DNA Consultants Home of the DNA Fingerprint

Native Hawaiians and Native Americans
Part One

In a previous post, "On the Trail of Spider Woman," we suggested that petroglyphs in Arizona and Utah with female goddess symbolism and birthing ceremonies were connected with the Hohokam ("Sea Peoples") and other Indians who followed in their wake, corresponding to archeology and anthropology's Basketmaker Culture. In this and a series of posts over the next few months, we will show pictures of “emergence” petroglyphs from Hawaii, New Guinea, California, Hopi, Zuni, Pima, Papago, Fremont, Zuni, Mimbres, Palavayu and Eastern Woodlands cultural sites that support our thesis. We believe them to be the footsteps and stepping stones of female haplogroup B and its associated lineages.

Mitochondrial Haplogroup B does not have as its dissemination center Mongolia or Siberia or Central Asia but Southeast Asia, specifically Taiwan and Indonesia, and is characteristic, in contrast with Indian groups emphasizing A, C and D, of the Pueblo Indians and some Southeastern Indians such as the Cherokee and Chickasaw and Choctaw. It entered the Americas in successive waves, some of them seaborne, over many millennia.

The first picture comes from the western coast of the island of Hawaii. It is considered one of the oldest religious shrines in the Hawaiian Islands. It shows a stick figure carved into a rock set in the ground. As we will see, this is a typical "emergence" figure marking the arrival of a people in a new phase of existence. The symbolism is of a female mother figure giving birth, her progeny here depicted by the taillike extension coming from between her legs. There are thousands of variations of this tribal or clan mother iconography scattered over Asia and the Americas (but not apparently found in Europe or Africa).

The Hawaiians considered the western coast of the Big Island their place of emergence. According to their legends, their people came from the sea from the southwest and were noted for their ability to twist plants and fibers into ropes. Their capital was hence called Hilo (twisted, plaited). On account of their subtlety in these arts they adopted the hula (twist) dance as their national dance. Its original purpose was as a fertility ritual to increase population. (Johannes C. Andersen, Myths and Legends of the Polynesians, Tokyo:  Tuttle, 1969.) The main song sung during the enactment of the hula was called The Water of Kane, or Waters of Life.

The Hawaiian Mother symbol illustrated above seems to be connected with a certain clan. As is often the case, the head of the female figure is differentiated to show which clan. This one has horns and could represent a dragonfly. This insect recurs in American Indian petroglyphs where it is associated with the Water Clan and fertility rites. To "read" the Hawaiian petroglyph properly we might say, "Here is the spot where the Head Mother of the Water Clan emerged and gave birth to her people." It is likely (although no legends are preserved regarding its use) that women made offerings here to become fertile, attract husbands and be delivered of healthy children. In similar ceremonial sites, such figures mark an actual birthing stone where women squatted to give birth, attended by midwives and clan mothers.

Native American Parallels

To show the physical resemblance of the Hawaiian design to American Indian symbols we will reproduce  thumbprints below from different traditions. They will be linked together and explicated in subsequent posts in this series.

"Lizard Woman" petroglyphs from Arizona/Utah.

I got a holiday present from my wife of an unusual little book titled On the Trail of Spider Woman. Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and Myths of the Southwest, by Carol Patterson-Rudolph (Santa Fe:  Ancient City Press, 1997). Putting this intriguing study together with a travel book by David Hatcher Childress, my son and I took a 4-day road trip into the homeland of the Indians credited with having the first civilization in the Southwest, a settled town life marked by desert agriculture, canals, pottery, baskets, ballcourts, plazas and adobe pueblos, pithouses and kivas. Previous occupants of the area were non-sedentary hunter-gatherers considered to be "paleo-Indians."

We visited Painted Rock Petroglyph Site outside Gila Bend, in the middle of nowhere, and ended the trip in the barren sands outside Phoenix, where we began it, visiting the Hohokam Pima National Archeological Monument, also known as Snaketown. The former is little seen, and the latter cannot seen, because the Pima (now Gila River Indians) had the ballcourt and other ruins reburied by backhoes in the 1970s. The caretakers of this declared national treasure decided not to open it to anyone to view or visit because of its "sensitive" nature. There are no signs, no roads, nothing left above ground.

Overview of pecked records and markings of Hohokam, 200 B.C.-A.D. 1300, on granite outcropping called Painted Rock in South Central Arizona.

At Painted Rock, the first mystery we pondered was why it was called "painted" rock when there is no paint. Petroglyphs are produced by pecking away the dark desert varnish to make a negative image on the underlying lighter rock. We wondered if it had anything to do with the Paint People, or Phoenicians, Kanawah Indians of the East Coast or Cherokee and Saponi Paint Clans.

The second mystery was the abundance of snake imagery. Famously, snakes in Indian tradition stand for boats and water. We noticed a Corn Cross, the symbol of the Feathered Serpent or Quetzlcoatl religion, supposedly introduced into Mexico from both the East and the West by white, bearded strangers in ships, who brought rule by laws and numerous arts of civilization and banned human sacrifice.

The third thing we remarked upon were the many Great Goddess or Earth Mother or birthing/fertility symbols. Such places were probably shrines where women came to be blessed and get married and give birth. Sun Park in Hopiland has numerous hemispherical carvings about two inches wide where people ground out minerals to eat. These cupmarks or cupoles at petroglyph sites puzzled archeologists until an important article in a scholarly journal clarified their meaning as part of the worldwide phenomenon of pica (pronounced "pie-ka"), "the desire to ingest nonfood substances such as rock powder, clay, chalk, dirt, and other material by some humans, especially pregnant women" (Kevin L. Callahan, "Pica, Geophagy, and Rock-Art in the Eastern United States," in The Rock-Art of Eastern North America, ed. Carol Diaz-Granados and James R. Duncan, Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004, p. 65.

Neolithic Cupmarks in Kh. Umm El-Umdan, Israel. 

In general, petroglyphs are ignored both by archeology and anthropology, and their study is a no man's land. Sun Park has a birthing cave and birthing stone. Canyon de Chelly has the most photographed Mother Earth rock formation in the world, Spider Rock, a chthonic monument discussed on page 83 of the Spider Woman book by Patterson-Rudolph.

Who Were the Hohokam?

There were also clear images of horses, riders, people praying, spirals, axis mundi (center of the earth) symbols like the iron butterfly and cross, labyrinths, bilobed axes, irrigation plans, horned beasts, felines, palaces or villages and warriors with spears and shields. We searched in vain for anomalous depictions of whales, elephants and deep water fish, found at other similar sites, but the sun was sinking and we did not have time to make a thorough inspection of the motifs. There is a famous petroglyph of a whale at Old Oraibi.

The name Ho-ho-kam is usually explained as meaning "Those Who Are Departed," but such an etymology is more a gloss than a literal translation of its meaning and origin. Like many words in the Hopi, Zuni, Pima and Azteco-Utan languages in general it is composed of South Semitic elements. In Egyptian, it literally means "Sea Peoples" or "Foreigners." The historic Sea Peoples came from Asia Minor and once threatened to conquer the Egyptian empire. The Philistines and Phoenicians are related to them. They were remarkable for their feather bonnets and, like their relatives the Cretans (whose language also came from Asia Minor), for a long-protracted continuance of Mother Goddess worship down into the Bronze Age.

Haplogroup B is the signature lineage of certain Indians in North America. Its ultimate source is Southeast Asia (not Mongolia, as has been suggested for the other three classic Native American haplogroups A, C and D), whence it took multiple circum- or trans-Pacific migratory routes to the Americas (Eschleman et al. 2004). It has high frequencies in Polynesia, which was settled from Southeast Asia, and among the Western Indians of the U.S. such as the Hopi, Zuni (77%), Anasazi (78%), Yuman, and Jemez Pueblo (89%). It is also found in frequencies approaching 70% in the Cherokee and Chickasaw.

We believe Spider Woman is simply an aspect of the Stone Age Great Goddess worshiped by those who came from Southeast Asia through Polynesia and helped colonized the American Southwest. She is the same as the Earth Mother. As in other cultures, she was replaced by sky and sun deities and male hierarchies. But her religion seems to have persisted in the Hohokam, Cherokee and Hopi tribes in a similar fashion to the survival of her cult in the Cretans, Phoenicians and Sea Peoples. 

According to Hopi and other traditions, at the end of the last age, the Mother Goddess ceased to be the leader of the people in their wanderings and went back "under the sea" to the east and west whence she and they had emerged. We can only infer from this that Spider Woman, as she was called in Asia and the Pacific, and the Great Goddess, as she was known in the Old World of the Middle East, relinquished her role as supreme deity to the new male pantheons and withdrew across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to the distant origins of civilization outside the Americas. Ironically, her memory survived better among the Indian nations than in the war-torn empires and materialistic cultures that dominate world history elsewhere. Indian societies today exhibit rare examples of matriarchy as opposed to patriarchy.

Why You Do Not Have (and Don't Want) Enemy Ancestors

When I first visited Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico I got a creepy feeling. Who were these people? The staff, mostly Navajo and not descendants of the original inhabitants of the site, said they were the Anasazi, a Navajo term meaning "enemy ancestors." When I pressed for more answers, I was told they belonged to the Chaco Culture. They were Chacoans.

Anthropologists are used to calling people they don't understand a culture, but as I learned more of this one I don't think they had much of it. The culture of the Anasazi turns out to be one of head-hunting, terrorizing human slaves, drug use and cannibalism.

 Hamatsi, a Kwakiutl Indian of the cannibal spirit. Feldman.

In a book subtitled A History Forgotten, George Franklin Feldman dispels the parlor concepts and sanitized history surrounding Native American practices and pieces together the frightful truth. It is the only book on its topic:  Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America (Hood:  Chambersburg, 2008), and the author's work was an uphill battle against political correctness.

Forget about the Donner Party. When anthropologists and explorers first encountered the monuments and ruins of the people politely called the Ancestral Pueblo they found widespread evidence of a cannibalistic society that had gotten out of control and succumbed to its own inhumanity.

"The best documented indication that the Baskemakers were headhunters is . . . Kinboko Canyon, evidence discovered by archeologist Samuel J. Guernsey of the Peabody Museum of Harvard in 1915, and reported in a 1919 publication of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology," writes Feldman in the chapter on the Anasazi. He goes on to describe this and other early excavations in the Four Corners area that were quickly hushed up and reburied in horror, including Battle Cave in Canyon del Muerto, now part of the Canyon de Chelly National Monument inside the Navajo Indian Reservation. We read now of flesh-stripping, bone crushing, roasting pits, and sliced off mastoids.

Around 950 A.D., eleven persons, including women and children, were killed and butchered, cooked, and eaten on Burnt Mesa in New Mexico north of the San Juan River. At a site near the Hopi villages in Arizona, a group of thirty individuals, forty percent under the age of eighteen, were slaughted and eaten. In a Colorado rock shelter, a large jar was found filled with splintered human bones. . .

The grisly record goes on and on. Feldman writes that by the year 2000 the number of such sites in the San Juan drainage where the Chaco Culture was centered had risen to forty (p. 136).

To their credit, the Indians who were the Chacoans' food supply eventually overthrew their masters and left the area to settle far away, on the three Hopi mesas in Arizona and along the Rio Grande in new pueblos that survive today such as Taos and San Juan. We suggest that the aristocrats of Chaco may have been subject to degenerative neurological disorders like kuru or mad cow disease. But whether they self-destructed or were destroyed by their subject population, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to claim them as ancestors.