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The Cross Section of Oral History and Geology with Josh Wolford - Ep 133
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In this episode, Carlton talks with Josh Wolford about his background in anthropology and his work on the relationships between Anishinaabe cosmology and the geologic/climactic events in the upper Great Lakes. Specifically on how they relate, where this fits in anthropology, ethno-geoarchaeology, and how we can look at other Indigenous creation stories for clues to our Paleolithic past.
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Literature Recommendations
- Talking Rocks: Geology and 10,000 Years of Native American Tradition in the Lake Superior Region by: Ron Morton and Carl Gawboy - Illustrations by Carl Gawboy
- Ojibway Heritage by Basil Johnston
- The Prehistory of the Burnt Bluff Area by James E. Fitting, Charles E. Cleland, et al.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ruins/133
Guest Contact
- Instagram: @jmwolford
- Email: jmwolford51@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to episode 133 of a life ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living life in ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover. And today I am joined by my co-host Connor John. And David is unable to join us because he's currently out taking out two birds with one stick.
Guest Introduction: Josh Wolford
00:00:29
Speaker
For this week's episode, we are joined by Josh Wolford. Josh, thank you so much for being on the show. How are you doing today, man? I'm doing great. Staying warm here in a very snowy West Michigan.
00:00:41
Speaker
I heard Michigan got a lot of snow. So we got introduced to Josh a couple of months, like half a year ago at this point. So we've been emailing back and forth trying to get him on the show for quite some time.
Josh's Research and Academic Background
00:00:53
Speaker
We were really intrigued by his current research as well as his master's thesis. So that's what he's on to talk about today.
00:01:02
Speaker
So once again, man, thank you so much for being so understanding with our ridiculous summer schedule and then us getting back on track so we can get you, get you out for December. So no worries, man. Yeah. I understand how busy it is and you, you guys rolled in archeology this summer. If not, you can bring this up to the field. I imagine we've tried.
00:01:27
Speaker
This is the most diplomatic way to put that. We've tried. That's where David was all the summer. Trying to get him via Starlink to do this was a wild ride.
00:01:48
Speaker
Yes. Or he's trying to siphon the free Wi-Fi off of a library from the parking lot. It was wild. We tried. He put his heart into it. We were like, David, we'll just record without you, man. This is too much. So yeah. But anyways, about you, not about David, can you just for our audience, introduce yourself, who you are, where are you at academically, and what you're doing, man?
00:02:13
Speaker
My name is Jeff Wilford. I have a master's degree in anthropology from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, or should I say Detroit, Michigan.
Childhood Interests and Geological Influences
00:02:23
Speaker
I got my bachelor's at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, and actually a double-minded in biology and geology. That's why my thesis is quite interdisciplinary. I've pretty much been interested in
00:02:38
Speaker
Not just archaeology, but all that stuff since I was a little kid. I grew up on a lake here. There was rocks everywhere from every time period in geologic history. I remember growing up watching, I think it was Jurassic Park. It was about to bed for me. They're hitting rocks with hammers and there's fossils of dinosaurs.
00:03:02
Speaker
I want to do that. So it was like two, three hitting rocks on the beach, but I would be disappointed because I would find like coral and not a dinosaur. So I was like, that's not cool. But when I got older, I realized that, Hey, that is super cool because this is coral and this is not tropical where I live now. Michigan is not tropical, but it was. And that kind of like threw me down this whole rabbit hole of what the geology and everything.
00:03:30
Speaker
I think, you know, that's the thing. We always find shells, fossilized shells as a kid. And they're like, well, this is boring. And then you realize, I found fossilized shells in the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia, where there is not an ocean. Like, wait a moment. That was cool as hell. Yeah. You know? And then you guys have old beer. Like, that coal, like, the Petoskey Stone, essentially. Why is it not a Petoskey? This is a rugos coal. It's 400 million years old.
00:03:57
Speaker
That's on your desk. Yes. A lot more. But I. As I told you, lots of rocks. I love so much. I love. I got a little I got a little shell. I got a little. It looks like an ammonite. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you know, that's what happens when you're an archaeologist, nerd, something like that. And nothing nearly that old on my
Anthropology and Mythology Connections
00:04:21
Speaker
desk at all. I have I have a lot. Yeah. Damn it. I need to go get shells.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, I mean like that's just thinking about her finding geology so fascinating, you know, like talking about finding shells in abolition mountains, or like even like Mount Everest is a great example, where literally at the summit, there's limestone that's I think 30 million years old and has shell fossils, 29,000 feet above sea level.
00:04:46
Speaker
That's wild. Yeah. There's also a bunch of dead bodies. They're off. They're frozen. They're still there? They can't get them off. That boggles my mind.
00:04:58
Speaker
as a detour. So you obviously, you mentioned that you're interested in the hard sciences. Where does the anthropology come into that? That came in because I'm also super interested in history and mythology. I just love studying all sorts of different mythologies. I find myself hyper focusing into
00:05:22
Speaker
Norse mythology for some time and Greek mythology for some time and so on and then I've always been into like studying different mythologies just learning about each one like first like maybe Norse mythology Greek mythology and so on and then
00:05:40
Speaker
What's, what are the stories of like where I live in the Great Lakes? Do we have like, you know, gods and all these epic stories like the Odyssey and stuff like that? We do. And that's, you know, that's what kind of like maybe dive into studying in a showered culture. And just because that's like, that's where I live is in the Great Lakes. We have, you know, to quote James Red Sky, who is a, an elder from Connecticut,
00:06:12
Speaker
He was interviewed by Solon Dubny for his book, Sacred Scrolls in the Southern Ojibwe. He basically said, he pointed it on the shelf in the Bible and he said, you see that Bible? There's that much and much more in Bedeiro.
00:06:28
Speaker
that to me is just like wow there's all this like knowledge
Personal Ancestry and Academic Journey
00:06:31
Speaker
that's just not written down it's it's in like their ancestral memory and they did recount these birch bark scrolls and not rock art but that's like shorthand it's like pre-viral ethics kind of deal it's like where one image will represent a whole story which is so cool man
00:06:53
Speaker
Yeah, man. No, that's, that's really cool. And I also like you picked up on how you refer to it as a, we have those histories with that recognition of like tying yourself to the land in a way of like recognizing, like you're not othering yourself. I thought that was really, I caught onto that really pretty tiny little bit.
00:07:15
Speaker
of Anishinaabe because I have on my dad's mom's side, her side of the family is French Canadian. And so it is very common during the, in fact, it was encouraged in the colonial period for the voyage on to intermarry with Native women because they got
00:07:37
Speaker
by mirroring into that clone, they would have access to that hunting territory and having access to all the furs. I'm sure you guys know that the fur trade during the colonial period is pretty much what built America, essentially. Yes, it did. That is that, yes. Just yes.
00:07:57
Speaker
Solid, man. So where'd you go to undergrad, I guess? So you went to, you're at Wayne State now. I graduated. Okay. So you're done from Wayne. That's where your thesis is. Yeah. I thought about getting the PhD. I almost decided to get it. And I like actually listened to your guys's episodes.
00:08:14
Speaker
I can't remember who you had on. She had like a dual PhD. Yeah. It's like in psychology and in, she was like something about left-handedness. That was great. But she was talking about how hard it was for her to find a job with two PhDs. I'm like, wow, her resume is way better than mine. Maybe I should go.
00:08:35
Speaker
So I kind of decided against it, but my undergrad, I originally started going to a place called Saginaw Valley because I was pre-med at first and I was just kind of studying anthropology, archeology for fun. Like between class and homework, I would go up into the fourth floor of the library there and just pick out different books about Ojibwe peoples and Anishinaabe peoples.
00:09:02
Speaker
and read about. And then I think it was after I took Gen Chem chemistry. I was like, wow, this is fucking hard. I'm going to have to do Chem 2, Orgo 1 and 2, Physics 1 and 2, California 2. I'm not that good at math. So maybe I should stop trying to be a doctor and follow this archaeology thing.
00:09:23
Speaker
Well, it's weird because I think like initially in a lot of cases you want to get into something that you can see a career in. And I don't think we as a discipline advertise archaeology or anthropology is something that you can get a career in.
Fieldwork Experiences and Geological Myths
00:09:38
Speaker
That's going to make you money. I mean, it's not going to make you a ton of money. It's not going to make you med money, but it will certainly. Yeah. But there are places for folks in anthropology and archaeology. So it's,
00:09:53
Speaker
I feel like that's a very common thing that we see is that people are like, eh, I'm going to go for like a real job. And then I'll study this like on the side, but you can, you can like pursue this as a career. Oh yeah, definitely. And like, there's so many different avenues that you can take afro. Like I was a tour guide on Mackinac Island for five seasons.
00:10:15
Speaker
And I really looked at that as like, kind of like my fieldwork. And I looked at that, even though I worked 70 hours a week giving tours to people, I kind of was involved in this place that was like, it's sacred. Like that's Mackinac Island is the spot, I'm going to talk about it in the paper, where this is about a recreation of the world after the destruction of flow. And
00:10:40
Speaker
Anishinaabe up there still believe that. Yeah. Those, those flood stories are pretty ubiquitous across. Oh yeah. North America. Yeah. Oh yeah. Everyone, everyone has one, which is always fascinating, uh, just as a, as an aside, but. Yeah. It's usually a crazy arc, you know, story. Yeah. It's almost like there was like this time period where there was a lot more place and then it's
00:11:07
Speaker
Yeah. That would be like all this fresh water all of a sudden. And back when the rivers were not as deep, they're all fairly shallow and wide and very susceptible to flooding these large landscapes. If they got oversaturated, who would have guessed, right? Well, yeah. And that's the interesting thing is that in so many different sources from so many different, whether it was historic literature or an ethnologist or an anthropologist,
00:11:39
Speaker
talking about the flood, different versions of who, what characters were, you know, it's kind of like filling the mad lib of who is the one that inspired the muskrat to swim down to the bottom and grab the pieces of soil to create the land. And the anabosia could be the animals themselves, could even get you manateu, could even all sorts of different people or manateus. But there was one story from James Red Sky, who I mentioned a little earlier,
00:12:05
Speaker
who I've never found this anywhere else, where he mentioned that the creator tried to create the world four times. The first three times he failed because there was too much water, there was too much ice. And each time it took to recreate was between 2000 and 4000 years. It's like, well, that's exactly like the length of time that these pro glacial lake periods
00:12:33
Speaker
around where there was the water was, there was a lot of ice. They couldn't go further north, you know, because the ice was there and then all that water and seasonal flooding. That's fascinating. Yeah. I thought when I read no way, it like literally fits right into my, cause I found that while I was doing some heavy research into my thesis, cause I kind of developed this idea, getting tours because there was, uh, Mackinac Island is
00:12:59
Speaker
I mean, as it says in the story, it is on the back of a turtle. It grows out of the water. But for geologists, that island is one of the best places you can go, Great Lakes, to see paleo shorelines. There's over 25 on the island, all over it. And there's one spot where I would stop with my buggy and my passengers. It's called Rifle Range. And in my geology of Michigan book, these specifically mentioned Rifle Range has a
Incorporating Indigenous Perspectives in Research
00:13:25
Speaker
great place to see ancient shorelines.
00:13:27
Speaker
and you can see 11 that roll down a hill from
00:13:33
Speaker
what I wrote is a carriage road down to Fort Mackinac. A lot of people usually tell the story about the attack at Fort Mackinac from the British there, but then I started to talk about, well, actually look at these ancient shorelines. They have a talk about isostatic rebound, which is the, it's like the crust of the earth is solid, obviously, because we're all on top of older buildings and we drive around on it and everything, but in the mass scale, it behaves more like a plastic.
00:14:00
Speaker
And when you put something really heavy on top of it, it'll sink. Kind of like in the foam of a mattress or the chairs we're sitting in right now, it's depressed under the weight of our butts. But then when we stand, the foam will return to its original shape. And that tendency for returning to its original shape is called ectostasy.
00:14:18
Speaker
And so the atostasia and the active bounding is called isostatic rebound. And that happens. It's still happening to this day in Michigan, very, very, like almost unmeasurable. But up in Hudson Bay, it still is rebounding. I think something like March, which is here.
00:14:36
Speaker
that's wild especially and that's like based on like from the glaciers right because you have like like I don't I don't remember how high the glaciers are but that's like a big chunk of ice that you just like sitting on top of this oh yeah like insane amount michigan like
00:14:52
Speaker
I'll use my hand. I don't know if you've ever seen anyone do this. The ice was basically this from here to here was what they call something a hinge line, which is where there was the most, where they're actually rather able to measure isostatic rebound in the crust of the lower peninsula. And over that point, it was about a mile and a half thick up near Hudson Bay. It was two miles thick.
00:15:16
Speaker
Just, and that's, you know, the, the place just seems 2 million years long, almost. It was like 2.1 million years ago, I think is when I technically started. And that's exhibited through ice course, where we can see 800,000 years back, but the, you know, the, the peaking and troughing of CO2 concentrations and it's in those interglacial periods, or rather the troughs of CO2, that's a glacial period. And then when we get peak, there's higher amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. So like in the case of it was warmer.
00:15:46
Speaker
because it's a greenhouse gas, climate change, all that sort of thing. It'd be wild for a human to walk up and be like, oh, there's this big old pile, like a mile high pile of ice. I guess I shouldn't keep going on.
00:16:04
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I guess. I think though with the continental glaciers, it would just like be like a gradual thing. And you wouldn't even realize if you're walking on top of it, you would probably be like a mile above the actual rock, because that just would be ground basically. But there was probably lots of fissures and crevices in there that, you know, you can fall into. In a book talking rocks,
00:16:30
Speaker
Carl Godboy, Earth walks is what his native moment is. He said they call it the old man, is what they call the ice. And in one of their stories, it's like the dueling of two shamans, where it's like, there's an old man winter, and then there's like the youthful spring. And if they were battled every year, and the spring would win every year, obviously. And that he thinks that was a metaphor for like,
00:17:02
Speaker
I guess, victory of spring taking over the land because there's no more ice, really, like there once was. Huh. Dude, that's fascinating. And on that note, we're going to go ahead and close out this segment. We'll be right back with episode 133 of Life and Ruins here with Josh Wolford. Welcome back to episode 133 of Life and Ruins podcast. We're here with Josh Wolford and we just got to dive straight into
Unusual Finds and Archaeological Challenges
00:17:28
Speaker
it. You have an interesting story about something you found in a privy.
00:17:32
Speaker
Oh. Can you tell us about what your field school was and what this interesting artifact was? In my field school for Western Michigan University, we did two different sites. The first site was on this island in the lake in Southeast Michigan called Apple Island, where we weren't really looking for Native American stuff. We were doing more of a
00:17:54
Speaker
We were actually working under like a grant before to try to get the island put under the National Historic Registry. And we ended up succeeding. We got registered from the work we did there, but we were studying like Victorian era vacation, which like vacation was like a new thing at this time period. But then, so then we were there for like four weeks. And then for the next four weeks, we went up to off the peninsula of Michigan, camped on Lake Superior and doing the same for all that time.
00:18:23
Speaker
And every day we drove up to the High Wealth National Forest to this place called Coldwood. Coldwood was a court wood lumber town that was predominantly populated by Finns, Finnish people. And there was like one non-Finn, he was like the headmaster and he lived in the nice house and all the other Finns lived in kind of like the non-nice houses because they were the workers.
00:18:50
Speaker
The town is no longer there. If you go there now, it's literally just pine plantation. And you can see what holes in the ground from privies and from looters. So that knowing that that site was heavily looted, we ended up just kind of studying.
00:19:05
Speaker
well, partially also with finish culture in the Upper Peninsula at Lumber Can. So we'd always joke around that we would think that these looters are like tweakers or something like that going up to the woods to dig up bottles because they dig up the bottles and then they sell them. So I was five feet down a privy that had mottled soil. There's no strap at all. So it indicated looting behavior.
00:19:33
Speaker
And, you know, kept finding things like a boot that was a hundred years old, like an old sweater, and it was amazing. It was a wool, it kind of says how good wool is. It didn't even degrade after a hundred years. And, you know, a pile of what a privy is. But then, beneath all that stuff, at the very bottom, I found it just looked like a, you know,
00:19:56
Speaker
pipe stem sticking out of the soil, but it was glass. It wasn't white ball clay, which we found tons of on Apple Island because it was late 1800s, which is now very common to find those sorts of pipes. This was clear glass, and it looked manufactured, not blown. And so I was like, I don't know, that's a crap about it. And then I dig out around it, got it all perfect,
00:20:21
Speaker
And I ended up on the graduate students posters for looting behavior. And where's the crackplate? And I remember actually talking about that when someone was asking me, what was one of your favorite things you found at Coldway? I mean, there was axe blades and old saw blades all over the place. That's really cool. Found an old finish, old, like, Knopfsen bottle with a finish that I'd written on it.
00:20:47
Speaker
old medicine bottles that were literally only on the mark for one year, like for children's syrup that had morphine and alcohol. And I can't remember what else. And so obviously that didn't start working very long, but I said, you know, the crack just because it did indicative of all like the behavior of the people that, you know, looted that place. That's fascinating. Wild anthropology.
00:21:16
Speaker
The anthropology of looting is an interesting one.
Thesis Inspiration and Narrative Approach
00:21:20
Speaker
Fueled by much crack, maybe some meth in there as well. Oh, probably. It keeps them going. Well, not the archeologists, but the looters. Yeah. Caffeine keeps us going. Caffeine and usually alcohol is what fuels an archeologist. Oh, and it's not just archeologists. I'll tell you that pretty much every field school does that. I know I've heard the geology field school, and they party a lot.
00:21:43
Speaker
Oh, I've heard the same thing. I think geologists might be on par with the archaeologists. Yeah, they're cool. But not the biologists. I've heard the biologists. They don't party as much. No, I was thinking about that the other day. They're a little bit more studious. They care about birds and plants. Yeah, I mean, I do too.
00:22:05
Speaker
It's just like, it's all a whole discipline. We love you. Yeah. Well, I might, I might've been biologists. I absolutely love it, but yeah, they don't like the party, like the geologists or the archeologists do.
00:22:17
Speaker
fair. Well, we wanted to start off this segment with that because Josh was telling us this story like in the, in the green room in between segments and we're like, you need to tell our audience about the crack might be found. That's how we're going to kick this off. But onto something more serious, we really wanted to talk about Josh's thesis and how it's not only interdisciplinary, but also is, is
00:22:39
Speaker
in my experience, rarity to see someone incorporate who's not from an indigenous background, indigenous perspectives into the work to give a more holistic understanding of the research questions and research outcomes. And I really, really like your introduction. Like it reads very much like James Deets and how he would like any article or book he would do. He would like set a narrative. And if it's okay, can I read your first paragraph? Because it's fantastic. Okay.
00:23:10
Speaker
Out tucked away in the far reaches of the northern edge of the earth lies a vast wilderness of forest and plains, tundra and rock, lakes and rivers. Much of which has remained seemingly unchanged since the last vestiges of the retreat of Ice Age glaciers. This land has not always appeared this way. It was locked under the forceful grip of an ancient ice sheet that spread across North America.
00:23:31
Speaker
An ice sheet that scoured, plucked, and pruned the land and left it never looking the same. But this cold wilderness was not devoid of life, language, and culture, just as its modern counterpart isn't devoid of these things today. The ancestors of the indigenous peoples who live in the boreal forests of this northern land today were witness to the changing of this land. They lived through the cataclysmic changes to which it wrought, and they lived to tell the story.
00:23:56
Speaker
and tell their story they did. For thousands of years, the succeeding generations of Northern peoples have hunted, gathered, fished, danced, and loved in the land their ancestors did the same on. They witnessed events that geologists and archaeologists long to know and who spend their livelihoods trying to know about. Since the meeting of their two worlds, the scientists and the natives have had a clash of their worldviews. Yet there are numerous facets of reality that they could learn from each other and corroborate each other's narrative.
00:24:25
Speaker
That was really well done. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I try to, I try to not make it look boring. Like science can be really boring, but also like it's so fascinating.
00:24:39
Speaker
I just wanted to just try to make it a little bit more, one of my professors says that it was evocative. And that's what I try to go for, I guess, is that I read, like, Farley Miller is probably one of my favorite authors. He's kind of a famous Canadian author and he, his most famous book is like Never Cry Wolf. But my book, then I really liked him, it was called People of the Deer. And that's a lot of inspiration came from.
00:25:07
Speaker
Yeah, no, that was great. I'd say it was evocative, Connor. Yeah, no, I was going to say it's great. And also, thank you for letting us read it, because if you read my opening paragraph, I might have PTSD. Well, I was...
00:25:19
Speaker
I was like, oh, well, there's pieces I need to fix. No, I don't want to add stuff to it, take things away because I've been eating it now for the hundredth time. And I'm like, oh, geez, I can do so much better than this and this part of the paper. But, you know, I'm always going to be picking myself apart. I can't, I can't look, I can't, I can't look at my thesis anymore. But, um, the best thesis is a dumb thesis.
00:25:45
Speaker
So what was the goal of this thesis? Like you're, you're obviously studying the intersection of a bunch of different things. Like what, what was the kind of goal going into your writing of this? I guess it was me just, you know, kind of developing this idea over five years of, you know, driving my carriage tours as kind of where all this started and how I just thought it was amazing how
00:26:11
Speaker
both the geology and the Native American whole tradition and Chanel tradition basically corroborated each other.
00:26:23
Speaker
Cause I would maybe sometimes, not as much as I would, you know, he would think, but I would deal with like somebody on my carriage tour, on a public carriage tour would be like in there, like 6,000 years old or something. And that happened not as often, but this kind of just like helps corroborate like, no, there was people here that witnessed the water and the ice of the, of the place to see. And, you know, the formation of the subsequent Great Lakes that came afterwards.
00:26:51
Speaker
But then, you know, also the narrative that is behind modern geologic theory corroborates what the Anishinaabe people tell us that they saw, that their ancestors saw, which is just so fascinating to me. And, you know, the book, there's one book that actually, you know, I sent it to you guys as one of my recommended was, it's called Talking Rocks. And it's about, it's authored by a Minnesota state geologist and an Ojibwe elder.
00:27:19
Speaker
from, I think he taught at University of Minnesota Duluth for some time, but they basically like, you know, it's a conversation is what the book is kind of about. It's not very academic and be great for like undergraduate, you know, interest students for anthro, maybe like learning about like Native Americans, but it shows like the interdisciplinary work of
00:27:43
Speaker
where how geology and or like hard science rather and indigenous philosophy are you know compatible because i mean like studying ecology the whole science of ecology the field of ecology started from indigenous people all over the world because like at first ecology was a conservative science
00:28:06
Speaker
Because, you know, people would say, there's no way all this stuff is interconnected. You know, all these, the little bug or a little like shrimp, freshwater shrimp that live in the river, that can affect, you know, the eagles or something like
Indigenous Voices in Anthropological Research
00:28:21
Speaker
that. I mean, you realize that, you know, all interconnected. That's kind of why I wanted to take, you know, geology, biology to help me understand better, you know, the people of that time period.
00:28:33
Speaker
One thing that I did notice, and like this is not a citation list that I'm necessarily familiar with, but how difficult was it to come across
00:28:47
Speaker
indigenous authors on the subject rather than like anthropology or ethnographers who were just kind of repeating stories that they heard. Because like you have a lot of indigenous narratives and indigenous oral history present throughout your thesis and how they really corroborated with the geology and the archaeology really nicely as you would expect people who are descendants of those who lived through these things. Like what was that like trying to find indigenous voices or promote the indigenous
00:29:17
Speaker
speakers themselves. Well, some of my sources I got, because one thing that got me into anthropology is Michael John.
00:29:26
Speaker
who passed away when I was kind of young. And he was just really interested in like geology and studying archaeology for his own, you know, fancy. And he just really liked it. And he really, he started finding stone mounds in Southeastern Michigan that he, you know, some of them worked for farmers, but he associated some others with like curicle hunting structures. And so he kind of dove in and bought all sorts of books, you know, about conditionality culture,
00:29:54
Speaker
and geology and all sorts of things like that. He passed away and my cousin ended up giving me a lot of his books. And many of them were like from Basil Johnston, you know, Ojibwe Heritage, the Manateus, which is the spiritual world of the Ojibwe. So I kind of had this nice, I guess, launching pad for me with sources was from like this two boxes of books that I got from my local. And that kind of like I've read through all of those. And then I just started, you know,
00:30:30
Speaker
like different books on Amazon to read. And then I would just find myself digging through old books in the library. So it kind of was like...
00:30:39
Speaker
This research is 10 years in the making because I started doing this stuff when I was a senior in high school. It's taken a long time to find all these different sources. Also, my dad lives to study theology, but he always talks about using the hermeneutic approach. I always really liked that. I was trying to read from the perspective of Anishinaabe first, and then not from what some anthropologists said, but what did the Anishinaabe say?
00:31:09
Speaker
Did you ever find any discrepancies or differences in how the anthropologists interpreted or wrote down these origins stories? Was there any big differences between the primary literature, the primary source versus the later anthropologists?
00:31:33
Speaker
Oh, sort of. I know that like in the book Sacred Scrolls of the Southern Ojibwe by Sullivan Doodney, I think it was in 1976 that he wrote that. That's where he's investigating. So they would, I don't think they still do. So I said they would inscribe different stories on birch bark and they would hide them away in caves or what have you. The medieval wooden scrolls is what they were. Medieval when it's the Grand Medicine Society.
00:32:03
Speaker
And so one of the primary objectives of Midewin is to keep creation stories and the history of the culture. What someone was trying to accomplish with that research was follow their migration.
00:32:17
Speaker
because there's migration scrolls. The nationalities say they originated on the coast, on the Atlantic Ocean, and then they migrated to the core they live now, to the land of wild rice. And it's suddenly superior, basically. And all the way up into the Saultou peoples are up in
00:32:36
Speaker
like Winnipeg, which are kind of like, what can be considered OG cream, which is like a mixture of Ojibwe and Cree cultures. But he kind of didn't believe that Midewin was pre-contact. There was some anthropologist for some time, it might be still fun today, that believed that Midewin was not pre-contact. It was a result of
00:32:58
Speaker
social movements within an Islamic culture themselves to resist European, Europeanization or anger, like Christianization.
00:33:10
Speaker
resist that, but there's lots of, there's evidence that, uh, you know, of virtual schools found in caves that are, you know, predate contact period. And there's rock art that could be associated with medieval traditions that are, you know, there's one in Michigan. It's, uh, in the upper peninsula, it's, they call it the spider man. It's not really a spider man, but that's just what it's called. That's like 1500 years old. So that right there, it's pre-contact.
00:33:37
Speaker
So that's really the only discrepancy, I guess, I'm finding that some anthropologists don't necessarily agree, oh, well, Midewerwin pre-contact or post-contact or, I mean, there's definitely influence that you can see because no culture is isolated from itself. Everyone influences everything. You know, like we have, the Jibwe influenced Pawnee in some way and vice versa.
00:34:07
Speaker
What's the reception been of your thesis to, to the Senate communities if it's been shared with them yet, I guess.
00:34:14
Speaker
I haven't shared the pieces of them per se, but I've definitely, I've given tours to plenty. I mean, actually I was like blessing. I picked up the, it was a private tour I had, were picked up in the early morning, one of our bigger private carriages. And there was a class from Bay Mills reservation, which was on like an hour from the island. And it was their folklore class.
00:34:43
Speaker
which was Ojibwe. I had students, they're all Ojibwe. And they told me a lot of stories and I shared with them what my thesis was. I was like, oh, that's fascinating. They loved it. Another time that I had, I remember I gave a tour. I used to tell the flood story. I used to tell that on my tour. And when we stopped at the Arch Drop is where people would get off and go take a picture of a big rock.
00:35:09
Speaker
Two people came up to me and he said, did you know you have a descendant of Chief Shimawakum's senior parents? Chief Shimawakum was a famous Ojibwe chief who fought in the war of 1812. And he was like one of the ones that stole the fort from the Americans. And I wrote lots about him and I'm just, oh my gosh, in a way, they were like super thankful. They go, thank you for telling their stories. It was like they told me. And I'm like, that is, that means so much to me.
00:35:36
Speaker
No, that's really cool. And I think, you know, something that I've, in terms of larger conversations that we've had with like in the Society for American Archaeology and how to do collaborative community-based archaeology and indigenous archaeology, like doing a very, a truly collaborative thesis is like really hard to do because of the short window. Yeah. But in terms of, you know, reading your thesis and how you've done it, I think it's done respectfully. That's how it comes across to me in terms of like,
00:36:06
Speaker
highlighting, like, this is what the indigenous folks say. And I've never really, you know, one of the things that archaeologists struggle with in terms of, you know, the old guard and not believing that oral traditions are legit and how the archaeological record in and of itself is based on interpretation bias.
Cultural Narratives and Geological Correlations
00:36:21
Speaker
But like, kind of your approach with like, these are geologic events that like are not disputed. This is hard science. This is hard science. And these are these stories that talk about
00:36:32
Speaker
these known geologic events and pre-contact is like, oh, that's geology is where we should be going as a, to cite like, yeah, oral traditions are legit because we can, you know, I, that's what I picked out of this. Like, Oh, wait a moment. Yeah. I mean, there's examples all over the world too. Other than just mine, I think nature published something, which is like the journal to get into. I think it was Australia where these, these aboriginal stories tell
00:37:03
Speaker
thing. Like, yeah, yeah, sure. And then like, um, astronomers are like, actually believe it like a comet or something hit here, like 48,000 years ago, right? Like, yeah, people were there too. So they probably should I listen to a little bit more?
00:37:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think, although the journal Nature now has, in terms of whoever's doing their archaeology, vetting, Nature's not as prestigious in archaeology anymore. I'm sure other disciplines, it's fine, but some- Yeah, if you're in biology and you get published in Nature, you're doing good stuff. Absolutely. The review process is questionable at best.
00:37:53
Speaker
That came out somewhere weird, but I think it was, yeah. Well, and, and, and there was a society for the SAA's archeological record. They just came out with like a rebuttal, like the state archeologist came out and was like, yeah, not fam. Yeah. Random people showing up and dating mountains on campus. Like, yeah, so we'll wait to see.
00:38:02
Speaker
and archaeology-wise. It's coming across as click, baby.
00:38:19
Speaker
But yeah, no, this was, this was good. I'd be like intrigued to see what the cultural offices of some of these dissenting communities. Yeah. I applied. Um, so I'm not working in like anthropology at all right now, but I look, when I got out of grad school, I applied to be like a tribal historic preservation officer for a couple of different tribes. Got interviewed, but didn't, unfortunately didn't get hired, but they liked the research at that school.
00:38:46
Speaker
So all right, we're going to go ahead and end this a little bit longer than the usual segment right here. We'll be right back with episode 133 here with Josh Wolford here after these sweet, sweet messages from our amazing producers.
00:38:58
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 133 of a life in ruins podcast. We are with Josh in the site. We wanted to like dive into the specifics of what you kind of found your correlation between oral history and geologic events. Do you mind diving in there? Let, let us know what you kind of correlated through your research. Yeah, absolutely. So like some examples of like,
00:39:24
Speaker
that in my research for Shake the Earth was the creation story according to Anishinaabek tradition, which can include a variety of details, depending on the context of recounting something that's called varsokanak, which
00:39:43
Speaker
translate that word. It's actually Ahsokaan. It's singular and Ahsokaanak is plural. But Ahsokaanak is an animate gender of the word for stories that exists in sacred context and are treated as living non-human persons. The act of telling such sacred living ancestral memories can be elaborated upon or made more concise depending on the situation and the teller. So it changes a little bit depending on the situation or who's telling the story. But the most
00:40:16
Speaker
I focused on was the story of creation that involves a creation, destruction, re-creation sequence. First, the universe came into existence from the inspiration that a dream that a creator had gets humanity. And it was before time even began where they saw everything that is, and they created the universe. And after the creation, there
00:40:46
Speaker
ancestral embodiment of Anishinaabe culture, along with Mayink, who was the wolf, they went to go kill a manatee called Mishapeshu, which is the Great Lynx who controls all the water in not just the Great Lakes, but just inland lakes, things like that. And Mishapeshu lived in the caves underneath Mackinac Island, so they went there to go kill him, but they only succeeded in cutting off his tail. Hence why Lynx have
00:41:18
Speaker
kill him because his body's covered in copper and silver nuggets. So he's also like a patron man of copper from the Isle of Royal and places like that. And in his anger, Shpeshu flooded the earth in retaliation, killing pretty much all life. And it was, you know, after that flood that we have the, for those who aren't familiar with this creation story, it's been, you know, publicized in like children's books and stuff like that, where there's the great flood and then it was a
00:41:50
Speaker
for all the animals that survived. And it kind of depends on the story that you look for, but it involves the animals trying to dive down to the bottom of the water to grab a piece of soil to create land on the back of the great turtle. And it's from the turtle's back serving as the nucleus point for where the earth was reborn. And according to Anishinaabe,
00:42:18
Speaker
And the word Mackinac that we have today is just a shortened version of the whole word, which is, which means place of the great turtle. And they refer to the whole region as the place of the great turtle. And because of that notion that land started there or restarted there and it regrew from there.
00:42:44
Speaker
But the waters receded and the land rose. We talked a little bit about isostatic rebound earlier, and that's where the land literally rose that we can measure. But then also the waters ended up receding away because 11,000 years ago, there was a time period where the Gliese Lake phase was called the Algonquin phase. And the early phase was 230 feet higher than modern lake levels in
00:43:13
Speaker
is a very flooded place compared to today. But then that's because the water was blocked from escaping further north to fill in the Lake Superior Basin and also to drain out into like what is now Georgian Bay. It was blocked by that ice. But then as years went on, the
00:43:42
Speaker
And because of that two factor of ice disappearing and land rising, there was an event where the water drained out. It's called the North Channel. It's Georgian Bay. So there's Lake Huron and then on the north part of Lake Huron, there's Georgian Bay. And it drained
00:44:03
Speaker
and Ottawa River until the St. Lawrence into the ocean. And so it dropped from 230 feet higher than modern lake levels to 150 feet lower than modern lake levels, and only a matter of like a few hundred years. And so the people that were there, it's like almost like someone pulled a plug on all that water and it disappeared. And so you would have been able to walk from the Lorpen Peninsula to Mackinac Island at that time
00:44:34
Speaker
side of the island. And that river valley was discovered in the 1920s. The article I used to cite that part of my paper was literally written by Dr. Stanley. It's called The Stanley Phase of the Glacial Lake Algonquin. And it was actually during that time when Lake Huron was split into two lakes, three lakes, depending on the source you look at or what time period it is. But there was this eight smiths of land that went from Alpena, Michigan to Amberley, Ontario.
00:45:03
Speaker
And there were some archeologists at University of Michigan in 2009 that were looking at bathymetry maps of Lake Huron and this ILP in Amberley Ridge, or they call it the Hundred Fathom Shoal for shippers for people on like the freighters and stuff. And they were looking on that to find maybe there's some, you know, paleo habitation sites and they didn't find
00:45:31
Speaker
leaf is a caribou hunting corral that's 9,000 years old that's at the bottom of Lake Cara. I think that's the Algonquin stage, then the Nipissing stage was after the Algonquin was when the water rose back up. I don't know my Nipissing geology as much as the Algonquin phase I focused a little
00:45:57
Speaker
modern lake levels. Maybe more. Sure. Maybe there's someone out there listening to us that knows the depressing shoreline elevation levels.
00:46:07
Speaker
I have two comments real quick, because this is fascinating. It's been really hard for me to find a point to stop you, because everything you keep saying is just great. But I'd like two things. One, what is it? What is it? Royal Island?
Ancient Mining and Indigenous Identity
00:46:18
Speaker
What was that called? Isle Royale. Isle Royale. So there's a student at my department, IU, who's out of Michigan, who works up there. And I recently found out that has the oldest evidence of copper mining and metallurgy in the fucking world, not just the United States, the world. Yes.
00:46:37
Speaker
nuts for mining copper and doing cool stuff out there. So like one little fun fact with that too, a little bit of a rant.
00:46:44
Speaker
The Turtle Island thing. So Lakotas, I think, are now the largest recognized tribe now by population. They beat out the Danay, but the Asininaabe, I can never say that word. Anishinaabe. Anishinaabe are now like six largest, but like all those groups that come out of the council of the seven fires or four fires like Potawatomi, there's this whole macro cultural linguistic group that are all related that come out of the Great Lakes are also some of the more
00:47:13
Speaker
larger tribes by population nations today by population. And so like a lot, and they're very active and this turtle Island narrative for everyone like now, like, Oh, so you, you know, land back or, you know, totally agree with what I'm saying is, is like this whole, you know, like save turtle Island thing. Or when people ask me specifically about, well, talk about turtle Island. I'm like,
00:47:35
Speaker
I'm not one of these goddamn people. Like, no, we don't believe in this turtle narrative. That's a very specific thing that just had a happenstance out of colonization that their narrative is like everywhere. Yeah, we don't have turtles. Like, what are you talking about? I'm from the Great Plains. You think there's water out there? We have rivers. We don't have lakes.
00:47:53
Speaker
And if you have a problem with that, email jread at pawnynation.org and you just send all those that hate over there and let Matt deal with that. And I'm sure that Matt, yeah, he'll deal with it. But anyways, just like style tangent. That's fine because like, well, sometimes I feel like people, and you probably deal with this, is that sometimes people will think of as Native American cultures as monolithic, ubiquitous,
00:48:20
Speaker
thing. There's hundreds. I have a map behind me. That's my, that's one of the old, uh, mass geographic maps that you'd get. And the insert, that's all the languages, language families. It's like, there's so many different kinds of cultures. There are different cultures on just North America. So does your map show the Lakotas out in the Great Plains? Um, I see the Pawnee Great Plains. As they should be. Yeah. I don't see the Lakota
00:48:48
Speaker
Are they, are they by the Great Lakes? Is that map right? Cause there's two kinds of maps of mine. You'll find like language maps that are based on like 19th century where people were, and then you'll find like ones from based on like 16th century where people generally are placed before displacement of colonization. So I always go that route. Yeah. It's difficult. Like I don't really, like when I put maps in my
00:49:14
Speaker
Well, they all move. These are all mobile people. And they don't stay. So Lake Huron is called Lake Huron because that's where when the French came and discovered it, that's where the Huron were living because they were displaced by the Iroquois. And they weren't from there, they moved there. They were like refugees, essentially.
00:49:35
Speaker
I always go with the map that shows the Pawnee Nation having the largest territory possible. That's my go-to. It's like, okay, where's the largest landmass map? That's the one that I'm throwing anywhere. Not showing the Lakota later. Would you kindly refer to as the invaders? Oh yeah, the great Suin invasion. Yeah.
00:49:58
Speaker
I like to remind people that Lakota's and Cheyenne's and Arapahoe's aren't from the Plains originally. I always have to throw that in somewhere. They're not Plains people. They're from the Great Lakes. Get back across the Missouri River, please. That's where you belong. No, I shouldn't say that. We're going to get canceling.
00:50:19
Speaker
But no, I agree. It's like there's specific narratives for like turtle, you know, the turtle and it's like, Mackinac Island is like the turtle Island. And a lot of times people refer to the owl of North America as turtle islands. Well, I don't know if everyone believes that and all the different stories that are out there, you know, like the Hopi, they like, you know, isn't like the ant people and they came up from like below
00:50:46
Speaker
Yeah. You generally are going to find star people and then yeah, which there are, that's also an Anishinaabe culture, which is, you know, to get, get into like the creation story. Yeah. The version I liked to tell my tour was that it was, um, no chemists or you can call her sky women as well. She fell through the hole in the sky to the back of
00:51:17
Speaker
So, which in a ceremony called the Shaking Tent Ceremony, the Achisia Qn, that tent that they use mimics the Pleiades, because they use, depends on, I've read some sources that say that it uses seven poles, like there are seven stars in the Pleiades, to mimic the Picaic E-Shake. That is like this conduit for channeling the spirits into this tent.
00:51:44
Speaker
So now you're going to get me on another, this is actually, this is actually contributing archeologically to this conversation in a meaningful way. So we see, so the Pleiades is a major star assemblage, whatever you want to call that cosmologic thing that the Pawnees gravitate towards. It's part of, we have stories about it, but like, I know it's also big at Cahokia,
00:52:11
Speaker
and there are Cahokia outpost just south of the Great Lakes. And so when I see, when I hear the Pleiades being like a major component or someone being associated specifically with the Pleiades, like usually it's like one or two people, like these star people, but there's, there seems to be this connection, I think back to Cahokia with, you know, cause the Cahokia was a multicultural, multi-ethnic,
00:52:37
Speaker
It was a metropolis. It was like a state. I mean, hell, it had so much interactions everywhere that I'm always curious, like the vestiges of Cahokia coming across in different societies across the Great Lakes, the Great Plains, Eastern Woodlands, outside the Missouri River, Ohio River, Mississippi, they had reach.
00:52:58
Speaker
I don't know. That's just when you were talking about the Pleiades and the star woman comes to me, I'm like, I bet my ass that there's a Cahokia connection either directly or indirectly of that. But I, you know, whatever, this isn't an academic podcast. It's all good. The, I mean, there are, there's mounds in Grand Rapids right along the grand river. See, there we go. Yeah. They're in Michigan. There's even some of it further north in the central mitten.
00:53:26
Speaker
It's kind of like a hinge, like not Stonehenge. It's not like mysterious Stonehenge found in Michigan. No, one of those clip baity like... Yeah, right next to the Viking tablets. Solid point. Well, so as I was talking earlier about like submerged archeological sites, there's one that they found in Grand Traverse Bay and it's in 40 feet of water, but it's also probably another caribou hunting structure, but there's also a huge rock
00:53:57
Speaker
And it's underwater. And that was actually on an episode of Ancient Aliens. And of course, of course, they were trying to make it seem like the aliens did it. And I'm like, no, because they're trying to make it like
00:54:10
Speaker
Connected with how sea level rise and then obviously look at you know, we'll see little rise There's all these like Atlantean states underwater and look at this place in the Great Lakes and is that something to do with it's like no man like Lake Huron Lake Michigan when you're standing on the shoreline here You're 500 feet above sea level. The ocean level does not affect the level of the lakes here
00:54:31
Speaker
dude, all people need to do is just read introductory textbooks for like intro to geologic sciences, intro to archeology. Like that dispels any of the BS that like Graham Hancock, who's now especially big with his Netflix. So we're going to do a review episode of that. We're bringing Jesse tune and Shane back on. We're all going to watch the first episode together and take notes and to do one of our little specials where we just,
00:54:58
Speaker
Mystery Science Theater 3000. Yeah, pretty, pretty much. Dude, well, this was a really fun conversation. I'm really glad we were able to get on the podcast. And I, this was just fascinating. And like you did, that was a really cool thesis. I hope you're able to get in publication. That's the goal. Sweet man. And so, um, you know, before we end the show, Josh, what are a couple sources? This was books, articles, videos that you would recommend for anyone interested in
00:55:34
Speaker
There's so many sources I would love to like, I can probably spend a whole other hours talking about there's this and this and this.
00:55:41
Speaker
Well, I mentioned it earlier, it's called Talking Rocks. The full title is Talking Rocks, Geology in 10,000 Years of Native American Tradition in the Lake Superior region. That's a mouthful. It's not an archeology book at all, like a conversation between a geologist and an Ojibwe elder. And it kind of like, it breaks the ice of that, like, you know, these two different philosophical worlds can... Is that a pun? Did you just put a geology pun in there on accident? Probably.
Submerged Sites and Recommended Resources
00:56:10
Speaker
I can't tell if this was intentional breaking. Anyway, sorry, let me interrupt. I just wanted all of us to acknowledge that this happened. Well, doing a carriage tours, it's a lot of education, but it was a lot of entertainment as well, which means a lot of puns came in those tours. Another book I recommend is Ojibwe Heritage by Basil Johnston. That's a really good book into kind of delving into their cosmology and the ordering of their
00:56:50
Speaker
these rock art sites, Lake Michigan, where they believe that shamans can nude up to these caves and shot arrows at the rocker. And the entire artifact assemblage in those caves is like 83% projectile points that were not refinished, that all have shattered tips. And there's no habitation in these sites. And it's just purely a sacred site and that kind of like
00:57:19
Speaker
That's one of my fear. That's one of the things that actually got me into the anthropologies. I went to that cave when I was a senior in high school. Yeah. It sounds like that's just the tip of the iceberg with literature recommendations. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Here we go again. Now the floodgates have been unleashed with all the goddamn ice age puns. All right. We warned Josh about the shit show that is recording with us. Oh, don't worry about it.
00:57:47
Speaker
So where can our listeners find you on social media or email or get in contact with you? So you can find an Instagram at jmwolford. So it's my first initial, middle initial, last name, pretty simple. Then if you want to like email me, you can email me at jmwolford51 at gmail.com. If you have any questions, I can send you my thesis. I can, you know,
00:58:15
Speaker
answer questions about, you know, more things, have conversation about it. Yeah. Awesome. I'm also, uh, my last name, uh, my first and last name with a number because apparently I'm not the first CJON 23 in the world. So because this is a life in ruins, uh, we have to ask you a very important question. So if you could do it all over again, would you still choose to be an ethno geoarchaeologist? Yes. I don't know.
00:58:49
Speaker
Hell yeah, man. Well, we just interviewed Josh Wolford. You can find him on Instagram at jmwolford and send him an email at jmwolford51 at gmail.com. Per usual, Connor. Right. Review the podcast, please. We actually got a ton. We got a ton of it. We got like eight more reviews since like last time. So thank you so much. Keep doing that. That's how we get out into the world. So thank you. If you have any problems with this episode, email Carlton.
00:59:18
Speaker
Any messages from his slander? If you have any biology, any problems with my biology hate, send it to me. We love interacting with you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you all so much. And if you're listening to this show on the All Shows Fleet, please, please, please subscribe to our individual show, A Life in Ruins podcast. Having you guys download our show directly
00:59:41
Speaker
from our show, not the all shows feed allows us to get basically we can actually see who's listening to our podcast, which allows us to get advertisers and sponsors for the show that help us run the show and produce additional content. The all shows feed is considered its own different show and we can't get metrics for that. So we have a base. We know more people are listening and following our show.
Conclusion and Contact Information
01:00:04
Speaker
but we can't see that because we can't see those numbers. So all shows feed, fantastic place to see all the different shows on the APN and get a variety. But if you like our show, please subscribe to Life from Mars. And with that, we are out.
01:00:26
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. And if you've made it past the credits, you know, it is our favorite time of the episode for Connor's witty joke. Connor, what do you have for me and Josh today?
01:00:51
Speaker
It's a doozy. So I heard this story on the internet. So this guy finds himself as a cook on a ship that just has set off. He does a quick survey of the kitchen. Everything seems right in the right places. But he finds several bags of potatoes that are all shaped like penises. He's like, that's weird. And he goes and asks the captain. He's like, hey, what's with all the potatoes looking at penises? I don't like it. Can we change that?
01:01:20
Speaker
And the captain says, well, you can't change it. This is a dictatorship. Oh, Jesus. God damn it, Connor. That's a good one. That's a good one.
01:01:49
Speaker
And Josh Roger good, thank you so much for being on the show and with that we're
01:02:05
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.