By Gerald P. Wykes
It started several years ago. The first time might have been a dark and stormy night, but my recollection is dim on that fact. Pictures of a giant sturgeon started showing up in my email box. “You gotta see this” was the usual tag. I opened them because they were from legitimate friends and I could think of no way that the word “sturgeon” could be code for something bad. Each time, the picture was exactly the same. It showed a gang of ten guys standing in the water supporting a monstrous sturgeon. The ancient beast was obviously well over 10 feet long—11 feet, one inch according to the text—and “over 1,000 pounds.”
The image didn’t appear to be Photoshopped or altered in any way. If it were, the work was uninspired. I mean, why make the creature only 11 feet long when you can make it 25 feet long for crying out loud. Remember the San Francisco Bay shot of the great white shark leaping out of the water at a helicopter? That altered picture made the rounds a few years back before it was revealed as a hoax. How about those 1950s postcards showing a guy riding the back of a giant walleye?
No, the photo was real, but the problem with this sturgeon picture was that it was variously reported as a fish taken in Lake Michigan; near Biloxi, Mississippi; and in Willamette, Oregon, depending on the source. Either this fish was especially widely travelled and stupid, or something was fishy. It was the latter.
Long story short, the fish was a Pacific white sturgeon captured off the coast of British Columbia. It was still alive when photographed and was released right after the shot was taken. The problem here concerned the location attributions of the photo. If taken in the Gulf of Mexico, it would have been a really big Atlantic sturgeon. Attributing it to the Great Lakes would have made it the biggest lake sturgeon ever known. Lake sturgeons top out at a very respectable eight feet and some 300 pounds, but nowhere near the half-ton, dozen-foot mark of the Pacific variety. A detailed look at the pictured sturgeon would have revealed its true identity from the get-go, but that takes time and effort on the part of the viewer.
I can say with some certainty that this picture made it to the public as a real lake sturgeon picture because of its impact value. I know this because I almost used it as a lake sturgeon example myself (due to the Lake Michigan reference) before giving it the second look it deserved. Unfortunately, a real picture of even a humongous lake sturgeon pales in comparison to one depicting one of its gargantuan oceanic cousins! As educators we have the potential to either stop or perpetuate this type of misinformation by placing reality over imagery.
The old adage about not believing everything you hear or read has a direct counterpart in the cyber world. Don’t get me wrong—I am not pulling the old fogey tact here. The Internet is a pretty doggone okay thing. As an interpreter who is, like most of you out there, constantly researching program topics and seeking obscure photo sources, I am truly grateful—pretty much. I can’t come out and give it a full blown “wonderful,” however, because I have seen the shady edge to this otherwise finely tuned tool. Yes, it’s a tool and not a means to an end. But even the finest of tools can wreak havoc when employed in a thoughtless manner. This has a direct relationship on the field of interpretation and the veracity of our product.
I’m not sure why such photo hoaxes are perpetuated. Perhaps they are momentary jokes played on a friend that end up going viral. In fact, the word hoax is probably inappropriate, since in a majority of these cases the labeling is just plain mistaken. In the Internet world, one might come upon a page posted by a fifth grader who mistakenly labeled a June bug as a cicada. Such mislabeled pictures have the potential, when pinned up on Internet boards, to end up on millions of computer screens worldwide. Many end up in our own exhibits and flyers!
There are many actual online cases of nutria pictures being labeled as muskrats, for instance. I’ll be the first to admit that muskrats are notoriously hard to portray because they are essentially blunt, hairy footballs that slouch. Nutrias, on the other hand, are much bigger and more photogenic. Some of the best muskrat pictures on the Internet are actually nutrias!
The ultimate level of trickery, and perhaps the most insidious one, is where the subject is properly labeled but the location is not. The sturgeon photo was a mild example of this, but there are more dramatic cases involving cougar (aka mountain lion, panther, painter, catamount) sightings. Apparently mountain lions are “everywhere.” Like the Cheshire Cat of Alice in Wonderland fame, this feline appears and disappears at will and there are plenty of real pictures to “prove” it.
We easterners are constantly presented with a barrage of ghost panther stories. The bulk of the eastern cougar population faded into legend as settlers cleared the forest land for agriculture and out-competed the creature for big game. Unfortunately the true stories about lingering populations are being diluted by the overwhelming background noise created by Internet fakeries. We can easily ignore those farm cat pictures, but it’s harder to turn away from the real big cat photos.
As director of a Michigan interpretive center at the western end of Lake Erie, the subject of panthers is a topical one, believe it or not. The flatlands of the western Erie basin once hosted cougars up to the mid-1700s and the lake itself was indirectly named after the cougar. The Erie people, who once lived along the southern shore, were known as the “People of the Long-tailed Cat” or the “Nation du Chat”—possibly due to their habit of wearing panther robes with intact tails. The “Cat Nation” was extinguished by the Iroquois in the early 1600s, but their name remained affixed to this great body of water. Secondly, although there are now confirmed sightings of wild cougars in the upper peninsula of the state, there are continual unverified reports of these critters roaming throughout the lower peninsula.
Earlier in the year, a visitor brought in a blurry Xerox copy of an incredible trail cam picture showing a cougar dragging a white-tailed buck by the throat. According to his source, the image was captured by somebody in Escanaba—a location in Michigan’s upper peninsula. It was forwarded to him by a friend, of course. Since the cat was reportedly a Michigan critter, I was anxious to make use of the shot for future predator programs and went online to see if a clearer shot was available. Sho ’nuff, quite a few examples came up when “Mountain Lion Dragging Buck” was typed into the search engine. Remarkably, each copy of that dramatic photo was tagged with a different location!
Yes, this enterprising cat had apparently dragged his prey past trail cams near Alex City, Artemas, Ava, Batavia, Coshocton, Dinwidde, Warren, and “Chet’s Backyard.” According to this impressive list and my personal contact, the beast covered the states of Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, New Jersey, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. I believe that Chet lives in North Carolina, so you can add that one to the list as well. The complete list covered nearly every state in the eastern U.S. If you are to believe this online record, the skeletal remains of this exhausted panther will soon be found somewhere outside of Poughkeepsie lying next to those of a whitetail deer. His cause of death will be starvation and exhaustion.
As it turns out, the photograph was very real. It was taken on a ranch in southern Texas—a fact confirmed by the sagebrush in the background and by the original trail cam owner. Unfortunately, the location fakery that followed it has muddied the distribution record of the species and tarnished the credibility of every viable trail cam image on record.
In another incidence of misplaced cougary, three mountain lions are shown wandering about a snowy driveway. The digital images that landed in my email box were attributed to a location only an hour away from my home in southeast Michigan. Fortunately, it only took a short time to track these digital cats back to their original location in a Colorado yard. One of the keys in making that determination involved a car visible in one of the images. This vehicle had a blue and white front license plate of a design combination seen in both Colorado and Michigan, but the clarity wasn’t sufficient to read it. The fact that the state of Michigan does not require a front license plate while Colorado does provided an initial opportunity to plant a red flag on this one.
The message here is one of renewed vigilance to match a new era. There is a whole new generation of interpreters out there who are under the figurative gun to produce programs, exhibits, and flyers. The image gallery provided by the World Wide Web is increasingly becoming the main source for such material. We all—seasonal and seasoned interpreters—are potentially guilty of giving short shrift to the likes of muskrats, sturgeon, cougars, and eventually to our public. So much of the natural world is full of the kind of incredible stuff you can’t make up—even if you wanted to. Beware, then, the Internet stuff that is “made up” because it dilutes reality. If an Internet photo reference seems doubtful, there is a very good chance that it is. Check all sources and verify when possible.
By the way, thanks to that Internet, I found out that there really were panthers in Poughkeepsie, New York, as recently as 2003–’04. These particular Poughkeepsie Panthers wore skates and performed as a short-lived semi-pro hockey team. But, admittedly, I could be mistaken about that.
Gerald Wykes is the curator/supervising interpreter at the Lake Erie Marshlands Museum and Nature Center in Brownstown, Michigan. He can be contacted at 734-242-8149 or wykes@juno.com.
Interpreting Reverence in American Indian Sacred Sites
By Nancy Stimson
Do you have a place that had a profound impact on your life or your sense of identity, a place that is special and gives meaning to you and your family? Interpreting American Indian/Native sites can be challenging. Discussions have led to disputes between American Indians who consider the sites sacred and other Americans who wish to use the sites for recreation and commercial enterprises. Some disputes have led to legal clashes over the management of these sites.
These disputes raise questions regarding the environment, religious freedom, the relationship of citizens to federally owned land, the lasting impact of historical inequities, and how our society mediates between groups whose vastly differing experiences have produced competing needs and belief systems.
Interpreters can relate the reverence of the sacred sites and the issues surrounding the sites by asking their audience, “What do you value most? How is what you revere the same or different from what other people in your community value?”
Sacred places give meaning and identity to communities and individuals. We as interpreters continue to provide opportunities for our audience to make their own intellectual and emotional connections with not only the past but also contemporary Native cultures. This includes valuing relationships to landscapes, their spiritual integration with all of nature, and human arrangements, aspirations, and rewards. Our audiences may grasp the irony that a nation founded on religious freedom would ban the religious practices of its native peoples. We hope they will come to see how long, historic connections to place and deep spiritual roots that sink into land could be nurtured by indigenous people for generations but ignored by newcomers from Europe. Some sacred structures—churches, synagogues, mosques—are built where it’s convenient for people. Conversely, many American Indians believe that sacred places define themselves and that it’s up to humans to find them and care for them, not create or own them. What leads one culture to name a place Devils Tower—and want to climb to the top of it—while Native people revere it, keep their distance, and perform pipe ceremonies?
Mato Tipila, the Lodge of the Bear, also known as Devils Tower, is one of the premier climbing challenges in the world. For the Lakota and 16 other tribes of the northern plains who perform sun dances and vision quests nearby, the monolith is sacred. In the 1990s, the National Park Service considered a ban on climbing the tower. Opponents argued that the government was taking sides—promoting Indian religion—and denying climbers their right of access. In court, the National Park Service argued it was a matter of respect and accommodation of cultural traditions. Eventually, the National Park Service adopted a compromise, asking climbers not to climb during June, when Indian ceremonies are at their height. Today, 85 percent of climbers have voluntarily stopped climbing in June. The Lakota observe with some irony that climbing is banned entirely at sites that others consider “sacred,” including Mt. Rushmore.
Mining at important archaeological and sacred sites is practiced on Hopi traditional homelands in Arizona. The Hopi have a spiritual covenant to care for their desert environment. Throughout the Colorado Plateau, mining companies extract pumice, gravel, coal, and water for profit. Private property rights won out over religious concerns at Woodruff Butte, and Hopi shrines were bulldozed. The government bought out a pumice mine on public land at the sacred San Francisco Peaks. A coal mining lease on reservation land at Black Mesa has led to the depletion of vital Hopi village springs as coal is mixed with water and slurried to a distant power plant.
The Wintu tribe, the U.S. Forest Service, and new age religion practitioners want to use the same sacred place but in different, mutually exclusive ways. For 1,000 years, the Winnemem band of the Wintu has conducted healing ceremonies on Bulyum Puyuik, “Great Mountain,” also known as Mt. Shasta. When a proposed ski resort threatened a sacred spring, the Wintu and other tribes fought and defeated the ski resort. Ironically, the publicity from the battle drew growing crowds of New Age spiritual seekers to Mt. Shasta. The Winnemem Wintu believe that some new age practices offend the mountain and mock their traditional ceremony. They are attempting to influence what is permitted. The Forest Service superintendent denied the permit for the ski resort, citing the Winnemem’s concerns for the spiritual integrity of the mountain.
Before November 29, 1864, a valley along a creek bed in southeastern Colorado was considered a temporary home for the Cheyenne and Arapahoe. Since that day, when more than 150 women, children, and elderly were murdered by Colorado militia, this is a site where descendants of those killed can pay homage and remember the event. Today the sacred site, known as the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, is threatened by Euro-Americans who question history by creating uncertainty over the exact location and others suggesting that the event never happened. Interpreters at Sand Creek Massacre NHS relate the events leading up to that tragic day, as well as preserve history through interactive communication with descendants of the massacre victims and survivors.
Healing the Land
Attempts to preserve ecosystems or protect endangered species may conflict with grazing, logging, mining, or recreational interests. Native people save spiritual practices tied to the land that reach back in history and require solitude, silence, and access to plants or minerals. These cultural traditions may conflict with the definition of national parks or private property boundaries and create challenges for land managers.
Presenting these issues in an interpretive format for the visitor can be taxing for the interpreter yet very rewarding. The interpretive technique of asking questions to the audience can be helpful to emphasize universal concepts such as sacred, home, death, a sense of place, spiritual connection, etc. The interpreter may ask, what is sacred to me? Where are my sacred places? What was sacred to my ancestors? Is what was sacred the same for them as for me?
Has your special place changed over the years, been threatened or destroyed? Imagine physical and spiritual connections to place as practiced by an entire community, town, or country. What evidence is needed to declare something a sacred site? What happens when one tradition marks sacred sites by leaving them undisturbed and another marks sacred sites by altering them with buildings or other structures?
For More Information
Rogow, Faith, and Christopher McLeod. Edited by Marjorie Beggs and designed by Patricia Koren. In the Light of Reverence. (2001). Sacred Land Film Project of Earth Island Institute.
Charmichael, David L., Jane Hubert, Brian Reeves, and Audhild Schanche, editors. Sacred Sites, Sacred Places. (1994). London and New York: Routledge.
Theodoratus, Dorothea J., and Frank LaPeña. “Wintu Sacred Geography.” (1992). In California Indian Shamanism, edited by Lowell John Bean. Menlo Park, California: Ballena Press, Anthropological Papers n. 39.
Strapp, Darby C., and Michael S. Burney. Tribal Cultural Resource Management: The Full Circle to Stewardship. (2002). Lanhan, Maryland: Altamira Press, Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group.
Page, Jake (editor). Sacred Lands and Indian America. (2002). New York: Harry Abrams.
Nancy Stimson is chief of interpretation, education, and visitor services at Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in Eads, Colorado. Contact her at nancy_stimson@nps.gov.
Posted in Commentaries, Interpreting Indigenous Cultures