streams, then disappeared in the wilds of what is now Tennessee. But a traveler’s account of the 1800’s tells of fair-skinned Indians in that area who spoke some Welsh words and put sentences together in the way Welsh people do.”
George Catlin, a nineteenth-century painter who spent eight years living among various Indian tribes, was among those who were impressed by the Mandan’s remarkable traits. Catlin wrote: “A stranger in the Mandan village is first struck with the different shades of complexion, and various colors of hair which he sees in a crowd about him, and is almost disposed to exclaim that these are not Indians.” The artist also noted “a most pleasing symmetry and proportion of features, with hazel, gray and blue eyes.”
[ Ref Cor 1 ] During his long stay which lasted for years among the Mandan tribe, Catlin makes many interesting paintings of almost every aspect of their daily lives as well as written observations. Catlin was the only White man to make a written and pictoral history of these rituals and customs which included, their dwellings and torture rituals. Catlin finally came to the conclusion that the Mandan’s were the descendents of the Madog people based partially on these factors.
The Mandans spoke Welsh,they used a boat which was know as the Welsh Coracle and many of the Mandans had blond hair and blue eyes.
Another account of the Madog legend is from, in James G. Perry’s Kinfolk,
” Prince Madoc (son of Owain ab Gwynedd) it is said, sailed to America 300 years before Columbus in 1170 with one ship. He returned and equipped ten ships and with colonists sailed again for the new world. It is presumed that he landed at Mobile Bay, Alabama. Early explorers and pioneers have found evidences of the Welsh influence along the Tennessee and Missouri Rivers, among certain tribes of Indians.
There is no record that the Prince ever returned to the land of his birth. Peculiar things have been found in America. It is there are Welsh speaking Indians up the Missouri River called the White Indians. Also, they fish with coracles, and pull the little skin covered boats with one oar, like a spade. These boats are used in Wales today.”
Did the Irish Discover America? (3:16)
Did Ireland’s St. Brendan reach North America nearly 1,000 years before Columbus?
http://www.history.com/videos/did-the-welsh-discover-america#did-the-irish-discover-america
St Brendan, The Navigator was born in Fenit Co. Kerry in 484. Educated by Bishop Erc in Kerry, set his skills to developing his knowledge to the art of ship building and the rules of the seas around Fenit Island. Building a simple boat made out of wood and leather, St Brendan set sail and discovered America in search of the Promised Land of the Saints. His journey and adventures were outlined in his journal the Navigatio Sancti Brendani which even inspired the Great Christopher Columbus himself on his voyage of discovery many years later. Fenit, Co. Kerry celebrates the life and work of this interesting of Saints and welcome visitors to its St Brendan Visitors Centre. Further information can be found on http://www.fenitharbour.com or contacting stbrendan@fenitharbour.com
Did the Scots Discover America?
Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, Baron of Roslin (c. 1345 – c. 1400) was a Scottish and a Norwegian nobleman. Sinclair held the title Earl of Orkney under the King of Norway (see Earl of Orkney: Scottish Earls under the Norwegian Crown). He is sometimes identified by another spelling of his surname, St. Clair. He was the grandfather of William Sinclair, 1st Earl of Caithness, the builder of Rosslyn Chapel. He is best known today because of a modern legend that he took part in explorations of Greenland and North America almost 100 years before Christopher Columbus. William Thomson, in his book The New History of Orkney
In 1784, he was identified by Johann Reinhold Forster as possibly being the Prince Zichmni described in letters allegedly written around the year 1400 by the Zeno brothers of Venice, in which they describe a voyage throughout the North Atlantic under the command of Zichmni
Some supporters of the theory contend that there are stone carvings of American plants in Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. The Chapel was built by Henry Sinclair’s grandson William Sinclair and was completed in 1486. Columbus made his first voyage in 1492. This is seen by writers Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas as being compelling evidence for the theory that Sinclair had sailed to America
William P.L. Thomson,The New History of Orkney (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008).
Knight & Lomas, The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasonry, and The Discovery of The Secret Scrolls of Jesus (London: Century, 1996 ISBN 0-7126-8579-0).
David Goudsward, The Westford Knight and Henry Sinclair: Evidence of a 14th Century Scottish Voyage To North America (McFarland & Company, 2010).
THERE ARE MANY STORIES ON HOW AMERICA GOT ITS NAME.
THE “OFFICIAL” VERSION OF IT BEING NAMED AFTER A MAP MAKER IS A VERY FLIMSY STORY.
http://www.geographictravels.com/2007/06/how-did-america-get-its-name.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Amerike#Theory_of_the_naming_of_America
STRANGELY THE NAME GIVEN TO THE NEW WORLD “AMERICA” SEEMS VERY SIMILAR TO THE GAULIC/CELTIC “ARMORICA” (PLACE BY THE SEA) .I DO NOT CLAIM THIS IS THE SOURSE ,BUT ITS A STRANGE COINCIDENCE AT LEAST
Ancient Armorica meets the New World America
Armorica or Aremorica is the name given in ancient times to the part of Gaul that includes the Brittany peninsula and the territory between the Seine and Loire rivers, extending inland to an indeterminate point and down the Atlantic coast.The toponym is based on the Gaulish phrase are-mori “on/at [the] sea”, made into the Gaulish place name Aremorica (*are-mor-ika ) “Place by the Sea”. The original designation was vague, including a large part of what became Normandy in the 10th century and, in some interpretations, the whole of the coast down to the Pyrenees. Later, the term became restricted to Brittany.
Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History (2.17.105), claims that Armorica was the older name for Aquitania, stating Armorica’s southern boundary extended to the Pyrenees. Taking into account the Gaulish origin of the name, this is perfectly correct and logical, as Aremorica is not a ‘country name’, but a word that describes a type of geographical region – a region that is by the sea. Pliny lists the following Celtic tribes as living in the area: the Aedui and Carnuteni as having treaties with Rome; the Meldi and Secusiani as having some measure of independence; and the Boii, Senones, Aulerci (both the Eburovices and Cenomani), the Parisii, Tricasses, Andicavi, Viducasses, Bodiocasses, Veneti, Coriosvelites, Diablinti, Rhedones, Turones, and the Atseui.
Trade between Armorica and Britain, described by Diodorus Siculus and implied by Pliny was long-established. Because, even after the campaign of Publius Crassus in 57 BC, continued resistance to Roman rule in Armorica was still being supported by Celtic aristocrats in Britain, Julius Caesar led two invasions of Britain in 55 and 54 in response. Some hint of the complicated cultural web that bound Armorica and the Britanniae (the “Britains” of Pliny) is given by Caesar when he describes Diviciacus of the Suessiones, as “the most powerful ruler in the whole of Gaul, who had control not only over a large area of this region but also of Britain” Archaeological sites along the south coast of England, notably at Hengistbury Head, show connections with Armorica as far east as the Solent. This ‘prehistoric’ connection of Cornwall and Brittany set the stage for the link that continued into the medieval era.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armorica
The ‘Coilltich’, Gaelic for the ‘forest-folk’, the term the highlanders had for the Red Man. … It is likely that the Gaels realized that Native Americans were the disposed and disenfranchised of America in the same sense that they had become the subject race of Scotland, driven out of their home by Clearances that continued into the early twentieth century
THE NATIVE CELTIC SCOTTISH CLANS FACED GENOCIDE VIA MASSACRES ,CLEARENCES, LAWS AND DISEASE AND FAMINES
The Hendersons were known for their size and strength and became the personal body guards of the chief of the Clan MacDonald of Glencoe. This meant they were among the victims of the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692. After the massacre, many Hendersons emigrated to the New World. This process was further stimulated by the Highland Clearances from 1746 to 1822.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Henderson
During the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite Uprisings, Many members of the Clan Chattan Confederation supported the House of Stewart and rallied the Chattan Confederation to the Jacobite cause, of which many Davidson’s took part.
Notable members of the Clan Chattan Confederation including many Davidson’s were convicted and transported to the North American colonies
Many of these Jacobite convicts upon gaining their freedom settled in the Piedmont Mountains of North Carolina and raised families, leading the English by the time of the American Revolution to declare the area a Hornet’s Nest of rebels.
Notable amongst the many Davidsons fighting the American Revolutionary War was Brigadier General William Lee Davidson (1746–1781), a North Carolina militia general during the American Revolutionary War who was killed in action at the battle of Cowan’s Ford.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Davidson
Early in the morning of 13 February 1692, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and the Jacobite uprising of 1689 led by John Graham of Claverhouse, an infamous massacre took place in Glen Coe, in the Highlands of Scotland. This incident is referred to as the Massacre of Glencoe, or in Scottish Gaelic, ‘Mort Ghlinne Comhann’ (murder of Glen Coe). The massacre began simultaneously in three settlements along the glen—Invercoe, Inverrigan, and Achnacon—although the killing took place all over the glen as fleeing MacDonalds were pursued.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Glencoe
After the Jacobite Rising of 1715 ended it was evident that the most effective supporters of the Jacobites were Scottish clans in the Scottish Highlands and the Disarming Act attempted to remove this threat.
November 1, 1716 which outlawed anyone in defined parts of Scotland from having “in his or their custody, use, or bear, broad sword or target, poignard, whinger, or durk, side pistol, gun, or other warlike weapon” unless authorised.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disarming_Act
The Act of Proscription (19 Geo. 2, c. 39) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain, which came into effect in Scotland on 1 August 1746. It was part of a series of efforts to assimilate the Scottish Highlands, ending their ability to revolt, and the first of the ‘King’s laws’ which sought to crush the Clan system in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of ‘Forty-Five.
Punishments started with fines, with jail until payment and possible forced conscription for late payment. Repeat offenders were “liable to be transported to any of his Majesty’s plantations beyond the seas, there to remain for the space of seven years”, effectively indentured slavery.
The penalties for wearing “highland clothing” as stated in the Act of Proscription were “imprisonment, without bail, during the space of six months, and no longer; and being convicted for a second offence before a court of justiciary or at the circuits, shall be liable to be transported. . .” No lesser penalties were allowed for.
A new section, which became known as the Dress Act, banned wearing of “the Highland Dress”. Provision was also included to protect those involved in putting down the rebellion from lawsuits. Measures to prevent children from being “educated in disaffected or rebellious principles”
The portions that forbade other acts were covered under the generality of this part of the statute: “any part whatsoever of what peculiarly belongs to the highland garb. . .” The “whatsoever” makes it clear that this was not restricted to “only” traditional clothing. As bagpipes “belonged to the highland garb” and the Scottish Gaelic language could also be thus interpreted, these were used to that effect.
The most severe penalties, at a minimum six months incarceration and transportation to a penal colony for a second offense, made these the most severe portion of this act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Proscription
THE NATIVE AMERICANS WHERE FACING EXACTILY THE SAME GENOCIDAL POLICIES!
THESE POLICIES WHERE BLAMED ON “GOD” ,IT HELPS RELIEVE THE CONSCIOUS IF YOU ARE ONLY FOLLOWING GODS ORDERS.
MANIFEST DESTINY IS ALL THE RAGE
This painting (circa 1872) by John Gast called American Progress, is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Here Columbia, a personification of the United States, leads civilization westward with American settlers, stringing telegraph wire as she sweeps west; she holds a school book. The different stages of economic activity of the pioneers are highlighted and, especially, the changing forms of transportation. The Native Americans and wild animals flee
Manifest Destiny was the 19th century American belief that the United States was destined to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. It was used by Democrats in the 1840s to justify the war with Mexico; the concept was denounced by Whigs, and fell into disuse after the mid-19th century
The concept of American expansion is much older, but John L. O’Sullivan coined the exact term “Manifest Destiny” in the July/August 1845 issue of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in an article titled “Annexation.”
It was primarily used by Democrats to support the expansion plans of the Polk Administration, but the idea of expansion faced opposition from Whigs like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln who wanted to deepen the economy rather than broaden its expanse.
The belief in an American mission to promote and defend democracy throughout the world, as expounded by Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, continues to have an influence on American political ideology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_Destiny
Bizarrely even today,in the 21st century, the god excuse of “Manifest Destiny” is used to defend such ideas as Israel!
DID YOUR HIGHLAND ANCESTORS BECOME AMERICAN INDIANS?
Duncan McDonald was a descendant of the Glencoe McDonalds who were killed in the infamous Massacre of Glencoe. But by 1877 he considered himself a member of the Nez Perce tribe on the Rocky Mountains of Idaho. His story is re-told in an amazing book by historian James Hunter, Glencoe and the Indians (Mainstream Publishing, 1996). It’s a classic piece of genealogical research, which traces a family over 900 years and uncovers an amazing story.
The book deals with the life of the McDonald family during the last 300 years in North America and Scotland. Hunter demonstrates the family’s descent through these 300 years beyond reasonable doubt, and in principle a further 900 years.
Here is a sample of the chain of descent, generation by generation:
Charles Duncan McDonald was born in Mission Valley on the Flathead Reservation, Montana, on 17 November 1897. Charlie was a founding member of the Tribal Council of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. He died aged 97 on 2 January 1995 at his home in St Ignatius, Flathead. Charlie was the son of:
Joseph A McDonald who was born at Fort Colville in what is now Washington State in 1866. Joseph was the younger brother of Duncan McDonald who features very largely in this book as a result of his involvement in the Nez Perce War of 1877. Duncan and Joseph were sons of:
Angus McDonald who was born at Craig on the north shore of Loch Torridon, Scotland, in October 1816 and who died at his Mission Valley home in the Flathead Reservation in February 1889. Angus came to North America in 1838 and in 1842 married Catherine whose father was part Mohawk and whose mother was Nez Perce. Catherine was both descended from and and related to a number of Nez Perce chiefs. Angus, for his part, was the son of:
Donald MacDonald who was resident at Craig in 1816 and who appears to have had subsequent connections with the Dingwall and Strathconon areas. Donald was the son of:
Margaret MacDonald who was born in Glencoe in 1763 and who was an elder sister of the leading Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader, Archibald McDonald. The first name of Margaret’s husband is unknown. His surname, however was MacDonald. This man had family links with the Knoydart area and was related (possibly as cousin) to Finan McDonald who was born in Knoydart in the 1770s and who, as a North West Company fur trader, became one of the first white men to enter present-day Montana. Margaret was daughter of:
Angus MacDonald who was born in Glencoe in 1730. Angus fought at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 and afterwards became tacksman or tenant of the Glencoe farm of Inverigan. Angus was the son of:
John MacDonald who was born in Glencoe around 1680 and who, as a small boy, escaped with his mother and his brother, Donald, from the massacre perpetrated by Scottish Government troops in Glencoe in February 1692. John was the son of:
Aonghas mac Ailean Dubh (Angus son of Black Allan), or Angus MacDonald, who served as a young man with the Marquis of Montrose during the latter’s campaign of 1644-45 and who personally guided Montrose’s army into Argyll in November 1644. Angus was the son of:
Ailean Dubh (Black Allan), Allan MacDonald, who held lands in the early seventeenth century, at Laroch, near Glencoe. Allan was the son of:
Iain Dubh (Black John) who was the second son of:
Iain Og (Young John), eight chief of Glencoe. Iain Og who lived towards the end of the sixteenth century, was the son of:
Iain, seventh chief of Glencoe, and further traced down to:
Iain, second chief of Glencoe, who was the son of:
Iain Og an Fhraoich (Young John of the Heather) who, in the early fourteenth century, became first chief of the Glencoe MacDonalds. Iain Og was the son of:
Aonghas Og (Young Angus) of Islay who served with Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 – this being the key victory in the war which Scotland fought with England to establish its independence. Angus was the son of:
Aongas Mor (Big Angus) who was the son of:
Donald who was the son of:
Ranald who was the son of:
Somerled who was born around 1100 and who made himself the effective ruler of an extensive realm which comprised the south-western portion of the Highland mainland and most of the islands off Scotland’s west coast. Somerled, who died in 1164, said traditionally to be the son of:
Gilla-Brigte and then further back to:
Gofraid who came to Scotland from Ireland in 853 and who was made the son of:
Fergus who, some twelve centuries ago, was the chief of a tribe, clan, or kindred whose homeland was in the vicinity of present day County Derry in the northern part of Ireland.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/scottishroots/histories/glencoe_indians.shtml
THESE SCOTTISH/NATIVE AMERICANS WHERE THE LUCKY ONES, OTHERS DID NOT FIND SUCH A WELCOMING AND UNDERSTANDING HOME!
REDLEGS AND OTHER WHITE ,SCOTTISH ,SUGAR SLAVES
BUT IN NORTH AMERICA ,THE MERGING OF TWO ANCIENT AND GREAT CULTURES BEGINS
The emergence of these Scoto-Indians should not be all that surprising. Historically there were a number of parallels between the American Indians and the Highland and Island world from which the traders usually came. In each case the physical conditions of life, governed by the change of seasons and often perched on the edge of hunger, proved similar. There could not have been much difference between an Isle of Lewis beehive shieling and a Great Plains tipi or a Mandan earthen lodge.
The two groups shared cultural similarities as well. Each was an indigenous people. Each had fought lengthy battles, stretching over centuries, both against one another and against English speaking invaders. Each had achieved partial, but by no means complete, success in fending off the invasions.
As indigenous peoples, their social structures reflected numerous similarities. Each viewed land as essentially a communal resource, not a commodity to be bought and sold for profit Each identified itself by bands or clans, and since chiefdom descended through lineage, each devised a system flexible enough to allow selection of the best person for the job. (The British monarchy found itself much more restricted in this regard.)
Some anthropologists have found parallels between the fall Indian Green Corn dances and the Highland Beltane fires and harvest ceremonies. Since the cultures were primarily oral, each group accorded the bard or orator a position of great significance. The ballads, songs, folklore, and stories passed on to the children contained the distilled wisdom of their people.
One even finds a similarity between Native and Scottish naming practices. Historian George MacDonald Fraser has argued that many a Scots Borders name, such as Hob the King, Dand the Man, Red Cloak, and Wynking Will, carried special meaning. The similarity to American Indian names such as Black Elk, Crazy Horse, Red Shirt, and Rain-in-the-Face is intriguing. In each case these names must have carried connotations of social significance, “elegant recklessness,” and prowess that modern researchers can only estimate. That members of both groups were driven from their homelands, one by the infamous Highland Clearances, the other by white encroachment and Indian removal, deepens the parallel. Finally, the deep wisdom and strength of character that each group has displayed over the centuries has allowed them to endure these calamities with dignity.
Viewed historically, the Highland Scots and the American Indians were tribal peoples. Modern Scottish clan maps show how each chieftain drew the lines of his territory. For the laird, having a group of men at his call alone meant security. The symbol for gathering—a fiery cross sent around from village to village—later took on far more sinister connotations in the United States.
The power of the clans was not finally broken until the battle of Culloden in 1746, after which the traditional rivalry was siphoned off into wars of empire and, later, the sporting contests of the famed Highland games. The Scottish tradition of using clan names for fore- and surnames (Gordon Ross; Ross Gordon) shows the desire to keep these clan distinctions alive.
The lack of written records makes the re-creation of Native history before contact a bit more problematic, but anthropologists agree that the band or town served as the chief social unit here, too. As among the Scottish clans, trading and raiding against one another proved commonplace among the American Indians. The Peace River in northern Canada drew its name from a reconciliation between two warring tribes, the Cree and the Beaver. Navajos and Apaches regularly attacked the Pueblos of the Southwest. The Huron despised the Iroquois, the Crow distrusted the Blackfeet, and the Sioux were disliked by all their neighbors. Indeed, one reason why the British, Spanish, and French could gain their initial footholds on the continent was that Native bands were willing to use the Europeans in their long-standing conflicts with their neighbors. The Pan-Indian movement did not really gain ground until the late nineteenth century.
A number of nineteenth-century travelers remarked on these Celtic-Native similarities. In 1838 Hugh Murray admired the bonds within the tribal union. ‘The honour and welfare of the clan supply the ruling principle,” noted Murray, “and are cherished with an ardour not surpassed in the most brilliant eras of Greek and Roman patriotism.” He commented that, like the Highland clans, so long as any tribal member had sufficient food, no one was in the least danger of starvation. Another traveler, D. B. Warden, observed how tribes recognized basic boundaries between groups as they wandered over the Great Plains. Impressed by the hospitality and kindness of certain tribes to their friends, he saw an obvious Celtic-Indian link. “So unbounded is the hospitality of the Osages,” he wrote, “that cooks are sent about to cry as in some parts of Ireland, come, come, and partake of the feast of the chief man of the village; and to refuse this invitation is a proof of bad manners.” In The Heart of Midlothian (1818) Sir Walter Scott told of a Highland outlaw who escaped to America to become an Indian chief. Almost fifty years later Lady Aberdeen found among the Black-feet “many faces reminding us of Scottish characteristics.”
Since both Highland and Native societies revolved around a fluid oral culture, no figure was as central to their life as the bard. A warrior might perform valiant deeds, but his fame would soon vanish if he had no bard to record them for posterity. The bardic tradition had especially deep roots in Scottish life. In the early fourteenth century poet Blind Harry composed his Wallace, which was followed in 1375 by John Barbour’s The Brus. The quasi-fictional work by eighteenth-century poet James MacPherson, attributed to an ancient Celtic bard, Ossian, drew from this oral tradition. About the same time, the vernacular bards merged their songs with a set of Jacobite lyrics. Since political Jacobitism was no longer a serious threat by the late eighteenth century, the Jacobite popular song gradually emerged as the focal point of Scottish culture. Robert Burns, Scotland’s most famous bard, drew heavily upon these songs for his poetry, as did Sir Walter Scott. When one thinks of Scotland, the ballads, poetry, and music always emerge as prominent cultural elements.
The American Indians had a similar oral culture. At the time of contact the bands of North America spoke more than five hundred mutually unintelligible languages, representing perhaps the greatest linguistic diversity in the history of the world. Early negotiators of treaties recognized how important the orator was for this world. Gilbert Imlay’s 1792 description of the western territory of North America remarked on the Indians’ “talents of natural eloquence.” A generation later, Hugh Murray observed how the Indians of New York State had mastered all the tricks of European diplomacy. He marveled even more at the oratorical skills of the Iroquois leader. When the chief of the Iroquois spoke to the French governor, he informed him in no uncertain terms that he spoke for all the five nations. ‘The function of oratory among the five nations,” Murray noted, “had become a separate profession, held in equal or higher honour than that of the warrior.”
A native folk wisdom permeated these oral traditions at every juncture. The Celtic lands of Eire(Ireland) Alba (Scotland)and Cymru (Wales) are replete with folk legends. In fact, this region may well have produced the richest folk tradition on the face of the globe. Highland folklore abounded with tales of the invisible “little people” (faeries) who moved easily between seen and unseen worlds. Legends of mermaids, banshees, sea monsters, black dogs, kelpies, charms, potions, and enchanted wells have long infused Highland life. Most of these creatures proved troublesome, and few humans meddled in their affairs without sorrow. For example, modern New Yorker writer John McPhee spoke of a man who was wandering along the coast of the island of Colonsay when a city woman popped up from behind the bushes to warn him not to kiss any faeries he might encounter (which is certainly good advice).
https://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/druidism-was-it-western-hinduism-18000-years-old/
The Choctaws, or Chahtas, are a Native American people originally from the Southeastern United States.The Choctaw culture has it roots in the Mississippian culture era of the mound builders.
The Choctaw have many stories about little people. Swanton states of Halbert, “the Choctaws in Mississippi say that there is a little man, about two feet high, that dwells in the thick woods and is solitary in his habits … he often playfully throws sticks and stones at the people … the Indian’s doctors say that Bohpoli [thrower] assists them in the manufacture of their medicines …” The little people are said to take young children to the forest to teach them how to be medicine men.
The will-o’-the-wisp was called “night-name” by the Indians and was believed to plait up the tails of horses during the night and to ride them about until they could hardly be used next day and many died from the effects.
“that there were tribes or families among the Indians, somewhat similar to the Scottish clans; such as, the Panther family, the Bird family, Raccoon Family, the Wolf family.” The following are possible totemic clan designations
Swanton, John (2001, Published Earlier). “Clans and Local Groups”. Source material for the social and ceremonial life of the Choctaw Indians. University of Alabama Press. p. 79. ISBN 0817311092.
Anthropologist theorize that the Mississippian ancestors of the Choctaw placed the sun at the center of their cosmological system. Mid-eighteenth-century Choctaws did view the sun as a being endowed with life. Choctaw diplomats, for example, spoke only on sunny days. If the day of a conference were cloudy or rainy, Choctaws delayed the meeting, usually on the pretext that they needed more time to discuss particulars, until the sun returned. The sun made sure that all talks were honest. The sun as a symbol of great power and reverence is a major component of southeastern Indian cultures. ”
—- Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_the_Choctaw
The Native stories frequently touched on a time long, long ago, when humans and animals could speak with one another. Spider Woman taught the Navajos of the Southwest to weave, and Beaver taught the Eastern Woodland peoples how to work with wood. From the birds, the Natives learned which berries to harvest and which to avoid. Tales of the half-human Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest kept children near the campfires at night. The legend of Buffalo Calf Woman is still central to the Northern Plains people, and the story of the White Buffalo calf is an essential item of faith.
No character achieved more fame in Native folklore than Coyote. The universal trickster of virtually all western bands, Coyote always caused trouble for the other animals, and he dearly paid for it in the end. Native children loved Coyote stories, for the moral was obvious. Indian parents have used them for centuries to teach their children. (I will discuss Coyote in more detail later in the chapter.) Whether spoken around Native campfires during the winter storytelling season or woven into hundreds of songs and poems in Gaelic communities across the world, folk narratives such as these have embodied a social wisdom that has endured for generations.
Such wisdom proved especially necessary in times of trouble, and both groups have experienced more than their share of it. As the Highland crofters lived through the infamous Clearances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so, too, did the Natives of North America suffer through a series of removals that began in the seventeenth century and culminated in the 1830s. Overlooked for years by the dominant culture, the stories of the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the Navajo Long Walk are slowly becoming better known.
Although the saga of the Scottish Clearances is well known in Canada, it is much less widely recognized in the United States. Yet this forced and semiforced exodus continued for over a century. Historian Michael Lynch has noted that because of the varied nature of crofter society, the Clearances emerged as hundreds of “local tragedies.”
Given the population pressure and scarcity of land, many nineteenth-century reformers touted emigration as the best answer to Highland and Island social problems, although one observer compared the task to that of Sisyphus. The emigration from the Outer Hebrides continued well into the twentieth century.
Thus, for both Native and Celtic cultures, the past is never very far away. ‘The Highlander loves his past and his native land with a passionate attachment and the story of the Clearances is still deeply embedded in his mind,” wrote Ian MacPherson. “A storekeeper in Edinburgh’s High Street or a fishmonger in Perth can no more get away from the past than can an inhabitant of Hawaii get away from the Pacific Ocean,” observed historian Geddes MacGregor. In many areas of the Highlands local folk memory still blames the Clearances for the collapse of traditional forms of life. A telling incident to this effect occurred during the early 1970s, when a radical Scottish theatre group performed a traveling drama that reenacted the infamous Sutherland Clearances onstage
CULTURAL FASHION MIXING
The cultural similarity between these two tribal societies meant that the Scotch-Native interaction could assume many forms. Take, for example, the cross-cultural borrowing of clothing styles. In the Rocky Mountain region local tribes adopted the Scottish brimmed cap, often embellishing it with designs of their own. Similarly, the New York Iroquois added elaborate beadwork to produce a modified Highland Glengarry bonnet. The most documented Scottish influence on Native clothing, however, occurred among the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole of the Southeast.
As early as the 1730s, British philanthropistJames Oglethorpe enticed a band of Highlanders, mostly from the Inverness region, to settle in Georgia with the hope that this Presbyterian group would serve as a buffer against the Catholic Spanish in Florida. The settlers thrived, and by midcentury members of Clan Chattan virtually controlled all the Indian trade within the Creek nation. One trade item that proved popular was cloth for a kilt, for by coincidence the outlawed Scottish kilt resembled the traditional male Creek breechcloth. Both of these skirtlike outfits proved especially suitable for Georgia’s wet, marshy terrain, and traveler William Bartram once likened Creek dress to the Highland kilt. The Scots traders influenced Creek headgear as well, selling a number of turban like coverings, to which the Natives usually added feathers. With each passing decade, noted historian J. Leitch Wright, Jr., “the dress of Muscogulge warriors seemed more like that of Highland lairds.”
Clan McGillivray proved one of the most staunch supporters of the Stuart cause. McGillivray of Dunnaglas led Clan Chattan at Culloden. A number of Jacobite ballads celebrate the name McGillivray. An early list of members of the Charleston St. Andrew’s Society (founded in 1729) contains the names of several people banished to the Colonies after the 1715 Jacobite uprising, including John and Lachlan McGillivray. This Lachlan McGillivray is almost certainly the fur trader who in the 1750s married a mixed-blood Creek-French woman from the prestigious Creek Wind clan. In c. 1759, she had a son, Alexander McGillivray, who would become the most powerful Native leader of his generation.
Although Alexander McGillivray was the most prominent southeastern Scoto-Indian, he was not alone. The surnames McPherson and McIntosh (originally from the Inverness region) remain prominent in Creek history, especially in the Removal Era. The Colbert family played a role in Chickasaw life all through the nineteenth century, as did the McCoys and McKennans for the Choctaws.
The most famous Scoto-Indian of the early nineteenth century, the leader who oversaw Cherokee removal to Oklahoma, was John Ross. By blood Ross was seven-eighths Scots and one-eighth Cherokee. Educated by clergymen, he always spoke English better than Cherokee, although he understood it fluently. A visitor to Ross’s boyhood home once likened it to a Scottish manor house.
NATIVE AMERICANS COME TO SCOTLANDS AID
John Ross never forgot his Scottish links. During the spring of 1847 he read of the efforts of a Philadelphia organization to aid the Highland poor—estimated to number three hundred thousand—who were suffering from the potato famine. “Have the Scotch no claim on the Cherokees?” Ross asked. “Have they not a very especial claim? They have.” Thus, he wrote to the Cherokee Advocate to request that the tribe meet in Tahlequah to raise money for the cause. The Cherokees met, appointed a relief committee, and in May 1847, sent $190 to a New York bank “for the relief of those who are suffering by the famine in Scotland.” Many an Oklahoma Indian surname today harkens back to a distant Scottish ancestor.
The Southeast was not alone in this regard, for many other regions boasted Scoto-Indians as well. On several occasions these fathers renewed their connections to Scotland by returning there with their families or by sending the children overseas for a European education. The most outstanding early twentieth-century athlete on the Isle of Lewis, for example, had an Indian mother. So many Orkney men returned with their American families that the islanders erected a small college in St. Margaret’s Hope on South Ronaldsay to educate the mixed-blood children. One of these returnees, a lad named “Huskie” Sanders, arrived in Stromness in 1886. Product of an Orkney father and a Cree mother, Sanders was sent to Orkney to be educated by his grandparents. For three years young Sanders participated in the life of a Scottish schoolboy, but he longed to return to Canada and finally his family agreed. When he boarded the ship in 1889, his schoolmates cheered his departure until the ship rounded Hoy and disappeared from view. Probably the most articulate of these Scoto-Indian returnees was Alexander Kennedy Isbister. Son of a Scots HBC clerk and a Cree mother, Isbister lived in Red River, Canada, until his father sent him to enroll at King’s College, Aberdeen, from which he graduated in 1842. He later became a dean of a British teachers’ college. From this post he lobbied both Westminster and the Colonial Office on behalf of the Red River Métis. Eventually, he denounced the HBC’s treatment of Indians and mixed-bloods in a pamphlet, A Few Words on the Hudson’s Bay Company, with a Statement of Grievances of the Native and Half Cast Indians, Addressed to the British Government Through Their Delegates Now in London (1847). In one eloquent passage he compared their lives to those of the slaves in the American South.
Historians have just begun to pay attention to the Scoto Indians. Both Sylvia Van Kirk and Jennifer S. H. Brown have recently provided major contributions to our understanding of these peoples, but a great deal needs to be done
http://macthunder.8.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?p=312&highlight=
SOME PERSONAL STORIES
“At one time, around 70 per cent of Hudson’s Bay employees were Orcadian,” he says. “Their skills with boats were second to none, and when it came to breaking out new trading routes, and navigating unknown lakes and rivers, they were first in there.”
It was Orcadian doctor John Rae who was responsible for mapping over 600 miles of Canadian wilderness, and for discovering the last link in the Northwest passage through the Arctic seas linking the Atlantic to the Pacific. It was during a mapping expedition in the early 1850s that he learned the fate of the sailors from John Franklin’s naval expedition and was condemned by Charles Dickens for reporting that the unfortunate men had resorted to cannibalism while in the final stages of hypothermia and starvation.
“The reason Rae survived in the wilderness was because, like the other Orkneymen, he was reared in a harsh and exposed environment and he knew that the secret of survival was to adapt and go native,” says Wilson. The Orcadians respected the native people’s skill and knowledge and learned from it, and the unions they formed with native women evolved into stable family units.”
When contracts ran out, the men usually decided to stay in Canada rather than hope that their God-fearing Scots-Presbyterian families back home would accept such relationships. Some of course did go home, most of them alone.
http://www.electricscotland.com/history/canada/lost_braves.htm
http://macthunder.8.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?p=312&highlight=
The Tale of Isabel Gunn
Inhospitable elements, irate bears and quarrelsome natives were the kind of occupational hazards Henry and his kind could handle. Cross-dressing Orcadians in advanced labour were not. However, a baby boy – effectively the first European child born in Rupert’s Land, as the Hudson’s Bay Company’s vast territory was known between 1670 and 1870 – appeared within the hour.
The bold Orcadian lass, Isabel Gunn, had blown her cover good and proper. At a time when no European woman ventured into the fur trappers’ domain, Gunn had followed her errant lover, John Scarth, from Orkney to Canada’s inhospitable north-west territories.
At the Hudson’s Bay Company’s recruitment office at Stromness, she had signed on as “John Fubbister” for a three-year contract at £8 a year. She sailed to Albany, Hudson’s Bay, then travelled to the Red River area, where she seems to have maintained her disguise for almost two years, doing the same work as her fellow voyageurs and making canoe trips as long as 800 miles (although trappers and traders measured such journeys in “pipes” – the number of smoking stops made between paddling).
But the tale of Isabel, or Isabella, Gunn, which itself has inspired a couple of modern songs as well as a documentary or two, is just one among many often extraordinary stories which emerge from the tangled history of the Scots in Canada
Which also meant that, once Isabel’s true identity was discovered, there was no place for her with the Hudson’s Bay Company. “They tried her as a nurse to the schoolmaster’s children,” says David Forsyth, joint-curator of the exhibition, “and as a washer woman – at which, one account says, ‘she was no witch’, which meant she wasn’t particularly good at it. But there were plenty of indigenous women about who could do that sort of thing anyway.”
“She didn’t settle to these kinds of tasks,” suggests Barrie. “After all, she was used to being an independent person.”
The father of Gunn’s child was reputed to be her fellow Orcadian John Scarth, but when the Hudson’s Bay Company policy of no white women at its posts finally prevailed and she was shipped back to Orkney in 1809, it was with her son only. She appears in later Orkney records as a stocking-maker, but the end of her tale is far from romantic: she died a pauper in Stromness, in 1861, aged 80.
Her son returned to his birthplace in his teens and drowned, along the same Red River where his mother had enjoyed a measure of freedom not commonly granted to her sex.
http://living.scotsman.com/features/The-birth-of-a-nation.2465920.jp
Tragedy of Chief Bowles: “Few historical figures are as tragic as Chief Bowles, the 83-year-old Cherokee Indian chief who died on a Neches River battlefield near Tyler 164 years ago this month [July 2004]. The battle of the Neches, fought on July 15 and 16, 1839, was the principal engagement of the Cherokee War, an event discolored by shame akin to the Trail of Tears, the forced march of the Cherokees from their homeland in the Southeast to Oklahoma in 1838 and 1839. Bowles — also known as The Bowl, Duwal’li, or Bold Hunter — was born in North Carolina around 1765, the son of a Scottish father and a Cherokee mother. As the leader of a village, he led his people from North Carolina to the St. Francis Valley in Missouri in 1810 to escape growing pressures of white settlers in the South. He later led the tribe to Arkansas and then into East Texas.”
BLUE EAGLE, ACEE (1907-1959), Papers and artwork
Acee Blue Eagle was a Pawnee-Creek artist, teacher, and celebrity. Born Alex C. McIntosh near Anadarko, Oklahoma, Blue Eagle attended Indian schools at Anadarko, Nuyaka, and Euchee, Oklahoma, and the Haskell and Chilocco Indian schools. Advanced study came at Bacone Indian College and the University of Oklahoma. At the latter, he studied with Oscar B. Jacobson. Privately he studied with Winold Reiss.
http://www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/guide/_b2.htm
The Legacy of Ludovic Grant
By Jerry A. Maddox
A non-fiction biography about Ludovic Grant, Gent., born near Fyvie Castle, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1688. As a Jacobite warrior in 1715, he was captured along with 1,500 other Scotch Highlanders at Preston, England, and imprisoned at Chester Castle for six months. His trial resulted in banishment to Charles Town, SC, in 1716. After serving as an indentured servant for seven years, he became a licensed trader with the Cherokee Indians in Tennessee and married a full-blood Cherokee woman. His letters to Gov. Glenn of South Carolina from 1751 to 1756 preserved in South Carolina archives served to alert colonial authorities of affairs in the Cherokee Nation and French aggression in the colonies. As the ancestor of thousands of mixed-blood Cherokees, his legacy has continued to this day throughout the Cherokee Nation and America. Through his marriage and marriages of his three mixed-blood granddaughters to English and Scotch colonists his legacy has resulted in a heritage to those who trace their roots to a man who left his country for a new life in America three hundred years ago.
http://www.authorhouse.co.uk/BookStore/BookDetail.aspx?Book=262717
Lord Strathspey met with a senior representative of the Cherokee Nation on the occasion of his attendance at the Stone Mountain Games in Georgia in October 2008. This in turn led to the liaison which has resulted in the planned visit to Scotland by a Cherokee delegation, inter alia, to attend the 3rd International Grant Gathering in Strathpsey in August 2010.
http://www.clangrant.org/history/cherokee.htm
THE MODERN SCOTTISH NATIVE AMERICAN LINKS
Melting in the Stranger’s Pot A’ Leaghadh sa Phoit Ghallda
He’s of Clan MacDonald and he’s the president of a college striving to give self-confidence to the older, native civilisation; but this was his first visit to Scotland.
Dr Joseph McDonald is a Salish Indian, and his college was founded by the confederated tribes of the Salish and Kootenai on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. But he is the descendant of the chiefs of the Glencoe MacDonalds – as can be read in the book “Glencoe and the Indians” by James Hunter
When he was over in Scotland, Dr McDonald presented a lecture to a gathering of Gaels in the Gaelic College, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. He explained how 28 “tribally-controlled” Indian colleges had been established in the USA since the beginning of the 1970s, as well as three Federal institutions, for the “educating of the mind and of the spirit” through vocational, arts and Indian studies courses. They have even succeeded in attracting students from non-Indian communities and from abroad.
One radical feature of his own college, designed to relieve the shortage of those who could sustain the ceremonies in the reservation, has been a course in which six elder Salish and six Kootenai act as “mentors” for students learning cultural practices and the language for a period of a year – could there be an opening for a college to oversee the joint learning of crofting skills and Gaelic in the islands??
Se Dòmhnallach a th’ann agus tha e na cheann-suidhe air colaisde a tha strì airson fèin-mhisneachd a thoirt do sheann dualchas na dùthcha; ach b’e seo a’ chiad turas aige gu Alba.
‘Se Innseanach Sailis a tha san Oll Eòsaph Dòmhnallach agus chaidh a’ cholaisde aige a stèidheachadh le co-bhann nan treubhan Sailis is Cutanaidh air Tèarmann Flathead ann am Montana. Ach ‘sann de shliochd a’ chinn-chinnidh MacIain a tha e – mar a leughar san leabhar “Glencoe and the Indians” aig Seumas Mac an t-Sealgair
Nuair a bha e bhos an Alba thug an t-Oll Dòmhnallach òraid seachad do chruinneachadh de Ghàidheil sa Cholaisde Ghàidhlig, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. Mhìnich e mar a bha 28 colaisde Innseanach air tòiseachadh aig treubhan sa USA, a bharrachd air trì colaisdean Feadralach, bho thoiseach 70n na linne sa, is iad “a’ foghlam na h-inntinn agus a’ foghlam an spioraid” le cùrsaichean cosnaidh, ealain agus eòlas Innseanach. Tha iad fiù ‘s a’ tàladh oileanaich à coimhearsnachdan “gallda” agus à thall thairis.
Aon rud ùr na cholaisde fhèin, is gainne de dhaoine gus na deas-ghnàthan a chumail suas air an tèarmann, ‘se sin cùrsa anns am bi sianar sheann Shailiseach is sianar Chutanach a’ cumail cleachdaidhean cultarach is cànan ris na h-oileanaich fad bliadhna – am biodh an cothrom ann airson croitearachd is Gàidhlig ionnsachadh còmhla sna h-eileanan fo sgèith colaisde??
http://www.scottishradiance.com/galcol/galcol1102.htm
BBC Scotland Films Documentary
“At Cherokee Heritage Center”
News from the Cherokee Nation, OK
Cherokee News Path ~ Sunday, June 11, 2005
PARK HILL, OKLAHOMA – Caledonia TV, a British Broadcasting Company of Scotland, visited the Cherokee Heritage Center Friday, June 3, to capture footage for their upcoming documentary on John Ross and the Five Civilized Tribes during his lifetime. The documentary, titled “Chief Braveheart,” is a historical documentary about Ross who was chief of the Cherokee Indians during the most tumultuous 40 years of the tribe’s history.
http://www.yvwiiusdinvnohii.net/Cherokee/News2005/Jun2005/CNO050611BBCFilms.html
ANYONE FOR SHINTY?
Shinty (Scottish Gaelic: camanachd, iomain) is a team sport played with sticks and a ball. Shinty is now played mainly in the Scottish Highlands, and amongst Highland migrants to the big cities of Scotland, but it was formerly more widespread, being once competitively played on a widespread basis in England and other areas in the world where Scottish Highlanders migrated
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinty
An early twentieth century photo of a traditional Cherokee stickball player
We should organise a competition with Cherokee Stickball like we do for Hurling and Shinty. Another sport with common ancestry is bandy. While bandy today is played on ice, bandy was the term for shinty in Wales. A similar game was played on the Isle of Man known as cammag, a name cognate with camanachd. The old form of hurling played in the northern half of Ireland, called “Commons”, resembled shinty more closely than the standardised form of hurling of today. Like shinty it was commonly known as camánacht and was traditionally played in winter
Shinty is older than the recorded history of Scotland. It is thought to predate Christianity, having come to Scotland with the Gaels from Ireland. Hurling, a similar game to Shinty, is derived from the historic game common to both peoples which has been a distinct Irish pastime for at least 2,000 years. Shinty/Hurling appears prominently in the legend of Cúchulainn, the Celtic mythology hero. The game was traditionally played through the winter months, with New Year’s Day being the day when whole villages would gather together to play games featuring teams of up to several hundred a side,
In recognition of shinty’s shared roots with hurling, an annual international between the two codes from Scotland and Ireland is played on a home and away basis using composite rules. In recent years the Irish have had the upper hand, but the Scots won the fixture narrowly in 2005 and again in 2006, this time at Croke Park, Dublin. Scotland made it four in a row when they won in 2008.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinty
Lacrosse is one of the oldest team sports in North America. The first lacrosse sticks were essentially giant wooden spoons with no netting. There is evidence that a version of lacrosse originated in Mesoamerica or Canada as early as the 17th century. Native American lacrosse was played throughout modern Canada, but was most popular around the Great Lakes, Mid-Atlantic seaboard, and American South.
Native American ball games often involved hundreds of players.Traditional lacrosse games were sometimes major events that could last several days. As many as 100 to 1,000 men from opposing villages or tribes would participate. The games were played in open plains located between the two villages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stickball_(Native_American)#Native_American_game
Scots link to Native American tribe celebrated
An extraordinary link between Scotland and a Native American Indian tribe is set to take centre stage at an International Clan gathering.
It is believed that up to a half of the Cherokee Nation could be descendants of Ludovick Grant, who was a laird’s son from Creichie in Aberdeenshire.
A delegation from the tribe are planning a visit to the Clan Grant International Meeting this summer to discover the roots of their celebrated ancestor.
Ludovick Grant was captured while fighting for the Jacobite army in the battle of Preston in 1715 and was due to be hanged.
However, he escaped death and instead was transported to South Carolina, where he was an indentured servant.
Following his release from his seven years of servitude, he began working as a trader for the Cherokee people.
According to Marjorie Lowe, a descendent of Ludovick, the fact that he was the son of a Scottish laird would have been meaningless to the Cherokees.
Each person was judged on his own merits and they did not recognise any kind of social hierarchy except their matriarchal clan system,” she told BBC Radio Scotland’s Digging Up Your Roots programme.
“So Grant, no doubt, was accepted as a peaceful person who brought trade goods which they desired.
“Since Ludovick lived among the Cherokees for more than thirty years and intermarried we can surmise that he was accepted fully as an adopted Cherokee citizen.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/north_east/8447105.stm
Scotland’s Lost Braves
by Kath Gourlay
Tuesday, 28th August 2001
The Scotsman
They say you can’t choose your relatives. But you can go an awfully long way to find them, which is why Orkney woman Kim Foden is halfway across the world, sitting wrapped in a ceremonial blanket, eating bannocks made by Native American relatives named Kingfisher.
On a day-to-day basis the bannock makers are known as Yvonne and Carol. Their great-grandfather, a Cree chief, had negotiated for the reserve land the tribe still lives on. His Indian name was Ahyahtuskumikimam. His Scots name was William Twatt and his grandfather had been an Orkney islander.
As members of First Nation tribes gathered in Canada last week for the 125th anniversary of the signing of Treaty 6 – which created Sturgeon Lake Reservation – Yvonne and Carol were among those using the native Cree names they have adopted, and not the Scottish surnames that show their heritage.
These are Scotland’s lost children – fathered by the Scots employed by the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company – now distanced by ocean, prejudice and neglect.
“These people are our cousins – direct descendants of the same forefathers,” says Foden, whose maiden name is Twatt, and who discovered that the Indian chief who founded the Sturgeon Lake First Nation was a cousin of her great-grandfather. “I had no inkling of any of it,” she says. “But I work as an Orkney tour guide during the summer and I was fascinated by the number of Canadian Indians with Orkney surnames who had been turning up recently to trace their relatives. I started digging into how this peculiar connection had come about and discovered I was part of it.”
On 23 August, 1876, in order to avoid confrontation with settlers, seven Cree chiefs signed away 121,000 square miles of Saskatchewan and Alberta to the Queen in exchange for one square mile of reserve land for each family. Only one chief was native. The rest were grandsons of Scotsmen – with surnames like Spence, Tait, Macdonald, Twatt and Calder.
“William Twatt’s grandfather Magnus Twatt had come from Orkney to work for Hudson’s Bay in the late 18th century,” says Foden. “White women were not allowed there and so the men took native wives. The children were given the traditional family names of their fathers and were often bilingual, and sometimes fluent in Gaelic, Scots-English and Cree.”
As trading spread inland and north, the genetic mix became more and more diverse. Scots surnames are common among Inuit people in the Arctic circle and the native music – played on the fiddle – is jig, reel and Strathspey.
“It was really weird,” says Orkney musician Len Wilson. “A group of traditional Inuit fiddlers from Aklavic in the Arctic Circle came to Orkney last year, and I picked up my fiddle and started playing along. I knew all the tunes.”
Many of them clutched sepia photographs handed down through the generations.
The links formed with Indian tribes was mutually beneficial during the pioneering days of trading and fur trapping, but once native skills became surplus to modern requirements, so did the mixed blood races. Their white fathers and grandfathers were dead and links with the old country severed. Though they were accepted by maternal relatives, their aboriginal blood was not pure. They became known as “metis” – the mixture.
“Look, it’s stamped on my business card, Metis, and I’m proud of it,” says Canadian businessman Bob Armit, who has made an emotional trip to Orkney to find his roots
Until the present generation of adults, the mixed race people were not allowed lawyers, the use of public information services, or even to travel off the reserves without a permit.
“I met this wonderful chap called Alexander Dietz,” says Foden. “He’s dedicated his life to helping people trace their genealogy back and find links with their families. Up until the 1960s whole families of children were forcibly taken away from their families and put into residential schools – a kind of mass education programme.
“They grew up not knowing their own parents or where they came from, and weren’t allowed to go into libraries and archive departments to find out. I told my uncle and he said, ‘This is unbelievable. How dare they treat the sons and daughters of Orcadians like this!’”
“Dysfunctional families are the order of the day around the reserve,” says Foden. “These are kids whose parents had no idea about parenting because they’d never experienced it. Yvonne told me about a woman she knew who couldn’t pick up and hold her children because she felt it was wrong to touch them. No wonder alcohol and drug abuse is rife. These people had no self-worth for so long.”
Harold, while assuming the tribal name of Kingfisher, has donned the Twatt family mantle and taken responsibility for upholding the rights of the reserve and its people. “There are lots of issues to resolve,” he says. “The reserve used to be thickly wooded but in the early 20th century an American logging company stripped it and altered the way of life. It is only now we have got compensation.”
They now rent out the cleared land to farmers off the reserve who grow oil seed rape. He is trying to find money to set up heritage tours and fishing holidays.
“They have such a quiet dignity,” says Foden. “I never heard a bitter word, only facts. They say they can’t move forward without forgiving and the rest of the world could learn a few lessons .”
http://www.electricscotland.com/history/canada/lost_braves.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon_Lake_First_Nation
One of the most exciting revelations for Forsyth and Barrie in their research was the Métis, the mixed-race people of European and native descent, now acknowledged as one of the three aboriginal peoples of Canada, along with the Indians and the Inuit. Originating in liaisons between Cree, Ojibwa and Salteaux women and the incoming French and Scottish fur-traders as far back as the mid-1600s, the Métis were formidable backwoodsmen and fighters, and often acted as intermediaries between the immigrant Europeans and the natives, working as guides, interpreters and suppliers to the trading companies.
The Métis’ clothes reflected the cultural mix; often European in style, but heavily embroidered with ribbons and beads. This manifestation of cultural cross-fertilisation could be seen elsewhere in Canada, too: the Iroquois, for instance, developed their own version of the settlers’ Glengarry bunnets.
Eventually the Métis became powerful enough to challenge the Hudson’s Bay Company’s monopoly on the fur trade, siding with the North West Company, which also had much Scots involvement.
When the HBC granted 116,000 square miles in the Red River Valley to new Scots settlers, brought in by Thomas Douglas, fifth Earl of Selkirk, which threatened to restrict the all-important pemmican (dried meat) trade, the situation flared into the “Selkirk Wars”, climaxing in what became known as the Battle of Seven Oaks in 1816, when the governor of the colony and 20 of his men were killed in a skirmish with the Métis. Yet the man who led the Métis side was one Cuthbert Grant, a Scottish Cree who had been elected “Canadian Captain General of the Métis Nation”.
“Certainly the Métis community has been gaining confidence over the last ten years,” says Forsyth. “We saw a real manifestation of that at the indigenous games, where the Métis were competing along with the Ojibwa and the Cree. On each corner of the sports field was a Red River cart, a symbol of Métis culture which they used to use to collect meat from the buffalo hunt – we’re getting one for the exhibition.”
Forsyth and Barrie were struck by the warmth with which they were greeted. “We were welcomed into people’s homes so readily and graciously,” recalls Barrie.
A young girl played them a Red River jig on the fiddle, a tune which clearly betrayed its Scots ancestry, while over lunch they were told about the distinctive Métis bread, which one woman remembered her mother hiding if visitors called at meal times, because it was known as “poor man’s food”.
The Métis had no inkling of where the name came from. They only knew that this stigmatised home baking was known as … bannock.
http://living.scotsman.com/features/The-birth-of-a-nation.2465920.jp
CAN I THANK MY ANCIENT BLOOD BROTHERS FROM ACROSS THE WATER FOR THIER HELP AND UNDERSTANDING AND SUPPORT FOR MY PERSECUTED PEOPLE AND ANCESTORS . YOU HAVE COME TO SCOTTISH PEOPLES AID ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION. THANK YOU
IF THERE IS ANYWAY I CAN REPAY MY PEOPLES DEBTS TO YOURS, I WOULD GLADLY OBLIGE. WE SHARE SO MUCH MORE THAN JUST HISTORY!
TODAY NATIVE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD MUST STAND TOGETHER! WE MUST PROTECT OUR SHARED CULTURAL ROOTS AND HERITAGE AND HELP EACH OTHER IN ANYWAY WE CAN
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alba