So now I want to turn to another aspect of the ritual

life of the northern big game hunting tradition.

And so we see here a photograph of an early photographer
from the 19th century came upon one of these structures,
and it's called a sweat house or a sweat lodge.
And what it is, it's a-- I mean, the actual architecture
of the structure can vary.
But you see here they made sort of a basket, and in the center
are these rocks.
And in the front here, you see a skull of a bison.
And the sweat lodges are sort of sacred places as involving also
a sacred ceremony.
Now, you say, well it's cold.
I mean, who wouldn't want to be in a sweat lodge
in the middle of winter?
But it's not just about being comfortable.
The sweat lodge is about, once again, communicating
in a particular way with ancestors.
It's also a place where you join, if you will,
a certain a cadre of kinfolk.
And if visitors come, before you even basically say hello,
the first thing you do is go into a sweat lodge,
where you sort of form a bond.
The smoke that comes from the rocks that you bring into,
you heat the rocks outside, and then
with tongs, you bring the rocks inside.
And you put water on it, like in a sauna.
The sauna in Scandinavia and the sweat lodge in Plains Indians
are identical formation.
The sauna has survived into modern age.
Sweat lodge hasn't.
But it's the smoke that comes from the stones and the [SHHH]
sizzling sound that is the speech of the ancestors.
So you take the water.
You sizzle it.
So next time you're in the sauna and you
want to listen to your grandma, put the water on it,
and [WHSSSH], right?
And try to figure out what grandma is saying.
So that's what's happening here.
And of course, it's very hot.
And you get sweaty.
The sweat, we would say, ew, sweaty, ew.
But the sweat for the Plains Indians
was the surface, the shiny surface of your body,
that allowed you to become visible to the ancestors.
Because now you're shiny.
Remember I talked about mirrors being little portals right
into the ancestor world.
But if you are the mirror, if your face shines from sweat,
you are becoming, in some sense, reverse portalized,
where the sweat is attracting the energy of the ancestors.
So the sweat lodges have a particular design,
the fire where you heat up the stones.
They'll have some sort of sacred totemic space
where the members of the sweat lodge
are not allowed to pass, so sort of a sacred zone.
The head of the sweat lodge will take the rocks here,
but everyone else is not allowed to pass.
And of course, the sweat lodge itself
with a hole in the ground, somewhere
where you put the rocks.
And then you can bring in the water in a bucket.
And you'll also put into the fire sweet grass.
Sweet grass is seen as sacred.
It has this wonderful, curly smoke
that once again forms a vertical axis between you
and the ancestors.
Here's a typical sweat lodge as photographed
in the 19th century.
And if you go to Wyoming, you can do this if you want.

They're still around.

And finally, the Plains Indians, around 2,000 BC,
began to build truly remarkable structures that
are called medicine wheels.
That's what we call them today.
We don't know what the Native Americans back then called
them.
And they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes,
and they're made with rocks that are laid out
on the ground in a form of a pattern.
Usually with a circle-- that's why they're called wheels--
with radiating spikes coming out.
But as you can see, some are complete circles.
Some have to have little avenues.
Some are very dense.
Some are very simple.
No one knows precisely what they're used for,
but we're sort of assuming that during the bison hunt,
perhaps the chiefs or the shamans
would come to these places from various tribes,
and they would converge and do ritual dances and ritual
songs in order to prepare themselves for the bison hunt.
It seems to be the most logical type of explanation.
But that is just an explanation.
We actually don't know what they're for.
They're very mysterious structures.
And they're mainly in the US and Canadian border
in the plains region.
Eventually, they stopped doing it.
That's why we don't know what they're used for.
So over a period of about 2,000 years or so, they were built.
And then for some reason, no one knows, around
maybe 1,000 years ago, they just sort of stopped making them.
So maybe they forgot.
Maybe, I don't know-- maybe it was bad weather and whatever.
We don't know.
So they started to make them.
And then they stopped making them.
But the tradition of the wheel is still
very potent in the Native American culture,
and that's why we are sort of assuming
there's this sort of connection.
So this is Big Horn in Wyoming.
Anybody seen it?
Yeah?
Oh, great.
Excellent.
Good for you.
Well, I haven't seen it, so you got one up on me.
But all I know, it's truly spectacular,
and I definitely want to see this thing.
It's on a ridge, so there's a very sharp escarpment.
And it's on the moment when the ridge comes
to a very specific sort of point.
And people have been struggling for a long time
to figure out what it is.
Is it aligned to Sirius, or his two sons,
or to solstice, or to the sunrise, or to the sunset?
We're not exactly sure.
It's aligned to something.
I mean, that's for certain.
But is it aligned to all of these things,
or to just one of them?
We don't know.
No one's around, so to speak, to tell us, right?
But we know it's certainly aligned to the winter solstice.
If you look out over it, there's the peak
that's at the other end.
So maybe it had something to do with sort
of winter solstice, a winter ceremony of some sort.

So what I wanted to do is sort of compare, if you will,

these two lectures.
The first lecture we talked about this world.
of the savannas.
The second lecture is the world of the hunting tradition,
of the big animal hunting tradition that
started with the Gravettians 28,000, 25,000 years ago,
and then migrated and developed and mutated
in producing new architectural forms, such as the tipi.
Maybe, when the tipi was created, if you want a date,
we think maybe around 3,000, 2,000 BC or something
like that.
So it's a relatively recent development,
but one that made the Plains Indians control
the plain in a way.
They didn't have horses yet.
So horses came when the Spaniards brought horses,
and they lost a couple horses in the wild.
And then the Plains Indians sort of captured the horses
and then took horses.
And then all things went gangbusters
because now they had horses that could drag this thing.
And it was a whole different story.
This was all before horses.
Horses had been killed off in Americas.
So this is the diagram for today.
So the great arc is the hunting tradition.
And it's associated issues.
The sites that I talked about where
the Sami and the Lavu, the Big Horn, and the Head-Smashed-In.
So these were the particular sites
that I talked about in that context.