by C C Daniels
They are indeed descendants from an ancient people that DNA evidence suggests also fathered the Aztecs, not the other way around as historically proposed. Recent advancement of DNA testing shows the Utes to be physiologically advanced and the likely forefathers of Asians and even Africans.
To be clear, abundant forensic evidence puts the Nuutsiu at the base of the human family tree, the roots, if you will, of humankind.
While Ute legends of brave warriors and wise chiefs are similar to traditional oral storytelling common in Native American nations, the Ute have exclusivity on the notion that they are the original peoples of the Earth. While other Native nations claim to be a favorite of the gods, the Nuutsiu elders teach an oral history that they share a oneness, a common descent with the gods.
I’d never heard of such a legend.
Passed exclusively from trusted elder to trusted elder, this legend is not one that is shared with common tribal members much less outsiders at large. Among the details is a description of bones that never die.
What? I sat up and read the last sentence again. Honaw had used that exact phrase.
Historically, curious observers and investigators (both scholarly and pastoral) have documented common Native American legends with little or any factual notations. In contrast, this paper intends to connect the obscure Ute common-descent doctrine, explosive in its implications, with modern science.
The mythos, again that elders were solely cognizant of, includes narratives of gods descending to Earth to assemble with Ute elders and medicine men. Calling themselves cousins of earthly beings, the gods arrived from the sky on a regular basis to conference (i.e. powwow) with the Nuutsiu savants. The gods not only convened with select members of the tribe, but evidence suggests that they mated with the Nuutsiu as well. Their offspring…
I actually rolled my eyes and stopped reading at that point, because it was so farfetched. Aliens mating with Utes? No wonder the Air Force Academy wasn’t a good match for Ms. Savage.
I quickly scanned and flipped through the pages of complex DNA chemical makeups and corresponding data charts of earth populations. The science was above my education at the time. When I came to the photographic evidence section of the dissertation, I moved my lamp closer to get a better look at the pictures.
Ms. Savage had included photographs of ancient drawings on a rock outcropping in Utah. The drawings were some I’d seen before—rudimentary to say the least. But because of recent experiences, the scene they depicted became instantly recognizable to me.
The first set of drawings were of a buffalo hunt. The ancient Nuutsiu hunted the buffalo on foot with spear-like tools. The braves had to sneak up on a herd to get close enough to one of the buffalo and pierce the dense and thick animal hide with a thrust of their spear. Bows and stronger arrows came later. The more modern Nuutsiu, like other nations, learned how to stampede the animals off cliffs and into canyons. An easier way to hunt protein for sure, but the practice wasn’t liked by all.
Some Nuutsiu, according to MawMaw, abhorred the callous maiming and killing of entire herds—even the calves. Those who were against the indiscriminate method believed that, like the white man’s fences, the great hunts played a role in the near extinction of the buffalo.
Nevertheless, many bands of Ute gathered in spring for those great hunts. Women and older children made noise and threw stones to encourage the buffalo to stampede in the desired direction. Sometimes the great buffalo went the wrong way. Whether hunting by stampede or with spears, getting gored was a hazard of the job. And the second set of drawings showed just that—a hunter impaled by the horns of a giant buffalo.
I turned the page to the last series of photos and gasped. There, in the prehistoric drawings, dots rained from a skull onto the gored person. The very last drawing showed the gored person rising.
An instructional petroglyph panel along the Potash, Lower Colorado River depicts a brave, injured during a hunt, being resurrected by a bone that never dies.
I caressed my miraculously healed arm and couldn’t help but feel a kinship with the gored brave depicted in the drawings. Reading and seeing the evidence that the skull did have a connection to the Nuutsiu was comforting and at the same time disturbing.
Laying Ms. Savage’s paper on my bed, I went downstairs to get a drink.
I rummaged through the fridge to find my last Mexican cola that I hid on the bottom shelf way in the back. Filling a glass with ice, I slowly poured in the dark, caramel-colored sweet treat, still thinking about what I had just read.
“That stuff is going to rot your bones,” MawMaw complained, shuffling into the kitchen and putting on the kettle for tea.
I couldn’t help but snicker to myself at the irony of rotting bones.
“At least it’s natural junk food.” She had clucked when I brought it into the house for the first time. MawMaw didn’t allow any of that fructose stuff in her house.
PhD MawMaw prepped her cup with juniper and then sat at the table to wait for the water to heat. When I finished pouring my cola, I turned to look at her.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.” I shook my head, sipping the ice-cold drink.
“Something is obviously on your mind,” she insisted. “Speak.”
I leaned back on the counter. “Why do you believe in God?” I blurted out.
MawMaw smiled. “Why do you not believe in God?”
She had never made me feel bad about my disbelief. She and I had an agreement to disagree when it came to our viewpoints.
“Because it’s nonsense,” I said softly. “Walking on water, burning bushes, rising from the dead. I don’t believe in magic.” In my head, I corrected that to I didn’t used to believe in magic. I wasn’t ready to admit that out loud.
“What I believe in isn’t magic,” MawMaw insisted.
I didn’t know what to say to that, because to me it was magic.
When I stayed silent, MawMaw continued, “Why do you think the idea of a god has stood the test of time?”
“Because some people need to believe that a benevolent being has their back, I guess.” I took another sip of cola.
“Could it be that civilizations the world over are all wrong?” MawMaw went on.
My cynical side came out in full force. “That’s a false argument, MawMaw,” I said. “Civilizations the world over once thought that the sun revolved around the earth. The entire continent of Europe once believed the world was flat.”
She nodded and, in her eyes, I saw her approval of my arguing skills.
“Legends have been known to be nothing more than myths,” I said.
“Legends have also been known to hold kernels of truth and to provide a means of passing crucial survival information from one generation to the next,” she said.
I nodded in agreement. “But more often than not, legends get blown out of proportion.”
MawMaw nodded. “Yes, they do. The stories get bigger and grander, but there is a grain of truth to a good many of them, too, isn’t there?”
“To some legends, but not all. Some stories are just made up.”
The kettle whistled. I poured MawMaw’s cup, brought it to her at the table, and sat with my cola.
“Those kinds of stories don’t last from generation to generation. I’m speaking about the legends that carry on.” MawMaw took my hand. “What I’m trying to get you to do, my dear, is to open your mind to the possibility that the story of God, or gods, might have been a legend that got blown out of portion over time.”
I squinted at her. “What do you mean? You don’t really believe in God?”
“I’m saying that the real events surrounding God could have been very logical.”
“A logical, magical God?” I laughed. “Magic men in the sky aren’t logical.”
“First, who said they were all men?” She winked at me. “Second, who said they were magical? How do you suppose the ancients would have responded to our modern technology? What would they have tho
ught of your phone with voices coming out of it? How amazed would they have been with something as simple as a lighter or a flashlight?”
They would’ve been dumbstruck. “So, God was just someone who had better technology?” I countered recalling the story Honaw retold of Chief Tuwa’s sky people and Kanaan’s theory.
MawMaw nodded.
“What if he, or she”—MawMaw emphasized the word “she,” which made me smile—“was just a more advanced creature and the ancient people thought they beheld magic?”
“What if, indeed.” I sipped my soda and thought of the skull. I rolled my eyes in frustration with my warring thoughts, but MawMaw must have thought it was in disbelief.
She sighed. “You simply must open your mind, Wray, or you’re going to miss something enormously important,” she insisted in her most serious PhD voice.
“All right.” I submitted to her train of thought. “If God were simply a being with better technology, then the ancient people who witnessed it would consider and report it as magic, because they didn’t understand it.” I remembered Ms. Savage’s lecture.
“Precisely,” MawMaw smiled.
“But what happened to this incredibly advanced man?” Because MawMaw opened her mouth to speak, I quickly added, “Or woman?”
MawMaw stared at me while she considered what to say, like before when I got the impression that she wanted to tell me something profound. Instead she stood and clucked her tongue. “What happened to Cro-Magnon? What happened to the Boskops? Perhaps the gods were a race of people that no longer wanted to walk on this planet.” She took her cup and headed for the easy chair in the living room.
I followed her and leaned on the archway dividing the rooms. “Race of gods? Do you believe there is more than one god?”
“Why not?” She set her cup on the side table. “It’s as feasible as is one god, is it not?”
“I guess so.” I shrugged. “More so, actually.”
MawMaw sat and nodded. “Then, let’s just go with that theory.”
I sighed, MawMaw’s theories tended to the fantastical. Like Ms. Savage, she held a doctorate and held fast to science on the one hand while on the other hand believed in things most scientists chalked up to myth.
“The theory that God, or gods, were simply a superior race with better technology?”
MawMaw nodded once deeply. “They wouldn’t be magical in your eyes, now would they?” She raised her eyebrows at me.
“Nope,” I agreed, “but, where did they come from, and where did they go? What happened to the incredibly advanced race of people? And why don’t we have evidence of their existence?” I rattled off question after question.
“Perhaps they're still here, in hiding, and perhaps the evidence is right in front of us,” she said pleased with herself. “Have I opened your mind to the possibility?”
I nodded yes.
The skull seemed like magic to me, but my mind knew there had to be a scientific explanation for it, just like my quirks. I just didn’t know the chemistry behind any of it. “Natural selection would ensure that such a superior race survives, right?” I pursed my lips thinking of Honaw’s point when Kanaan mentioned extinction. “I mean, wouldn’t our ancients be more susceptible to—”
A hmmm sound that came from MawMaw.
I looked over just in time to see her eyes glaze over completely. PhD MawMaw left me and the conversation was over.
She grinned and motioned for me to fetch her knitting. I complied, to her delighted smile.
“Thank you, my dear.”
I watched her knit a few stitches, then left and returned to the kitchen. I poured the rest of the cola over the remaining ice in my glass and put the bottle in the recycle bin.
“Math,” I whispered to myself as I headed to my bedroom to finish my homework.
I had every intention of moving on to math, but when I snatched Ms. Savage’s report from my bed, it flipped to the next page and an image I couldn’t ignore. It was of a Ute chief sitting in what looked like an archeological dig near the Garden of the Gods. The photo was identified as being from the 1800s. The chief held a skull that looked remarkably like the one I found. Though the photo was a black-and-white copy of an old tintype, the sheen of the skull was unmistakable.
The news clipping under it read:
Ute artifacts uncovered during construction of General William Jackson Palmer’s private home in Garden of the Gods. Ute Chief Potash was called to the site. Angry Utes broke the photographer’s camera and banished him from the site. The photographer’s great-great grandson discovered the tintype inside the old camera.
I turned the page to read more.
The skull held by Chief Potash is significant in that it was said to hold the same healing properties as was depicted by the petroglyph in Utah. More notable is the composition of the skull. Noted scientists have examined the tintype and have concluded that, if authentic, the brilliancy of this type of skeletal remains cannot be placed anywhere along the known developmental continuum of modern Homo sapiens. Indeed, such lustrous properties, though common among exoskeletons, are unprecedented in living or fossilized endoskeletons.
Humans are endoskeletons. We have internal skeletons. Our bones aren't supposed to be shiny. The skull was unprecedented. I knew that from the get-go, and I assumed it wasn't human. But Ms. Savage didn’t conclude that. At least, not in her paper. For some reason, that detail—the word “known”—filled me with a sense of relief.
Calmer than I'd been since finding the thing, I closed the report cover, put the document back in the envelope and into my pack. Then, I took out my math book. No matter how hard I tried to focus on math, though, I couldn’t put what I just read out of my mind.
Leaning back into my pillows, I stared up through my collection of dreamcatchers.
Most of them were nothing more than touristy trinkets constructed with cheap, synthetic materials. One even had neon-pink-and-purple feathers. Not at all authentic. MawMaw rolled her eyes at it when I won it at the county fair. But I was seven and loved the bright colors, so she let me keep it.
Authentic dreamcatchers were woven with the traditional thin buffalo threads and were decorated with hand-carved bone beads and native bird feathers. Only a handful of my dreamcatchers were actually genuine.
The newest one, a dark-themed one Allohak gave to me at Mom and Dad’s funeral, definitely qualified as genuine.
Along with hawk feathers and thin leather threads, it had an abundance of shiny beads. They were as tiny and as white as the beads in the oldest one—the one tucked into the box when I was left on the Sky porch.
No matter that the oldest lacy one was inauthentic, just like the pink-and-purple one, I’d always loved it, especially the random scattering of seed beads.
The same with Allohak’s gift. The beads really stood out against the dark weaving. Like a glittery distant constellation in a moonless night sky, they added just the right amount of sparkle.
I reached up and ruffled the feathers with my fingertips. Through the eyes of the hawk they’d once been attached to, I soared high above the ground, seeing the world as the bird saw it. When it dipped its head to dive-bomb into a canyon, I jerked my hand away. That view had always made me nauseated.
My movements caused the dreamcatcher to swing softly back and forth. That's when, for the first time, I noticed the similarities in the bead placement of it and the lacy one. Balancing myself on my mattress, I pushed up to my knees so I could reach it, and, careful to use my fingernail, tilted it so that the web portion was horizontal.
“Oh my gosh.”
I got to my feet and, using my sleeve to touch Allohak’s dreamcatcher, took them both down. I placed the lacy one on top of the darker one. Though it was a bit larger, the web a bit wider, the beads still matched up perfectly with those crocheted into the lacy one.
How had I never noticed that before?
When I fell back to sit on my bed, the beads in Allohak’s caught the light from my desk
lamp. “No way,” I whispered to myself.
Chapter 16
I fished around in my desk drawer for my magnifying glass and got my tweezers from my nightstand. With the point of the tweezers, I lightly scraped one of the tiny beads. The minute flakes sparkled on their way down, disappearing into thin air. And the bead itself did what the skull had done—repaired itself.
I didn't want to, I really didn’t. But I had to know.
I set the feathery authentic dreamcatcher back on its hook and took up my favorite one, the first one, lacy one. Looking at the teeny bead under the magnifying glass, I knew what it was. A little scratch with the tweezers confirmed what I suspected. I had had pieces of the maybe-human-maybe-not-human self-healing bone all along. They absolutely were connected to me. The how and the why—I wasn't willing to go there yet.
That night, I dreamed the dream, the recurring one that started with my parents and ended with the pale-skinned woman. It was different, though. Like it was set to loop and repeat only a certain portion of the dream, it kept restarting—abruptly going back to New York. And instead of generic images of our life in the city, the dream focused on us watching the movie just before the men in black arrived.
The next morning, a smiling Amaya waited for me on the corner. We fell in step and, while we walked the rest of the way to school, Amaya updated me on Kia.
“Fangs?” I asked only half joking.
“Nope.” She laughed. “He has no side effects.”
So far, I added in my head and actually felt the thought leave my head.
“So far.” Amaya echoed my thought out loud.
I went back into privacy mode. Back to the meditative mind-set that had worked so well at school the day before.
Kanaan met us on Manitou Avenue. He put his arm around my shoulder.
“How was work yesterday?” he asked.
I let his arm stay as we walked up the hill. “Funny you should ask.”
I filled them in on Mr. Smith’s visit. Kanaan was seething by the time we got to school.
“You should call the police, Wray,” Amaya whispered.
