The Library Kids : The Sitecah

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

The Sitecah

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sarah_Winnemucca_Hopkins.jpg

The Pauite have a legend about red-haired giants out west in America that were cannibals. They fought them and finally trapped the remaining Sitecah in a cave, where they killed them by lighting fires at the front of the cave.

According to the Paiutes, the Si-Te-Cah were red-haired band of cannibalistic giants.^[1] The Si-Te-Cah and the Paiutes were at war, and after a long struggle a coalition of tribes trapped the remaining Si-Te-Cah in Lovelock Cave. When they refused to come out, the Indians piled brush before the cave mouth and set it aflame. The Si-Te-Cah were annihilated.

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, daughter of Paiute Chief Winnemucca, related many stories about the Si-Te-Cah in her book Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims. "My people say that the tribe we exterminated had reddish hair. I have some of their hair, which has been handed down from father to son. I have a dress which has been in our family a great many years, trimmed with the reddish hair. I am going to wear it some time when I lecture. It is called a mourning dress, and no one has such a dress but my family."^[2]

The Paiute tradition asserts that the Si-Te-Cah people practiced cannibalism, and this may have had some basis in fact. During the 1924 excavation of the cave, a series of three human bones were found near the surface towards the mouth of the cave. "These had been split to extract the marrow, as animal bones were split, and probably indicate cannibalism during a famine

The remains of the Sitecah were recovered along with artifacts. A fraternity got a hold of the best adult mummies and burnt them in a bizarre ceremony. You have to ask yourself why would a fraternity want to do this and why wasn't the find of giant red-haired mummies the find of the century in America.

A written report by James H. Hart, the first of two miners to excavate the cave in the fall of 1911, recalls that in the north-central part of the cave, about four feet deep, "was a striking looking body of a man “six feet six inches tall.” His body was mummified and his hair distinctly red."^[5] Unfortunately in the first year of mining, some of the human remains and artifacts were lost and destroyed. "The best specimen of the adult mummies was boiled and destroyed by a local fraternal lodge, which wanted the skeleton for initiation purposes."^[6] Also, several of the fiber sandals found in the cave were remarkably large, and one reported at over 15 inches (38 cm) in length was said to be on display at the Nevada Historical Society's museum in Reno in 1952.

We know for a fact that the Vikings came to America around 1000 CE and that they tried several times to establish a colony in Vinland. They were chased out. The Vikings were able to settle Greenland and Iceland and they have an oral tradition of the "other people" that they called Skraelings (thin and scrawny) trying to bargain for their weapons in Vinland (America). When they refused, the others tried to steal the weapons and warfare broke out.

Skræling (Old Norse and Icelandic: skrælingi, plural skrælingjar) is the name the Norse Greenlanders used for the indigenous peoples they encountered in North America and Greenland.^[1] In surviving sources it is first applied to the Thule people, the Eskimo group with whom the Norse coexisted in Greenland after about the 13th century. In the sagas it is also used for the peoples of the region known as Vinland (probably Newfoundland) whom the Norse encountered during their expeditions there in the early 11th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikinger.jpg

There is ample oral tradition that both red-haired people (Vikings and/or Celts) met with Asiatic people in the Americas and in Iceland and Greenland. Each side had bad things to say about the other. In some places in America one group (the red-haired tribe) was wiped out by the other. The biggest question of all is why are the artifacts and skeletal remains being destroyed to hide this history? The Vikings had an end-times story called Ragnarok. In that story, the gods lose to the giants in the end. Perhaps the answer to the question of why the remains and evidence are being destroyed lies with understanding what happened in the past and why "some people" want to cover this up.

Norse mythology, Ragnarök (UK /ˈræɡnərɜrk/,^[2] US /ˈræɡnərɒk/ or /ˈræɡnərək/^[3]) is a series of future events, including a great battle foretold to ultimately result in the death of a number of major figures (including the gods Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdallr, and Loki), the occurrence of various natural disasters, and the subsequent submersion of the world in water. Afterward, the world will resurface anew and fertile, the surviving and returning gods will meet, and the world will be repopulated by two human survivors. Ragnarök is an important event in the Norse canon, and has been the subject of scholarly discourse and theory.

The event is attested primarily in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson. In the Prose Edda, and a single poem in the Poetic Edda, the event is referred to as Ragnarök or Ragnarøkkr (Old Norse "Fate of the Gods" or "Twilight of the Gods" respectively), a usage popularized by 19th century composer Richard Wagner with the title of the last of his Der Ring des Nibelungen operas, Götterdämmerung (1876).