Donald N. Yates's Blog: Talking Leaves

This book began as the second one I wrote, after The Bear Went Over the Mountain in 1995. For many years it was available only as a pdf. Now it has been published by Lulu in a deluxe hardcover edition with an eye-popping dust jacket designed by Rafael Serrano in Chile. Order your copy or copies for the holidays directly from Lulu and get a 15% discount. Great for gift giving, especially for schoolchildren and college students, as it is rated for a youth audience. Please share....

This was the previous pdf edition...
http://www.lulu.com/shop/donald-n-pan...THE EIGHTH ARROW: Right, Wrong and Confused Paths According to Tihanama Elder Wisdom

Here's the link to the Lulu listing:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/donald-n-pan...

Here's a press release that appeared on PRNewswire just before Passover.

Donald Yates' "Merchant Adventurer Kings of Rhoda" Asserts Tucson Artifacts Are Genuine

PR Newswire PR NewswireMarch 28, 2018

Did Jews, Indians Celebrate Passover in Ancient Arizona?

LONGMONT, Colo., March 28, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Since they came to light nearly a hundred years ago, the Tucson Artifacts with their Latin and Hebrew writings have been branded a madman's forgeries, though no forger has been discovered. The University of Arizona refused to accept the hoard of inscribed religious objects from Calalus for the Arizona State Museum, calling them "manufactured history."

They went instead to the pioneer heritage museum across the street, where they are exhibited as local curiosities in donated jewelry store cases.

But the Arizona Historical Society Museum may have inadvertently acquired the most valuable historical documents in America, according to Donald N. Yates, a medievalist in Colorado.

His new book from Panther's Lodge Publishers contains 346 pages and 30 illustrations, as well as original news reports and ancient texts relating to the artifacts. Linking the finds to the region's early turquoise mining, it refutes the refuters with a mass of evidence, ranging from Jewish merchant charters and Arizona mineral surveys to an Indonesian shipwreck dated 838 and dynastic records from pre-Columbian Mexico.

The first Western Europeans evidently crossed the Pacific Ocean following an extension of the Spice Trade Route to China by at least 560, the first date mentioned by the artifacts.

Rhoda, the Toltec Indian trade center they took over, was "approximately Tucson, then called the Red City, Tlapallan, the home of Quetzalcoatl," says Yates. "During Passover that starts this week and on other high holy days, we can imagine Hebrew prayers drifting down at nightfall from the tombs of Jewish kings on Tumamoc Hill."

"It's all rather incredible," says Teresa A. Panther-Yates, president of Panther's Lodge. "If one-tenth of the history recorded on the artifacts can be verified, it completely shatters what we thought we knew both about 'Indians' and early medieval Jews."

Panther's Lodge Publishers is the publisher also of Los Lunas Decalogue Stone: Eighth-Century Hebrew Monument in New Mexico.

Merchant Adventurer Kings of Rhoda: The Lost World of the Tucson Artifacts is available wherever books are sold, with a list price of $19.95. A Kindle version can be downloaded on Amazon for $9.95. Google Play offers an ebook for $7.96.

Donald Yates lives in Longmont, Colorado with his wife Teresa. It is his twenty-second book.

CONTACT: Donald Yates, 1-720-597-0992, dpy@pantherslodge.com

New book tells of Jews and Mexican Indians developing first turquoise mining in Arizona and New Mexico.

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releas...

David Coatney, producer of a new documentary on "The Mystery Stone," did this interview of author Donald Yates in his home in 2016. Yates discusses his two books Los Lunas Decalogue Stone and Merchant Adventurer Kings of Rhoda as well as why mainstream history is so resistant to new ideas. Link to video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/RQpKyniABUA.

So the preponderance of the evidence (the REAL evidence, not purblind anti-diffusionists' crazy theories about forgery) seems to point to a large colony of Gnostic Christians from Egypt or Mesopotamia who fled Orthodox Christianity's persecutions in the 4th century, crossed the Atlantic, landed on the East Coast and settled predominantly in Michigan, where they fought and blended with the Chippewa Indians and left in mounds scattered all over the peninsula 10,000 to 30,000 archeological artifacts that have come to light since 1850, many of them tablets with unidentified writing and Biblical scenes on them. All objects, whether they are axes or cups or pendants bear the "mystic symbol," which seems to be a cuneiform version of the Greek abbreviation for Iesos or Jesus, IHS. Henriette Mertz deserves large credit for investigating and bringing this colony to wide notice. It was so threatening to status quo beliefs 100 years ago that a syndicate was formed to persecute believers and "expose" them in newspaper ads across the country. All the museums that were gifted with Michigan Relics threw them away or otherwise disposed of them, including the University of Notre Dame, where they were taking up valuable storage space under the football field, and the Mormons in Salt Lake City, where no one would touch them with a ten foot pole. A small collection ended up in a Michigan museum, where the curator holds his nose and apologizes for the quaint forgeries of the state's pioneer past. Wayne May, the editor of Ancient American, who republished the work with updated information with the permission of Mertz's nephew and literary heir, calls the affair the biggest scandal in American historical research. It's pretty sure, as Mertz points out, that forgers could not have been active for seventy years and covered the state, every single county in it, sometimes sneaking out into places with old mounds that didn't even have roads to them to plant copper, clay and slate artifacts inscribed and illustrated in various hands with an unknown alphabet. So we are left with the fact of their authenticity, which few seem to want to deal with. This book covers just about all aspects of the scandal in an even-handed and learned fashion. Deal and May's updates in a series of articles from Ancient American are, to my mind, forced and of limited usefulness. I am not persuaded Deal's astronomical data are pertinent. I think Mertz was on the right track when she suggested the purpose of the "mystic mark" was like a passport to heaven. One should compare the absolutely insane iconography with the Nag Hamadi Library, which my wife suggested I look at. Woah! I had to put all my books on this subject somewhere I can't find them for a while. My mind just can't take it.

Pale Ink by Henriette Mertz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Henriette Mertz was a cryptologist during WWII and later a patent lawyer who published a series of daring and controversial books on diffusionist history. Pale Ink was her Chinese book, published in 1953. One of the narratives studied in it is the classic source for early Chinese knowledge of America. It comprises an Afghan Buddhist monk’s account of his travels with other monks to Mexico and the American Southwest sometime before 500 CE. Hwui Shan’s adventures were officially received by the Chinese emperor and court. They ended up enshrined in Chinese literature—but not accepted in Western histories. Fu-sang is apparently Mexico, and the beautiful and useful fu-sang plants are the maguey. There have been many translations and interpretations of this famous text since the eighteenth century. For accuracy and authority you may want to compare Vining, who gives other versions in parallel. Edward P. Vining, An Inglorious Columbus (New York: Appleton, 1885), pp. 263-299. Chinese contact and colonization in the Americas, as abundantly evident in North America's rock art record, has today become a burgeoning area of scholarship. Mention may be made of John Arthur Ruskamp’s Asiatic Echoes, Hendon M. Harris’s The Asiatic Fathers and Siu-Leung Lee’s work on Chinese maps. An older popular book by an academic that is very good and readable and takes the Chinese story in America down to the present is Stan Steiner, Fusang: The Chinese Who Built America (New York: Harper Colophon, 1980). Mertz deserves a lot of credit for bringing the subject into the forefront. Her writing style is razor sharp and her speculations inspired.



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Pale Ink

Circe Sturm
Becoming Indian by Circe Sturm appeared several years ago as a blue ribbon publication of The School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, N.M. It is likely to be used and cited widely by schoolteachers, tribal educators and government workers. It replaces time-honored white papers like William Quinn’s, “The Southeast Syndrome: Notes on Indian Descendant Recruitment Organizations” (American Indian Quarterly 14/2 [1990]:147-54), or Virginia DeMarce, “Overview of Cherokee Groups and Federal Acknowledgements Process” (Unpublished MS, Office of Federal Acknowledgements, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of Interior, Washington, D.C.—see bibliog., p. 238). This is now the bible for racist, exclusionary and delusional federal Indian tribe policy. It will be mined for years to come.

Sturm’s first neural blunder is to equate the people who irritate the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma with a type of “white people” who “wannabe” Indian. The subtitle to Becoming Indian is The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century, an equation which would not have passed muster with any of the publishers I use. Is “being Indian” or wanting to be the same as “being Cherokee” or wanting to be? Hasn’t the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma appropriated the rights to speak for all Indians?

––Just a small point, but the majority of the interviews with “citizen Cherokees” (Sturm’s word for card-carrying Federally recognized members of the Big Three tribes) were conducted in the 90s, which is not technically the 21st cent. and the majority of the interviews from the “bad guys” (defined as state-recognized tribes and “racial shifters”) does come from the early aughts of the 21st century. . . at least an indication of how long this issue has sat in the files in Tahlequah and Washington.)

We thus have a rather disjointed battle in which the true Indians surprise a bunch of white people trapped on the Great Plains of Americana in a social media wagon train of superior numbers. Message for the leaders in Tahlequah and Washington, the white tide of settlers is not going away. Montgomery, Atlanta, Nashville and Columbia have spoken.

This is a ridiculous and irritating book, if you actually read it. Much is made of the author’s innovative scholarship and “novel vocabulary and fresh conceptualization.” We could not disagree more. Sturm’s vocabulary is firmly based on racial, essentialist notions that most people in our society shrank from and disavowed eighty years ago. Her conceptualization of the complex interplay between history, identity and politics is medieval. Her summaries and observations are deficient in intellectual rigor or scientific methods.

One of the “citizen Cherokees’” most scorching criticisms of the “wannabes” is that the latter want to steal the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma’s culture, especially the éclat of spirituality that seems to adhere to “Cherokeeness.” That’s wannabes as defined as “racial shifters.”

We are not aware, to begin with, that the leaders of the Cherokees, as officially ordained today, are particularly knowledgeable about Cherokee history or geography, much less spiritually inclined. We’ve written several books that attempt to correct the standard received version of Cherokee history. Most citizen Cherokees we know are evangelical, Baptist or Methodist and do not run around flaunting their spirituality.

We have to think if someone “wants to be Indian,” for whatever reason, that is a good thing. They should not be thwarted from imitating the ideals of spirituality they have learned and internalized. If their opinions or aspirations offend the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma as the keepers of the flame of “Cherokeeness,” we think that is a devastating statement about the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

A recent showdown between the citizen Cherokees and wannabes occurred on Labor Day weekend in Tahlequah in August 2008, according to Sturm. A SWAT team was on the roofs of the courthouse. The Task Force performed a skit, introducing themselves using their “Indian Names” – Chief Flies High and Eats Pie, Princess Buffalo Wings” and the like (p. 166). These names were meant to poke fun at race shifters, “their greatest concern . . . several self-identified Cherokee tribes who had already been granted state recognition in places like Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri.” We all know about “places like” those, don’t we?

A melee broke out after the Task Force condemned all wannabes as barred from selling Indian crafts according to a 1990 federal law.

Murv Jacob, a Tahlequah artist, circulated a flyer asking why one of the Task Force’s prominent member, Cara Cowan Watts, a tribal councilwoman who sponsored the legislation restricting the sale of “Cherokee” art, would want to spend so much time and energy attacking him personally as a “fake Indian” and his business as illegitimate. Among other things, Jacob stated:

I’ve got a good bit of Kentucky Cherokee blood, also some German and Hillbilly. I never refer to myself as an Indian. I have never said I was a member of any tribe. But I will never, no matter how vicious their attacks, deny my ancestry. I’ve met very few folks who are actually “Indians.” A card doesn’t make you Indian. “Kowan’s Kulture Kommitteel” removed all my artwork and books from both the Cherokee nationa Heritage Center and the little Cherokee Nation Gift Shop because I do not have a tribal membership card. In her little world, I have become a persona non grata. (Tahlequah Daily Press, August 29, 2008—Sturm, p. 169).

He continued:

Cowan, the keeper of Chad Smith’s most recent sacred fire of racial purity, is a scant 1/126th Cherokee on her CDIB card. Only in the wacky world of Cherokee Nation does she receive all those tribal benefits, plus a $50,000-per-year salary . . . and she attacks me from the impenetrable position of tribal sovereignty. There are thousands of Cherokee Nation tribal members with such laughable, minimal blood quanta, some as low as 1/2048. “White Indians” is what they are most often referred to throughout Cherokee history. You’d never guess they were Indians if they didn’t have that card… I believe they will be decertified as the blatant frauds they are. (Tahlequah Daily Press, August 29, 2008—Sturm, p. 170).

After that, Jacob was escorted out of the building. Another commentator on the scene said it required “an astounding delusional and racial world view for a 1/126th Cherokee to accuse anyone of ‘cultural appropriation.’” (Sturm, 170).

I am ashamed at the shenanigans in Indian country detailed in this account. Sturm’s anthopological study gives all Indians a bad name. It should be read and condemned by all people who still admire and emulate “Cherokeeness.” Citizen Cherokees should reject the vision of ignorance and racism presented in it. My ancestors Black Fox and Attakullakulla and Jacob the Conjuror are laughing their asses off in their secret graves back East.