ArizonaRealCountry.com 9 March 2019 For the remaining results, please visit www.arizonajuniorrodeo.com as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood and so it is in everything where power moves. Our teepees were round like the nests of birds and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.” It is necessary for man to progress. He cannot stand still, but must he be so wasteful and uncaring for the other guy and everything else around him? Our society has become such a destructive, violent society where very little seems to be sacred any more. We are more savage than the savages ever were. This final passage was spoken by an old Holy Wintu woman as she reflected upon the needless destruction caused by hydraulic mining to satisfy man’s greed for gold in California. Sadly, not much seems to have changed since that time. She said: “The white people never cared for land or deer, or bear. When Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. When we dig roots we make little holes. Where we built houses we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things. We shake down acorns and pine nuts. We don’t chop down the trees. We only use dead wood. But the white people plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything. The tree says, ‘Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me!’ But they chop it down and cut it up. The spirit of the land hates them. They blast out trees and stir it up to its depths. They saw up the trees. That hurts them. The Indians never hurt anything, but the White people destroy all. They blast rocks and scatter them on the ground. The rock says, ‘Don’t. You are hurting me’. But the White people pay no attention. When the Indians use rocks, they take little round ones for their cooking... How can the spirit of the earth like the White man? Everywhere the White man has touched it, it is sore!” I think the old woman seems to have said it all... Black Elk The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave us strength and endurance. This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion. Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle.