BLACKFEET BEAVER MEDICINE BUNDLE
"Of all the tribes who used and participated in the creation of medicine bundles and their rituals, none appear to have developed it to the degree that the Blackfeet did. (1)
"Medicine bundles are a significant part of Blackfeet culture and spirituality. In modern times the people revived the Black Lodge Society, charged with preserving the songs and dances associated with ancient rituals. They continue to announce the arrival of spring by opening five medicine bundles at the arrival of the first thunder of the season." (1)
The beaver bundle may have varied contents, but the following are regarded as essential: several beaver skins, entire; a pipe; two buffalo ribs; buffalo tail; buffalo hoofs; a digging stick; skins of muskrat, weasel, white gopher, badger, prairie dog, antelope kids, deer kids, mountain goat kids, mountain sheep kids; tail of the lynx or wildcat; scalplocks; skins of loon, yellow-necked blackbird, raven, blackbirds, woodpeckers, sparrows, crow, ducks, and several birds we were unable to identify; buffalo rocks wrapped in wool; wristlets of wildcat claws to be worn by the woman. (2)
1. Blackfoot Medicine Bundles
http://annfabricant.blogspot.com/.../blackfoot-medicine...
2. Ceremonial Bundles of the Blackfoot Indians
BY CLARK WISSLER...Pages 168-209
http://saokioheritage.com/.../wissler-ceremonial-bundles.pdf
"Medicine bundles are a significant part of Blackfeet culture and spirituality. In modern times the people revived the Black Lodge Society, charged with preserving the songs and dances associated with ancient rituals. They continue to announce the arrival of spring by opening five medicine bundles at the arrival of the first thunder of the season." (1)
The beaver bundle may have varied contents, but the following are regarded as essential: several beaver skins, entire; a pipe; two buffalo ribs; buffalo tail; buffalo hoofs; a digging stick; skins of muskrat, weasel, white gopher, badger, prairie dog, antelope kids, deer kids, mountain goat kids, mountain sheep kids; tail of the lynx or wildcat; scalplocks; skins of loon, yellow-necked blackbird, raven, blackbirds, woodpeckers, sparrows, crow, ducks, and several birds we were unable to identify; buffalo rocks wrapped in wool; wristlets of wildcat claws to be worn by the woman. (2)
1. Blackfoot Medicine Bundles
http://annfabricant.blogspot.com/.../blackfoot-medicine...
2. Ceremonial Bundles of the Blackfoot Indians
BY CLARK WISSLER...Pages 168-209
http://saokioheritage.com/.../wissler-ceremonial-bundles.pdf
Blackfeet Beaver Medicine Bundle Pipe
|
|
James Willard Schultz, or Apikuni, (August 26, 1859 – June 11, 1947) was an American writer, explorer, Glacier National Park guide, fur trader and historian of the Blackfeet Indians.[1] He operated a fur trading post at Carroll, Montana 47°34′25″N 108°22′24″W and lived among the Pikuni tribe during the period 1880–82. He was given the name Apikuni by the Pikuni chief, Running Crane.[1] Apikuni in Blackfeet means "Spotted Robe." Schultz is most noted for his 37 books, most about Blackfoot life, and for his contributions to the naming of prominent features in Glacier National Park.
Early lifeSchultz was born August 26, 1859, in Boonville, New York 43°29′01″N 075°20′12″W to well-to-do parents, Frances and Philander Bushrod Schults [as they spelled it]. The house where he was born is marked with a plaque as a New York State Historic Landmark.[1] Young James enjoyed the outdoors and his father ensured he was mentored by experienced outdoorsmen and hunters in the Adirondacks during camping and hunting trips. He became an experienced shooter at an early age.
Early years in MontanaAs a young adult, Schultz moved to Fort Conrad, Montana, on the Marias River. He worked at various trading posts as a clerk for fur trader James Kipp,[2] and he established a trading post at Fort Conrad in 1880. During that time he traded with the Pikuni and the Bloods and established another trading post at Carroll, Montana, on the Missouri River, where he also traded with the Cree.[3]
Glacier National ParkIn the mid-1880s, Schultz began to spend more time in the Two Medicine and Saint Mary Lakes region of what is now Glacier National Park guiding and outfitting local hunters. In late 1884 he sent an article entitled "To Chief Mountain" to Forest and Stream, one of his first literary efforts. The article was published in 1885. At the time George Bird Grinnell was the magazine's editor, and he became intrigued with Schultz and the Glacier region. Grinnell solicited Schultz to outfit and guide him on a hunting trip in Glacier in September 1885. Although the trip was not a great success for Grinnell, he did kill a Bighorn ram on a mountain near the Upper Saint Mary Lake with a single shot.
Schultz promptly named the mountain Singleshot Mountain to honor Grinnell's feat. Thus began decades of Schultz naming features in the Glacier regions for clients and friends, and to honor traditional Indian names.[1] Montana State University Library has a digital library of papers and photographs documenting Schultz's time in Montana and Glacier National Park, as well as the physical materials that are part of James Willard Schultz's collection, which are held at the Montana State University's Archives and Special Collections.[4]
Early lifeSchultz was born August 26, 1859, in Boonville, New York 43°29′01″N 075°20′12″W to well-to-do parents, Frances and Philander Bushrod Schults [as they spelled it]. The house where he was born is marked with a plaque as a New York State Historic Landmark.[1] Young James enjoyed the outdoors and his father ensured he was mentored by experienced outdoorsmen and hunters in the Adirondacks during camping and hunting trips. He became an experienced shooter at an early age.
Early years in MontanaAs a young adult, Schultz moved to Fort Conrad, Montana, on the Marias River. He worked at various trading posts as a clerk for fur trader James Kipp,[2] and he established a trading post at Fort Conrad in 1880. During that time he traded with the Pikuni and the Bloods and established another trading post at Carroll, Montana, on the Missouri River, where he also traded with the Cree.[3]
Glacier National ParkIn the mid-1880s, Schultz began to spend more time in the Two Medicine and Saint Mary Lakes region of what is now Glacier National Park guiding and outfitting local hunters. In late 1884 he sent an article entitled "To Chief Mountain" to Forest and Stream, one of his first literary efforts. The article was published in 1885. At the time George Bird Grinnell was the magazine's editor, and he became intrigued with Schultz and the Glacier region. Grinnell solicited Schultz to outfit and guide him on a hunting trip in Glacier in September 1885. Although the trip was not a great success for Grinnell, he did kill a Bighorn ram on a mountain near the Upper Saint Mary Lake with a single shot.
Schultz promptly named the mountain Singleshot Mountain to honor Grinnell's feat. Thus began decades of Schultz naming features in the Glacier regions for clients and friends, and to honor traditional Indian names.[1] Montana State University Library has a digital library of papers and photographs documenting Schultz's time in Montana and Glacier National Park, as well as the physical materials that are part of James Willard Schultz's collection, which are held at the Montana State University's Archives and Special Collections.[4]
Geoffrey Sea
September 11, 2025
A Map of the Diversification of X2a
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10231342548131696&set=gm.24647941734839980&idorvanity=457153007678857
It was time to assemble the data on X2a subclades, such as it is, in various populations and map it, which I don’t think has been done before. I say “such as it is” because the data is piecemeal and often unreliable. Most reports of X2a were made before its subclades were identified, and so lack specificity, so a case of X2a1a1a, for example, might have been reported as X2a1 or just X2a. There are also big inconsistencies in the reporting of subclades, and the FTDNA Million Mitogenes project has relabeled some X2a subclades from the system used by ISOGG 17 and YFull. I use the FTDNA new names in most cases, for example, the old X2g has been renamed by FTDNA as X2a4.
For these reasons, I limited my map to information that can be considered reliable, and I limited specification of subclades to the fifth character, in order to detect general patterns. For example, if a sample was reported as X2a1a1a, I count it only as X2a1a. My primary data sources are the samples listed in the FTDNA Haplogroup X Group, Eupedia, the 2009 Perego article (only for the general distribution pattern), the 2017 Duggan article, the 2007 Bolnick and Smith article, and the 1998 Brown article, (see sources for the last four).
While I consulted reports from the Native Heritage Project, I find too many inaccuracies there for reliability. I consulted numerous sources for reporting on subclades carried by specific populations and ancient samples, such as the 2016 analysis of a basal form of X2a in Kennewick Man (which I’m choosing to call simply X2a because of disagreements in the labeling), the 2017 analysis of Nonosabasut, the uncle of the last-known Beothuk woman, Shanawdithit, who carried X2a1b, or articles specific to haplogroups of the Navajo and Jemez Pueblo.
The Native American populations carrying X2a can be divided into only eleven groups, each of which can be considered a genetic cluster as far as X2a subclades are concerned. My map shows ten of them; I have only excluded the Cherokee because no information about subclades carried by the Cherokee is available to me. (As the Cherokee were long dominated by the Adena of the Ohio Valley and Adena descendants, namely the Shawnee, we can presume that the Cherokee carry the offspring of the Adena-Shawnee subclades.)
The groups make sense historically. For example, the Navajo and the Apache are both descendants of the same southwest Athabaskan ancestral group, and the Navajo intermarried with the Jemez Pueblo, while the Apache intermarried with Tanoans. Thus, all four of those groups carry the basal form of X2a, showing likely interaction with the Wakashans or Sahaptins en route from Alaska.
The Sahaptin people of Washington, including the Yakima, speak a different language from the Wakashans of British Columbia, but they carry the same subclade of X2a, which has been described as lacking the defining mutations of X2a1 and X2a2. One study also showed that the Adena of Ohio are genetically close to the Yakima. We might consider the Sahaptin-speaking people as honorary Almosans of a sort.
The Ojibwe have been the most intensively studied genetically and they carry a wide diversity of X2a subclades, but that diversity extends to closely-related groups in Ontario and Quebec who technically are not Ojibwe, and so I have labeled this group “Anishinaabeg,” a more inclusive name.
The Plains Sioux were strongly influenced or even formed by the Algonquian-dominated Mississippian Civilization represented by the city of Cahokia, and this undoubtedly explains the frequency of X2a1a. That the Sioux carry the Adena haplotype rather than the basal haplotype carried by the Tanoans of the Plains is revealing.
X2a has been found in mound burials and subsurface burials in Kentucky, Illinois, and southern Ontario (see Bolnick and Smith). I group these together as Adena, as they all exhibit the X2a1a subclade, which must have been a prominent haplogroup of the Adena. That it has not yet been identified in an Ohio mound burial can be attributed to the lack of data from Ohio mound burials, a result of two centuries of identity battles about the Ohio mound-builders, and the strong reluctance of archaeologists and geneticists to acknowledge that the Adena were Algonquians, because of the implications of such a finding for things like site ownership and NAGPRA repatriation.
Despite that knowledge blockage, the data from Kentucky, Illinois, and Ontario is sufficient to conclude that the Adena were central to the transmission of X2a and they definitely were Algonquian, direct ancestors of the Shawnee.
Many years ago, I posted my reconstruction of the Algonquian expansion from the Columbia Plateau, through the Cree and the Adena Civilization of the Ohio Valley, to the Adena eastern expansion along the eastern seaboard, specifically including the Mi’kmaq, the Lenape, and the Powhatan. This was based on revision of J. Peter Denny’s 1991 article on the Algonquian Migration (see sources), and on historical linguistics and archaeology, without considering genetics. It was a major test of my model to see if the subclades of X2a would substantiate my model, and I’m pleased to report that they do to a remarkable degree.
It can be inferred from my map that the basal forms of X2a were carried by the original Almosans of the Pacific Northwest, between British Columbia and Oregon. The X2a1 branch likely originated among the Cree, who are the oldest group of the main branch of Algonquians. X2a1 is found among the Cree of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.
Algonquians historically migrated from the Lake Winnipeg area, through the western Great Lakes to Ohio, beginning to dominate the Ohio Valley by 3,000 years ago. X2a1a likely originated or at least diversified among the Adena, and it is the branch that then expanded with the Adena east to the Powhatan of Virginia (represented by a Virginia sample of X2a1a), through the Saint Lawrence Valley to the Mi’kmaq of Labrador and Nova Scotia, west into the rulers of Cahokia, and north into the Anishinaabeg, all of whom carry some X2a1a. FTDNA gives X2a1a a formation data of 4,300 years ago, but as they give the same date to the parent X2a1, there has to be some play in those numbers.
The Adena language, which had to be very close to Shawnee language, is now considered equivalent to Proto-Central Algonquian, with Ojibwe language a descendant. (The Ojibwe expansion in eastern Canada happened in the historic period in association with the French trapping industry – another reason to call this group Anishinaabeg rather than Ojibwe.) If the Adena had not existed, X2a would be far less frequent in North America overall. The amplification of X2a likely happened through Adena matriarchal and matrilineal clans. In his 1991 article, Denny made clear that the Adena were Algonquian and were an essential springboard for the Algonquian expansion further east. X2a1b has been found in the Cree, so likely also passed to the Adena en route to the Mi'kmaq and the Ojibwe.
Duggan et al., confirmed this picture, without specifically mentioning the Adena, when they wrote: “X2a expanded from the northwest to the Atlantic coast as early as 4000 BP.” That date may be correct if we consider Lake Winnipeg as part of the “northwest,” but Algonquians had probably left Oregon by 3,000 years before that.
Ironically, the data supporting Adena origin of X2a1a was best summarized in 2014 by the Solutrean theorists Oppenheimer et al. (see sources):
“The default phylogeographic inference would therefore be that the derived cluster X2a1a, and its haplotypes currently found in the three geographically-dispersed Native American groups, ultimately derives from an ancient dispersal event towards the south and west of the Great Lakes, in the early Holocene, flagged by X2a1a, best represented among Sioux.”
Southwest of the Great Lakes means the Adena Civilization between Illinois and Ohio. The Sioux were strongly influenced by Cahokia, which was a late Adena-ruled city. Of course, Oppenheimer et al. went on to dispute their “default inference” in support of their Solutrean nonsense. The default inference was correct.
It has to be realized that any discussion of haplogroup X brings an extraordinary amount of pseudoscientific bias because of the initial implication, largely false, that it comes from the Levant and is therefore somehow involved with ancient Israelites, hence the focus of Mormons on this haplogroup and the related bizarre “Solutrean” scam. Yet another, weird mytholological intervention on X2a was injected by author Steven Carr in his 2020 article about X2a in the Maritime Archaic, which escaped all editorial and peer review at the journal Genome (see sources). In that article, Carr embraced the old false legend of the Ojibwe having originated at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, a legend that derives from an 1836 book called the Walam Olum.
Unbeknownst to Carr, apparently, in the 1990s, the Walam Olum was proved to be a massive hoax, written by a European Jewish immigrant as an intended parody of the Book of Mormon. While many Native Americans were taken in by the fraud for over a century and half, that deception doesn’t make the legend any more true to history. The legend borrowed the concept of the Ojibwe and Lenape deriving from an Atlantic boat landing from the Book of Mormon – exactly the absurdity that caused all the pseudoscience surrounding haplogroup X2a, which, in reality, came from the Pacific Northwest, not from Maritime Canada.
This becomes extremely relevant to our subject because Carr noted that the Ojibwe and the Beothuk share a particular haplotype of X2a – X2a1b. He concluded from this that the legend of Ojibwe origins at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence is confirmed (perhaps he is a Mormon or a secret supporter of the Solutrean Hypothesis). That conclusion is an absurdity, as the overwhelming consensus of archaeologists, linguists, and geneticists is that Algonquians began in the Pacific Northwest and crossed the continent going eastward.
There are two possible real trajectories for X2a1b. It may have been a secondary Adena X2a haplotype that passed from the Adena into the Ojibwe directly, and also passed from the Adena into the ancestors of the Mi’kmaq, who migrated down the Saint Lawrence. There was definitely mixing between the Mi’kmaq and the Beothuk in fairly recent times, so the Beothuk may have gotten X2a1b from the Mi’kmaq. It is also possible that X2a1b passed directly from Ontario to Newfoundland traveling east, not in the other direction.
The map winds up confirming many hypotheses about Algonquian history; that the Adena descended from the Cree (or Proto-Cree); that the Mi’kmaq are Adena descendants; that the Plains Sioux carry Algonquian admixture from Cahokia; that a component of the Ojibwe came north from the Adena of Ohio. Now we can put a name to those Adena linkages and the name is X2a1a. More broadly, the map shows that the path of X2a through North America was an extremely narrow one, and that the haplogroup entered North America as the property of a single group that landed in boats in the Pacific Northwest.
Sources:
Bolnick, D. A., and D. G. Smith. 2007. “Migration and Social Structure among the Hopewell: Evidence from Ancient DNA.” American Antiquity 72 (4): 627–44.
Brown, M. D., S. H. Hosseini, A. Torroni, H. J. Bandelt, J. C. Allen, T. G. Schurr, R. Scozzari, F. Cruciani, and D. C. Wallace. 1998. “mtDNA haplogroup X: An Ancient Link between Europe/Western Asia and North America?” The American Journal of Human Genetics 63 (6): 1852–61.
Steven M. Carr, “Evidence for the persistence of ancient Beothuk and Maritime Archaic mitochondrial DNA genome lineages among modern Native American peoples,” Genome, Volume 63, Issue 7, April 2020.
Ana T Duggan, “Genetic Discontinuity between the Maritime Archaic and Beothuk Populations in Newfoundland, Canada,” Current Biology, . 2017 Oct 23;27(20):3149-3156.e11.doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.08.053.
Stephen Oppenheimer, Bruce Bradley, Dennis Joe Stanford, “Solutrean hypothesis: genetics, the mammoth in the room,” World Archaeology, October 2014, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267696314
Perego, U. A., A. Achilli, N. Angerhofer, M. Accetturo, M. Pala, A. Olivieri, B. H. Kashani, et al. 2009, “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migration Routes from Beringia Marked by Two Rare mtDNA Haplogroups.” Current Biology 19: 1–8. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2008.11.058.
September 11, 2025
A Map of the Diversification of X2a
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10231342548131696&set=gm.24647941734839980&idorvanity=457153007678857
It was time to assemble the data on X2a subclades, such as it is, in various populations and map it, which I don’t think has been done before. I say “such as it is” because the data is piecemeal and often unreliable. Most reports of X2a were made before its subclades were identified, and so lack specificity, so a case of X2a1a1a, for example, might have been reported as X2a1 or just X2a. There are also big inconsistencies in the reporting of subclades, and the FTDNA Million Mitogenes project has relabeled some X2a subclades from the system used by ISOGG 17 and YFull. I use the FTDNA new names in most cases, for example, the old X2g has been renamed by FTDNA as X2a4.
For these reasons, I limited my map to information that can be considered reliable, and I limited specification of subclades to the fifth character, in order to detect general patterns. For example, if a sample was reported as X2a1a1a, I count it only as X2a1a. My primary data sources are the samples listed in the FTDNA Haplogroup X Group, Eupedia, the 2009 Perego article (only for the general distribution pattern), the 2017 Duggan article, the 2007 Bolnick and Smith article, and the 1998 Brown article, (see sources for the last four).
While I consulted reports from the Native Heritage Project, I find too many inaccuracies there for reliability. I consulted numerous sources for reporting on subclades carried by specific populations and ancient samples, such as the 2016 analysis of a basal form of X2a in Kennewick Man (which I’m choosing to call simply X2a because of disagreements in the labeling), the 2017 analysis of Nonosabasut, the uncle of the last-known Beothuk woman, Shanawdithit, who carried X2a1b, or articles specific to haplogroups of the Navajo and Jemez Pueblo.
The Native American populations carrying X2a can be divided into only eleven groups, each of which can be considered a genetic cluster as far as X2a subclades are concerned. My map shows ten of them; I have only excluded the Cherokee because no information about subclades carried by the Cherokee is available to me. (As the Cherokee were long dominated by the Adena of the Ohio Valley and Adena descendants, namely the Shawnee, we can presume that the Cherokee carry the offspring of the Adena-Shawnee subclades.)
The groups make sense historically. For example, the Navajo and the Apache are both descendants of the same southwest Athabaskan ancestral group, and the Navajo intermarried with the Jemez Pueblo, while the Apache intermarried with Tanoans. Thus, all four of those groups carry the basal form of X2a, showing likely interaction with the Wakashans or Sahaptins en route from Alaska.
The Sahaptin people of Washington, including the Yakima, speak a different language from the Wakashans of British Columbia, but they carry the same subclade of X2a, which has been described as lacking the defining mutations of X2a1 and X2a2. One study also showed that the Adena of Ohio are genetically close to the Yakima. We might consider the Sahaptin-speaking people as honorary Almosans of a sort.
The Ojibwe have been the most intensively studied genetically and they carry a wide diversity of X2a subclades, but that diversity extends to closely-related groups in Ontario and Quebec who technically are not Ojibwe, and so I have labeled this group “Anishinaabeg,” a more inclusive name.
The Plains Sioux were strongly influenced or even formed by the Algonquian-dominated Mississippian Civilization represented by the city of Cahokia, and this undoubtedly explains the frequency of X2a1a. That the Sioux carry the Adena haplotype rather than the basal haplotype carried by the Tanoans of the Plains is revealing.
X2a has been found in mound burials and subsurface burials in Kentucky, Illinois, and southern Ontario (see Bolnick and Smith). I group these together as Adena, as they all exhibit the X2a1a subclade, which must have been a prominent haplogroup of the Adena. That it has not yet been identified in an Ohio mound burial can be attributed to the lack of data from Ohio mound burials, a result of two centuries of identity battles about the Ohio mound-builders, and the strong reluctance of archaeologists and geneticists to acknowledge that the Adena were Algonquians, because of the implications of such a finding for things like site ownership and NAGPRA repatriation.
Despite that knowledge blockage, the data from Kentucky, Illinois, and Ontario is sufficient to conclude that the Adena were central to the transmission of X2a and they definitely were Algonquian, direct ancestors of the Shawnee.
Many years ago, I posted my reconstruction of the Algonquian expansion from the Columbia Plateau, through the Cree and the Adena Civilization of the Ohio Valley, to the Adena eastern expansion along the eastern seaboard, specifically including the Mi’kmaq, the Lenape, and the Powhatan. This was based on revision of J. Peter Denny’s 1991 article on the Algonquian Migration (see sources), and on historical linguistics and archaeology, without considering genetics. It was a major test of my model to see if the subclades of X2a would substantiate my model, and I’m pleased to report that they do to a remarkable degree.
It can be inferred from my map that the basal forms of X2a were carried by the original Almosans of the Pacific Northwest, between British Columbia and Oregon. The X2a1 branch likely originated among the Cree, who are the oldest group of the main branch of Algonquians. X2a1 is found among the Cree of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.
Algonquians historically migrated from the Lake Winnipeg area, through the western Great Lakes to Ohio, beginning to dominate the Ohio Valley by 3,000 years ago. X2a1a likely originated or at least diversified among the Adena, and it is the branch that then expanded with the Adena east to the Powhatan of Virginia (represented by a Virginia sample of X2a1a), through the Saint Lawrence Valley to the Mi’kmaq of Labrador and Nova Scotia, west into the rulers of Cahokia, and north into the Anishinaabeg, all of whom carry some X2a1a. FTDNA gives X2a1a a formation data of 4,300 years ago, but as they give the same date to the parent X2a1, there has to be some play in those numbers.
The Adena language, which had to be very close to Shawnee language, is now considered equivalent to Proto-Central Algonquian, with Ojibwe language a descendant. (The Ojibwe expansion in eastern Canada happened in the historic period in association with the French trapping industry – another reason to call this group Anishinaabeg rather than Ojibwe.) If the Adena had not existed, X2a would be far less frequent in North America overall. The amplification of X2a likely happened through Adena matriarchal and matrilineal clans. In his 1991 article, Denny made clear that the Adena were Algonquian and were an essential springboard for the Algonquian expansion further east. X2a1b has been found in the Cree, so likely also passed to the Adena en route to the Mi'kmaq and the Ojibwe.
Duggan et al., confirmed this picture, without specifically mentioning the Adena, when they wrote: “X2a expanded from the northwest to the Atlantic coast as early as 4000 BP.” That date may be correct if we consider Lake Winnipeg as part of the “northwest,” but Algonquians had probably left Oregon by 3,000 years before that.
Ironically, the data supporting Adena origin of X2a1a was best summarized in 2014 by the Solutrean theorists Oppenheimer et al. (see sources):
“The default phylogeographic inference would therefore be that the derived cluster X2a1a, and its haplotypes currently found in the three geographically-dispersed Native American groups, ultimately derives from an ancient dispersal event towards the south and west of the Great Lakes, in the early Holocene, flagged by X2a1a, best represented among Sioux.”
Southwest of the Great Lakes means the Adena Civilization between Illinois and Ohio. The Sioux were strongly influenced by Cahokia, which was a late Adena-ruled city. Of course, Oppenheimer et al. went on to dispute their “default inference” in support of their Solutrean nonsense. The default inference was correct.
It has to be realized that any discussion of haplogroup X brings an extraordinary amount of pseudoscientific bias because of the initial implication, largely false, that it comes from the Levant and is therefore somehow involved with ancient Israelites, hence the focus of Mormons on this haplogroup and the related bizarre “Solutrean” scam. Yet another, weird mytholological intervention on X2a was injected by author Steven Carr in his 2020 article about X2a in the Maritime Archaic, which escaped all editorial and peer review at the journal Genome (see sources). In that article, Carr embraced the old false legend of the Ojibwe having originated at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, a legend that derives from an 1836 book called the Walam Olum.
Unbeknownst to Carr, apparently, in the 1990s, the Walam Olum was proved to be a massive hoax, written by a European Jewish immigrant as an intended parody of the Book of Mormon. While many Native Americans were taken in by the fraud for over a century and half, that deception doesn’t make the legend any more true to history. The legend borrowed the concept of the Ojibwe and Lenape deriving from an Atlantic boat landing from the Book of Mormon – exactly the absurdity that caused all the pseudoscience surrounding haplogroup X2a, which, in reality, came from the Pacific Northwest, not from Maritime Canada.
This becomes extremely relevant to our subject because Carr noted that the Ojibwe and the Beothuk share a particular haplotype of X2a – X2a1b. He concluded from this that the legend of Ojibwe origins at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence is confirmed (perhaps he is a Mormon or a secret supporter of the Solutrean Hypothesis). That conclusion is an absurdity, as the overwhelming consensus of archaeologists, linguists, and geneticists is that Algonquians began in the Pacific Northwest and crossed the continent going eastward.
There are two possible real trajectories for X2a1b. It may have been a secondary Adena X2a haplotype that passed from the Adena into the Ojibwe directly, and also passed from the Adena into the ancestors of the Mi’kmaq, who migrated down the Saint Lawrence. There was definitely mixing between the Mi’kmaq and the Beothuk in fairly recent times, so the Beothuk may have gotten X2a1b from the Mi’kmaq. It is also possible that X2a1b passed directly from Ontario to Newfoundland traveling east, not in the other direction.
The map winds up confirming many hypotheses about Algonquian history; that the Adena descended from the Cree (or Proto-Cree); that the Mi’kmaq are Adena descendants; that the Plains Sioux carry Algonquian admixture from Cahokia; that a component of the Ojibwe came north from the Adena of Ohio. Now we can put a name to those Adena linkages and the name is X2a1a. More broadly, the map shows that the path of X2a through North America was an extremely narrow one, and that the haplogroup entered North America as the property of a single group that landed in boats in the Pacific Northwest.
Sources:
Bolnick, D. A., and D. G. Smith. 2007. “Migration and Social Structure among the Hopewell: Evidence from Ancient DNA.” American Antiquity 72 (4): 627–44.
Brown, M. D., S. H. Hosseini, A. Torroni, H. J. Bandelt, J. C. Allen, T. G. Schurr, R. Scozzari, F. Cruciani, and D. C. Wallace. 1998. “mtDNA haplogroup X: An Ancient Link between Europe/Western Asia and North America?” The American Journal of Human Genetics 63 (6): 1852–61.
Steven M. Carr, “Evidence for the persistence of ancient Beothuk and Maritime Archaic mitochondrial DNA genome lineages among modern Native American peoples,” Genome, Volume 63, Issue 7, April 2020.
Ana T Duggan, “Genetic Discontinuity between the Maritime Archaic and Beothuk Populations in Newfoundland, Canada,” Current Biology, . 2017 Oct 23;27(20):3149-3156.e11.doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.08.053.
Stephen Oppenheimer, Bruce Bradley, Dennis Joe Stanford, “Solutrean hypothesis: genetics, the mammoth in the room,” World Archaeology, October 2014, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267696314
Perego, U. A., A. Achilli, N. Angerhofer, M. Accetturo, M. Pala, A. Olivieri, B. H. Kashani, et al. 2009, “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migration Routes from Beringia Marked by Two Rare mtDNA Haplogroups.” Current Biology 19: 1–8. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2008.11.058.
PARTS OF THIS ARTICLE HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED ON THE NATIVE AMERICAN SACRED LAND PAGE
UPGRADING THE HUMAN GENETIC CODE
Leon Secatero, the Navajo Headman who in 1998 gathered the Indigenous Elders from around the world to ceremony in New Mexico, explained the ancient ceremonies that were used to upgrade human genetic codons. I have participated in these ceremonies in the Holy Grounds that are sung in the ancient original languages. Leon would draw the symbols and explain as much as he could translate into English in Quantum Physics
language (1),
Leon taught that the semi- circular symbols on the outer ring on the right side related to the genetic DNA structures of Human Beings in the Fifth World. Following the circular pattern clockwise the break near the bottom depicts crossing the galactic plane into the Sixth World and the corresponding alteration in the genetic codes. At the bottom of the Calendar our sun crosses the Galactic Plane ( December 21, 2012). The spiral configuration at the bottom right is breaking up. The spiral at the bottom left is spinning clockwise indicating the making of the Sixth World. Clockwise spirals indicate the making and counter clockwise spirals indicate the un-making. The genetic structures alter again in the Sixth World creating mirror image symbols.
At the top is the hourglass Changing of the World Symbol representing the changing of the Sixth World into the Seventh World.
Most of the knowledge was received telepathically as English does not contain the concepts. Offerings were made to the gigantic glyphs of the Twelve Original Ancestors Only Two of Which Are Human which are the same figures that are honored by Indigenous People all over the globe. The world was made anew by drawing the Flower of Life symbol in the sand around an obelisk crystal.
Then the Medicine Men sang songs in the Original Language about the Original Instructions as the glyphs on the calendar were drawn in the sand around the fire. The Calendar for the Next Five Hundred Years is shown in Photo (1) drawn by Leon (2) in the summer of 2008 in my home. These are some of the the same glyphs from the ceremony that were drawn in the sand. An earlier version of the same calendar without the notations that were added later by Leon is shown in Photo #3.
We were instructed to move around the glyphs and crystals in a specific sequence as the tones of ancient songs reverberated around us.
Glyphs showing a split DNA codon evolving into a human form (4)
The crystal skull hologram shows a single strand of DNA extending up
from the base of the crystal skull(5) This hologram appeared in response to my questions about the genetic alterations in the human genome performed by the Star Nations ( Extra-Terrestrial Ancestors)
Leon Secatero, the Navajo Headman who in 1998 gathered the Indigenous Elders from around the world to ceremony in New Mexico, explained the ancient ceremonies that were used to upgrade human genetic codons. I have participated in these ceremonies in the Holy Grounds that are sung in the ancient original languages. Leon would draw the symbols and explain as much as he could translate into English in Quantum Physics
language (1),
Leon taught that the semi- circular symbols on the outer ring on the right side related to the genetic DNA structures of Human Beings in the Fifth World. Following the circular pattern clockwise the break near the bottom depicts crossing the galactic plane into the Sixth World and the corresponding alteration in the genetic codes. At the bottom of the Calendar our sun crosses the Galactic Plane ( December 21, 2012). The spiral configuration at the bottom right is breaking up. The spiral at the bottom left is spinning clockwise indicating the making of the Sixth World. Clockwise spirals indicate the making and counter clockwise spirals indicate the un-making. The genetic structures alter again in the Sixth World creating mirror image symbols.
At the top is the hourglass Changing of the World Symbol representing the changing of the Sixth World into the Seventh World.
Most of the knowledge was received telepathically as English does not contain the concepts. Offerings were made to the gigantic glyphs of the Twelve Original Ancestors Only Two of Which Are Human which are the same figures that are honored by Indigenous People all over the globe. The world was made anew by drawing the Flower of Life symbol in the sand around an obelisk crystal.
Then the Medicine Men sang songs in the Original Language about the Original Instructions as the glyphs on the calendar were drawn in the sand around the fire. The Calendar for the Next Five Hundred Years is shown in Photo (1) drawn by Leon (2) in the summer of 2008 in my home. These are some of the the same glyphs from the ceremony that were drawn in the sand. An earlier version of the same calendar without the notations that were added later by Leon is shown in Photo #3.
We were instructed to move around the glyphs and crystals in a specific sequence as the tones of ancient songs reverberated around us.
Glyphs showing a split DNA codon evolving into a human form (4)
The crystal skull hologram shows a single strand of DNA extending up
from the base of the crystal skull(5) This hologram appeared in response to my questions about the genetic alterations in the human genome performed by the Star Nations ( Extra-Terrestrial Ancestors)