Petroglyphs In Michigan Provide Link To Native American Past

(AP) — In a discarded pile of garish yellow plastic chain - the cheapest possible option to keep people away from things they're not supposed to touch - Stacy Tchorzynski spied a little piece of red printed fabric wrapped around an offering of tobacco. There are other sacred shapes and symbols, surrounded by a clutter of carvings that likely came much later: initials scratched by 19th century loggers, other graffiti, bowl-like indentations where someone, somewhere in history, chipped out an entire symbol and the rock around it so they could take it home. The Lansing State Journal (http://on.lsj.com/28Laqkr ) reports that a growing partnership aims to recognize both the archaeological significance as well as its cultural and spiritual importance to Great Lakes Native American tribes. The Sanilac petroglyphs, smack in the center of the Thumb, are the centerpiece in Michigan's least-visited historic state park, drawing about 4,500 visitors last year. On that recent Tuesday, Tchorzynski was at the park to work on installation of new cedar railings, decorated with a floral design, and new signs that describe the cultural and spiritual significance of the spot in both English and Anishinabemowin, the native word for the Chippewa language. Others include pictographs, or paintings on rocks; birch bark scrolls handed down through generations; and effigy earth mounds, huge mounds in stylized animal or symbol shapes used for burial or storage caches and once common throughout Michigan and the Midwest. The rock was discovered by European settlers after an 1881 forest fire swept across two-thirds of the Thumb, killing nearly 300 people and consuming trees, brush and homes. Archaeologists have studied the site since the 1920s, making plaster casts and using onion-skin paper to make rubbings of the carvings. In the 1940s, Cranbrook's director Robert Hatt worked with University of Michigan's Museum of Anthropology and the

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