The Week in Pictures and a Miwok Fact

Alviso Adobe Community Park "Tools from the Ancient World"

Practicing with the atlatl and spear

Earth Hour March 27, 2010 8:30pm-9:30pm

my cousin Patsy, the newest member of our family
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Miwok Fact of the Day: In traditional Miwok culture, when a village decided to have a dance, the lead elder (white people have named these people "chiefs," though the Native Americans did not refer to them by this name) of the village, would send messengers to surrounding villages to invite them. Each messenger would carry a string with a certain number of knots tied along it. The lead elder of the villages that had been invited would untie one knot each day after receiving the invitation. Once the last knot had been untied, the invited village people--men, women and children--traveled to the host village for the dance. This reminds me of an Advent calendar with the chocolates in the windows, or a modern-day online countdown timer. I'm trying this for my next party! (Powers, Stephen. Tribes of California. Berkeley: Regents of the University of California, 1976.)