Where are these totem poles located?

Part 33 of The Americas Connected series

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect and City Planner

Pick which location is correct?

1. Maori Cultural Heritage Centre – Auckland, New Zealand
2. Pacific First Nations Village – near Vancouver, BC
3. Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village – Nanou, Taiwan
4. Duwamish Cultural Center – Seattle, Washington
5. Alaska Native Heritage Center – Anchorage, Alaska

The correct answer is No. 3. but you will find almost identical architecture, artistic traditions and cultural traditions at all five of these Living History museum villages. Some of the peoples, who participated in the so-called “Olmec” civilization also constructed similar totem poles as did some branches of the Tainos in the Caribbean Basin. What do all these similarities tell you?

The concept of Native Americans being descended from racially pure ancestors, who crossed the Bering Strait is “caca de toro.” Their ancestors came from many places.

By now, I think that I have convinced most readers that one must fact-check any article on Native American history. Publications by North American geneticists are even more suspect. They are not telling you that it is rare for any Native American to carry more than 40% “Native American DNA markers.” Geneticists with a hidden agenda in North American labs are tossing out the rest of the results . . . labeling anything but Denisovan or Neandertal as being post-Columbian admixtures. They conveniently forgot that the Windover Pond People on the Atlantic Coast of Florida (6,000 BC) had the same DNA and burial customs as the Archaic Sami and Finns of northern Europe.

The situation is much worse than situations involving totem poles. The sea-going people of Taiwan, who create this Pan-Pacific architecture are called the Yuchi People. That is the name of their county as written in English, but they more typically call themselves Yuchen, which is the plural of Yuchi.

Of course, Southerners will instantly recognize that Yuchi (or Uchee/Euchee) is the name of one of the oldest Native American tribes. The Uchee always told colonists from Europe that their ancestors came across the Atlantic from the “home of the sun” and first settled at the mouth of the Savannah River in present-day Georgia. The Savannah River is nowhere near the Bering Strait. LOL

Wait a minute! That plural version of Yuchi? Adding an “en” to a singular noun, creates the plural form in the Creek languages, Itza Maya, Panoan (Eastern Peru), plus words ending in a consonant in Nederlandische (Dutch), Platt Deutsch and Archaic Anglisk (English). Remember, the plural of ox is oxen?

The roots of the Muskogee Creek Language are a mixing of Indo-European languages . . . Illyrian, Latin, Archaic Irish and Archaic Scandinavian . . . with the dialect of southern Mesoamerican, spoken by Eastern Creeks, such as my ancestors.

The Algonquian, Iroquoian, Shawnee, Cherokee and Muskogee-Creek word/suffix for tribe is identical to the Irish-Scottish Gaelic word for tribe . . . it’s written as gi, gee, ki, kee or ghe, but in all these languages pronounced as a guttural K, more or less, halfway between an English k and g.

The modern Muskogee-Creek words for medical doctor (alek) and medicinal herbs (leken) were exactly the same words used by the Anglisk, who became known as English, when they moved from southern Scandinavia to the island of Britain . . . 1500 years ago. Both words come from the Archaic North European word for medicinal herbs – leka. It is found in all the Germanic, Sami, Finnish-Baltic and Slavic languages.

But Eastern Creeks . . . we REALLY have weird combinations of DNA! All of my “American Indian” DNA markers are from southern Mexico and eastern Peru. But my body also contains healthy amounts of Sami from Lapland, Polynesian, Finnish, Karelian (NW Russia), Basque and Galician (NW Iberia and western Ireland). Those theoretically unexpected genes were brought to North America by the Uchee (Yuchi). They were a Sea People, who explored and settled the planet.

The surprising ethnic diversity of the Hiwassee River Basin in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee was just a microcosm of all of the Americas. Next week, we will introduce you to the descendants of the Hiwassee’s indigenous inhabitants. They don’t like to be called Cherokees . . . by the way.