The birds make their nests in circles, because they have the same religion as we do. The sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball and so are all the stars. This knowledge came to us from the outside world with our religion.Įverything that the power of the world does is done in a circle. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and powerful wind gave strength and endurance. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. In the old days, all our power came from the sacred hoop of the nation and as long as the hoop was not broken, the people prospered. "You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the world always works in a circle, and everything tries to be round. The Bighorn Medicine Wheelīlack Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux said: As I mentioned in the introduction, similar alignments can be found in the stone rings at Stonehenge. In each wheel, two of the stone cairns are positioned to align with the sunrise and sunset on the summer solstice. The medicine wheels at Bighorn and Moose Mountain had 28 spokes, the number of days in a lunar month, suggesting that they may have been used as a calendar or solar observatory. Some may have been used for ceremonies such as the sun dance. The most common speculation is that they were used to commemorate sacred places, but they probably had multiple uses and meant different things to different people over the centuries. Because Native Americans left no written records, little is known about the original purpose or meaning of medicine wheels Many medicine wheels had small stone circles (teepee rings) in the wheel area. The central ring covered a burial pavilion where skeletal remains were found The Ellis Medicine Wheel, built by the Blackfoot Aborigines, has been radiocarbon dated to about 1400 AD. Medicine wheels took many forms, but most had a central stone cairn, one or more concentric stone circles, and several stone lines radiating outward from the center In Native American usage, medicine refers to anything that promotes harmony, and illness is considered to be a lack of harmony within a person or between a person and their loved ones. They were first called "medicine wheels" in the 1800s. The original medicine wheels were stone artifacts built by the native peoples who lived in what is now the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada. This helps to align with the forces of nature, such as gravity and the rising and setting of the sun. The movement in the medicine wheel and in Native American ceremonies is circular and usually clockwise or sunwise. Hundreds, if not thousands, of medicine wheels have been built on Aboriginal lands in North America over the past several centuries. It can be a work of art such as an artifact or painting, or a physical construction on the ground. The medicine wheel can take many different forms. It embodies the Four Directions, as well as Father Sky, Mother Earth and the Spiritual Tree, all of which symbolize the dimensions of health and the cycles of life. The medicine wheel, or mandala, sometimes known as a sacred hoop, has been used by generations of various Native American tribes for health and healing.
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