...A Forum for American Indian Issues...

Continuing "The Genocide of Matriarchal Societies"

by: winter rabbit

Tue Jul 14, 2009 at 06:14:55 AM PDT

..one last example of synchronicity is between the Lakota and a prehistoric cave in France. Archie Fire Lame tells briefly of his travels there with his daughter, while talking to a guide he described as a "spiritual man."

Archie

Fire Lame Deer & Richard Erdoes. "Gift Of Power." pp. 277-278.

I found the image of a buffalo carved out of the living rock with water from a sacred spring flowing from its mouth. While I was contemplating this, I heard (his daughter) holler, "Daddy, quick, come here!" - There revealed a face exactly like the one my father always used during his Yuwipi ceremonies -

Then our guide said, "All this goes back thousands of years before Christianity." - (He) kept the image of a dark-skinned prophetess that nowadays is called the "Black Madonna." He told me, "They called her and her sisters witches and burned them at the stake."

"I know all about this," I said. "They called our medicine men witch doctors and shot them dead for the same reasons." He went on, "This here has survived. Few have been inside this cave. You have been chosen."

Next, Barbara Alice Mann has made such valuable contributions in terms of outlining and defining the "Western obliteration of women from the record, (p. 129)" that I don't think it can be retold too many times.

Unlearning the Language of Conquest Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in America. "Where Are Your Women?: Missing In Action," by Barbara Alice Mann. p. 121, 122, 124.

...in the often fractious discussions of the extent of Native American contributions to modern Euro - American culture, the glaring omission of women continues almost utterly unaddressed...Worse, from the European perspective, was the level of political clout wielded by woodlands women. The sixteenth - century Spaniards in La Florida (the whole American southwest) were nonplussed by matrilineage and the cacicas (female chiefs) with whom they were forced to deal...Spanish frustration was not a little focused on Guale females, who undermined patriarchal tampering with Guale culture...In 1724, the Jesuit missionary Joseph Francois Lafitau recorded in astonishment that Haudenosaunee women were "the souls of the councils..." Judicial affairs so entirely belonged to women that any woodlands man who wished to become a jurist or a negotiator had first to have been "made a woman" in order to be qualified for the job...

Mann then proceeds to outline the methods of genocide and cultural genocide used to destroy "the level of political clout wielded by woodlands women." She tells how the Spanish forced these women "to scalp their own sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers," and then Mann outlines "pen - and - ink witchcraft." "Pen - and - ink witchcraft" can be thought of as deliberately revising history. Mann continues to discuss how the "pen - and - ink witchcraft" was used in attempting to change the character and even the very gender of various entities in creation stories.

Mann ends with the following request, "We need the strong arms of our brothers reinforcing us in this effort." While I'm not a scholar, this is the best I can do.