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3. Mississippian Cosmology and Rock-Art at the Millstone Bluff Site, Illinois
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sacred stones, but the various Siouan groups have kept the tradition alive in tribal memory and have been awaiting the return of their sacred objects. Smith says that, prior to 1997, members of his tribe used the information preserved in oral tradition to search for the resting place of the seven sacred stones. He asserts that “the Winnebagos remembered that sacred rock, and they knew that it marked the resting place of the seven stones. But they didn’t know where it was located. All that time they thought it was in Wisconsin.” Once tribal members even excavated around the base of a large boulder in Wisconsin, but found nothing. Since their visit to Iowa in 1997, the Winnebagos are convinced that they have found their seven sacred stones and will eventually reclaim them. In an effort to convey their signi¤cance, Smith explains that “to the white anthropologists and archaeologists they just look like plain arrow points. To the Siouan tribes, especially the Winnebago, they have religious meaning. They’re just like the sacred pole of the Omaha, or the seven sacred arrows of the Cheyenne, or the White Buffalo Calf Pipe of the Lakota. They’re the main part of our religion, and they have to go home to the people.” REPATRIATION AND THE QUESTION OF CULTUR AL AFFILIATION By combining traditional knowledge already available to him with additional information provided by his elders, Smith has constructed a Winnebago account of the history and meaning of Sacred Rock and the stone and shell objects discovered there. Should the Winnebagos decide to initiate a repatriation claim under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA; 43CFR10), the account will constitute valuable evidence in support of the claim. But because NAGPRA requires that cultural af¤liation be established through “a preponderance of the evidence” before repatriation is mandated, it would be helpful if the oral traditions concerning the Sacred Rock cache were supported by archaeological and ethnographic data. In the absence of such supporting evidence it is conceivable that another tribe could submit a competing claim with equal validity. By their own account , the Winnebagos were only one of several Siouan tribes that once possessed, and eventually lost, their seven sacred stones. Furthermore, archaeological , ethnographic, and historical evidence suggests that the late prehistoric Oneota tradition in northeast Iowa—the Orr phase—represents the ancestral Ioways and possibly their close linguistic and cultural relatives the Otoes (Grif¤n 1937; Mott 1938; Wedel 1959), not the Winnebagos. The Winnebagos are believed to have hunted west of the Mississippi River during the protohistoric period, but it was not until the late 1830s—long after the Ioways Ratcliffe Sacred Rock, Iowa 35 and Otoes migrated westward—that the Winnebagos were forced to relocate from their Wisconsin homeland to northeast Iowa, where they remained for only a few years before being removed to a reservation in Minnesota.9 When Orr reported the Sacred Rock ¤nd to Charles Keyes, director of the Iowa Archaeological Survey, Keyes concluded that the artifacts were af¤liated with the ancestral Ioways. In a letter to Orr, Keyes remarked that the seven arrow points were consistent with artifacts found in Oneota (i.e., Ioway) burial deposits in the area (Charles R. Keyes to Ellison Orr, letter, 14 April 1945, OP, 9179, Collections, EFMO). In another letter written a few months later, Keyes declared that the “votive offering” discovered at Sacred Rock was “another bit of proof that the Ioways were the authors of the petroglyphs of the Upper Iowa Valley” (Charles R. Keyes to Ellison Orr, letter, 2 August 1945, OP, 9184, Orr-Keyes Miscellaneous Correspondence 1944–1949, EFMO). Orr, too, cited archaeological evidence from burials in suggesting that Sacred Rock was associated with Orr phase Oneota. In one report in which he gave a detailed description of the Sacred Rock petroglyph, he noted that “the ¤gure reminds one of the copper ‘snakes’ occasionally found in the graves of the [Upper Iowa River] terraces” (Orr 1963:6:85) (Figure 2.10).10 None of this, of course, proves that the cache of arrow points was left at Sacred Rock by the Ioways (or the Otoes). Nor does it demonstrate that the objects were not placed there by the Winnebagos, who could have deposited them at the site during their brief sojourn in northeast Iowa in the 1830s to 1840s or on earlier hunting excursions into the area. Analysis of the artifacts themselves also fails to point to origins among one...