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| Nick on the Mount |
Yesterday, the fourth grade, my immersion teaching partners and I went to the Choteu park. Choteu park is a lot of Native American significance, it was a heavily traveled place by the Native Americans and has many artifacts from them. The trip was definitely one of the best parts of this entire immersion experience.
The first thing we did at Choteu was meet the third and fourth graders from the Choteu school who were going on the trip with us. Our guide then walked us up to a rock that marked part of a trail that stretched from Alaska all the way down into Mexico. Native Americans made pilgrimages up and down this trail staying at different points along it for months or even years.
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| Tour Guide with the 4th grade |
After being shown the trail we got onto a bus and traveled to a hill where the Native Americans would go to have visions. What the Native Americans would do is walk up to the top of the rock and fast, trying to hear the voices of the mountains and have a vision. The hill was also an eagle capturing site. Here. they held eagles in high regard so they would not kill them. Instead they captured the eagles to take their feathers which were holy objects. Capturing an eagle was a long held tradition and something all boys had to do in order to become men.
The first thing we saw at the next site was a circle of rocks with a smaller circle inside it. Our guide explained that, in the winter, the Native Americans would build a tee-pee with a smaller tee-pee inside it so that when water would condense on the wooden pole of the tee-pee it would roll down the outside of the inside tee-pee and the people inside would not get wet. Close by was a huge ring of stones about 165 feet across, much larger than the Native Americans could have ever made their tee-pee's. The ring turned out to be a turtle effigy, another holy animal in their culture. The effigy was where they would perform medicine ceremonies.
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| Site of the Turtle Effigy |
The final part of the trip was going to Big Bear's cabin. Big Bear was a Native American who lived in Canada but got into some trouble with the law so he fled down to Montana and became a hermit. There are a lot of interesting stories about him. For instance, one day his neighbor came over to see how he was doing and as he came over a horrible stench was wafting from Big Bear's cabin, it turns out Big Bear had caught a skunk was cooking it. Another story about Big Bear is he would go out hunting with only one shot in his gun because, as he said, "A good hunter only needs one shot."
N. Zurawsky '13
