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AFTERWARDS, BEFORE
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The Latgawa branch of the Takelma Nation are known as the Panther People or “Knife in the Middle People”, because of their ideographic tribal name-symbol on their sacred “First Home”. On the extinct volcanic mountain is the shadow-symbol of a sacred stone knife and a sacred split feather at its center or “middle”.
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Linguistically, they are unique in human history. They have two separate languages, a sacred and an ordinary, which are grammatically unconnected with each other or any other known root-language (current or archaic) in the world. However, many other languages do have words borrowed from Takelman.
The Taklema word “wili” can be translated as Stone Knife, cutter, divider, separator and also house. The Takelma are, therefore, the people whose House is divided/held in the middle by a knife. The Dine lost such a mountain during their wanderings.
Like the Hopi, the Takelma claim to have emerged into this world/reality from a volcanic hole in the center of a small circular island at the western edge of a great lake. Up from a hole in this primordial island spewed molten earth-matter which was woven into a burden basket which had the shape of the “world-lizard”, or crocodile.
Like the Hopi, the Takelma claim to have emerged into this world/reality from a volcanic hole in the center of a small circular island at the western edge of a great lake. Up from a hole in this primordial island spewed molten earth-matter which was woven into a burden basket which had the shape of the “world-lizard”, or crocodile.
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At the center of the Latgawa’s recognized territory, on the southwest slope of Crater Lake (an extinct volcano), are found many baked-clay anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines depicting many prehistoric species erroneously thought to have been extinct long before the advent of man on this continent.
In 1970, Dr W. Davis, while director of the Museum of Natural History of the University of Oregon, is quoted as having been very impressed by these mysterious baked-clay artifacts, which include the large reptiles existing before man’s appearance on this planet. When correctly lighted and viewed, they all depict the same extict species; among many other images, a mastadon; an ape; a half-man, half cat image; a female frog, and a cat. |
The Taklema say this is the shape of the world. "Like all reptiles" they say,
"It periodically sheds its skin and gets rid of its parasites."
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