To some

indigenous peoples of North America The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the European settlers in the 15th century, and the ethnic groups who now identify themselves with those peoples. Many Indigenous peoples of the Am ...

, the medicine wheel is a metaphor for a variety of spiritual concepts. A medicine wheel may also be a stone monument that illustrates this metaphor. Historically, most medicine wheels follow the basic pattern of having a center of stone, and surrounding that is an outer ring of stones with "spokes" (lines of rocks) radiating from the center to the

cardinal direction The four cardinal directions, or cardinal points, are the four main compass directions: north, east, south, and west, commonly denoted by their initials N, E, S, and W respectively. Relative to north, the directions east, south, and west are at ...

s (east, south, west, and north). These stone structures may be called "medicine wheels" by the nation which built them, or more specific terms in that nation's language. Physical medicine wheels made of stone were constructed by several different

indigenous peoples Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...

, especially the

Plains Indians Plains Indians or Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies are the Native American tribes and First Nation band governments who have historically lived on the Interior Plains (the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies) of N ...

. They are associated with

religious Religion is usually defined as a social system, social-cultural system of designated religious behaviour, behaviors and practices, morality, morals, beliefs, worldviews, religious text, texts, sacred site, sanctified places, prophecy, prophecie ...

ceremonies. As a metaphor, they may be used in healing work or to illustrate other cultural concepts. The medicine wheel has been adopted as a symbol by a number of

pan-Indian Pan-Indianism is a philosophical and political approach promoting unity, and to some extent cultural homogenization, among different Indigenous groups in the Americas regardless of tribal distinctions and cultural differences. This approach to ...

groups, or other native groups whose ancestors did not traditionally use it as a symbol or structure. It has also been appropriated by non-indigenous people, usually those associated with

New Age New Age is a range of spiritual or religious practices and beliefs which rapidly grew in Western society during the early 1970s. Its highly eclectic and unsystematic structure makes a precise definition difficult. Although many scholars conside ...

communities.

Nomenclature

The

Royal Alberta Museum The Royal Alberta Museum (RAM) is a museum of human and natural history in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The museum is located in Downtown Edmonton, north of City Hall. The museum is the largest in western Canada with more than exhibition space ...

(2005) holds that the term "medicine wheel" was first applied to the Big Horn Medicine Wheel in

Wyoming Wyoming () is a U.S. state, state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is bordered by Montana to the north and northwest, South Dakota and Nebraska to the east, Idaho to the west, Utah to the south ...

, the southernmost archeological wheel still extant.Source: (accessed: January 2, 2008) The term "medicine" was not applied because of any healing that was associated with the medicine wheel, but denotes that the sacred site and rock formations were of central importance and attributed with religious, hallowed, and spiritual significance. As a metaphor, the concept of ''the sacred hoop of life'', also used by multiple Nations, is sometimes conflated with that of the medicine wheel. A 2007 ''

Indian Country Today ''ICT News'' (formerly known as ''Indian Country Today'') is a daily digital news platform that covers the Indigenous world, including American Indians, Alaska Natives and First Nations. It was founded in 1981 as a weekly print newspaper, ''The ...

'' article on the history of the modern Hoop Dance defines the dancer's hoop this way:

The hoop is symbolic of "the never-ending circle of life." It has no beginning and no end.Zotigh, Dennis (30 May 2007)
"History of the modern Hoop Dance"
Indian Country Today. Retrieved 12 February 2014.

Exegesis

Stone structures as sacred architecture

Intentionally erecting massive stone structures as

sacred architecture Sacral architecture (also known as sacred architecture or religious architecture) is a religious architectural practice concerned with the design and construction of places of worship or sacred or intentional space, such as churches, mosques, stu ...

is a well-documented activity of ancient

monolithic A monolith is a monument or natural feature consisting of a single massive stone or rock. Monolith or monolithic may also refer to: Architecture * Monolithic architecture, a style of construction in which a building is carved, cast or excavated ...

and

megalithic A megalith is a large stone that has been used to construct a prehistoric structure or monument, either alone or together with other stones. There are over 35,000 in Europe alone, located widely from Sweden to the Mediterranean sea. The ...

peoples. What sets them apart from many of the other megalithic peoples is how non-intrusive and environmentally sensitive the footprint and fabrication of their structures were. Unlike some of the grand and towering stone monoliths found in Europe, the indigenous peoples of North America usually laid down smaller stones on the earth, rather than digging deep pits and erecting huge stones, such as at

Stonehenge Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, west of Amesbury. It consists of an outer ring of vertical sarsen standing stones, each around high, wide, and weighing around 25 tons, topped by connectin ...

. The

posits the possible point of origin, or parallel tradition, to other round structures such as the

tipi A tipi , often called a lodge in English, is a conical tent, historically made of animal hides or pelts, and in more recent generations of canvas, stretched on a framework of wooden poles. The word is Siouan languages, Siouan, and in use in Dakot ...

lodge, stones used as "

foundation stone The cornerstone (or foundation stone or setting stone) is the first stone set in the construction of a masonry foundation. All other stones will be set in reference to this stone, thus determining the position of the entire structure. Over time ...

s" or " tent-pegs":

Scattered across the plains of Alberta are tens of thousands of stone structures. Most of these are simple circles of cobble stones which once held down the edges of the famous tipi of the
Plains Indians Plains Indians or Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies are the Native American tribes and First Nation band governments who have historically lived on the Interior Plains (the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies) of N ...
; these are known as "
tipi ring Tipi rings are circular patterns of stones left from an encampment of Post-Archaic, protohistoric and historic Native Americans.Cassells, Steve. (1997). ''The Archaeology of Colorado.'' Boulder: Johnson Books. pp. 224-227. . They are found primar ...
s." Others, however, were of a more esoteric nature. Extremely large stone circlessome greater than 12 meters acrossmay be the remains of special
ceremonial dance Ceremonial dance is a major category or classification of dance forms or dance styles, where the purpose is ceremonial or ritualistic. It is related to and overlaps with sacred dance and ecstatic dance. Definition History Description L ...
structures. A few cobble arrangements form the outlines of human figures, most of them obviously male. Perhaps the most intriguing cobble constructions, however, are the ones known as medicine wheels.

Locality, siting and proxemics

Stone medicine wheels are sited throughout the northern

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

and southern

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

, specifically

South Dakota South Dakota (; Sioux language, Sioux: , ) is a U.S. state in the West North Central states, North Central region of the United States. It is also part of the Great Plains. South Dakota is named after the Lakota people, Lakota and Dakota peo ...

Montana Montana () is a state in the Mountain West division of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North Dakota and South Dakota to the east, Wyoming to the south, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbi ...

Alberta Alberta ( ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is part of Western Canada and is one of the three prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to the west, Saskatchewan to the east, the Northwest Ter ...

and

Saskatchewan Saskatchewan ( ; ) is a Provinces and territories of Canada, province in Western Canada, western Canada, bordered on the west by Alberta, on the north by the Northwest Territories, on the east by Manitoba, to the northeast by Nunavut, and on t ...

. The majority of the approximately 70 documented stone structures still extant are in

, Canada. One of the prototypical medicine wheels is in the

Bighorn National Forest The Bighorn National Forest is a U.S. National Forest located in northern Wyoming, United States and consists of over 1.1 million acres (4,500 km2). Created as a US Forest Reserve in 1897, it is one of the oldest government-protected fores ...

in Big Horn County, Wyoming. This wheel has 28 spokes, and is part of a vast set of old Native American sites that document 7,000 years of their history in that area. Medicine wheels are also found in

Ojibwa The Ojibwe, Ojibwa, Chippewa, or Saulteaux are an Anishinaabe people in what is currently southern Canada, the northern Midwestern United States, and Northern Plains. According to the U.S. census, in the United States Ojibwe people are one of ...

territory, the common theory is that they were built by the prehistoric ancestors of the

Assiniboine people The Assiniboine or Assiniboin people ( when singular, Assiniboines / Assiniboins when plural; Ojibwe: ''Asiniibwaan'', "stone Sioux"; also in plural Assiniboine or Assiniboin), also known as the Hohe and known by the endonym Nakota (or Nakoda ...

. Larger astronomical and ceremonial

petroforms Petroforms, also known as boulder outlines or boulder mosaics, are human-made shapes and patterns made by lining up large rocks on the open ground, often on quite level areas. Petroforms in North America were originally made by various Native A ...

, and Hopewell

mound A mound is a heaped pile of earth, gravel, sand, rocks, or debris. Most commonly, mounds are earthen formations such as hills and mountains, particularly if they appear artificial. A mound may be any rounded area of topographically higher el ...

building sites are also found in North America.

Structure, fabrication and patterning

In defining the commonalities among different stone medicine wheels, the

cites the definition given by John Brumley, an archaeologist from

Medicine Hat Medicine Hat is a city in Southern Alberta, southeast Alberta, Canada. It is located along the South Saskatchewan River. It is approximately east of Lethbridge and southeast of Calgary. This city and the adjacent Town of Redcliff, Alberta, ...

, that a medicine wheel "consists of at least two of the following three traits: (1) a central stone

cairn A cairn is a man-made pile (or stack) of stones raised for a purpose, usually as a marker or as a burial mound. The word ''cairn'' comes from the gd, càrn (plural ). Cairns have been and are used for a broad variety of purposes. In prehis ...

, (2) one or more

concentric In geometry, two or more objects are said to be concentric, coaxal, or coaxial when they share the same center or axis. Circles, regular polygons and regular polyhedra, and spheres may be concentric to one another (sharing the same center point ...

stone circle A stone circle is a ring of standing stones. Most are found in Northwestern Europe – especially in Britain, Ireland, and Brittany – and typically date from the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, with most being built from 3000 BC. The be ...

s, and/or (3) two or more stone lines radiating outward from a central point." From the air, a medicine wheel often looks like a wagon wheel lying on its side. The wheels can be large, reaching diameters of 75 feet. The most common variation between different wheels are the spokes. There is no set number of spokes for a medicine wheel to have although there are usually 28, the same number of days in a lunar cycle. The spokes within each wheel are rarely evenly spaced, or even all the same length. Some medicine wheels will have one particular spoke that is significantly longer than the rest. The spokes may start from the center cairn and go out only to the outer ring, others go past the outer ring, and some spokes start at the outer ring and go out from there. Sometimes there is a passageway, or a doorway, in the circles. The outer ring of stones will be broken, and there will be a stone path leading in to the center of the wheel. Some have additional circles around the outside of the wheel, sometimes attached to spokes or the outer ring, and sometimes floating free of the main structure. While alignment with the cardinal directions is common, some medicine wheels are also aligned with astronomical phenomena involving the sun, moon, some stars, and some planets in relation to the Earth's horizon at that location. The wheels are generally considered to be sacred sites, connected in various ways to the builders' particular culture, lore and ceremonial ways. Other North American indigenous peoples have made somewhat-similar

, turtle-shaped stone piles with the legs, head, and tail pointing out the directions and aligned with astronomical events.

Cultural value, attribution and meaning

Stone medicine wheels have been built and used for ceremonies for millennia, and each one has enough unique characteristics and qualities that archaeologists have encountered significant challenges in determining with precision what each one was for; similarly, gauging their commonality of function and meaning has also been problematic. One of the older wheels, the Majorville medicine wheel located south of Bassano, Alberta, has been dated at 3200 BCE (5200 years ago) by careful

stratification Stratification may refer to: Mathematics * Stratification (mathematics), any consistent assignment of numbers to predicate symbols * Data stratification in statistics Earth sciences * Stable and unstable stratification * Stratification, or st ...

of known artifact types. Like

, it had been built up by successive generations who would add new features to the circle. Due to that and its long period of use (with a gap in its use between 3000 and 2000 years ago, archaeologists believe that the function of the medicine wheel changed over time. Astronomer John Eddy put forth the suggestions that some of the wheels had astronomical significance, where spokes on a wheel could be pointing to certain stars, as well as sunrise or sunset, at a certain time of the year, suggesting that the wheels were a way to mark certain days of the year.Alice B. Kehoe and Thomas F. Kehoe, 1979, Solstice-Aligned Boulder Configurations in Saskatchewan. Canadian Ethnology Service Paper No. 48, Mercury Series, National Museum of Man, Ottawa. (Translated into French by P. Ferryn, published 1978 Kadath 26:19-31, Brussels, Belgium) In a paper for the '' Journal for the History of Astronomy'' Professor

Bradley Schaefer Bradley Elliott Schaefer is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Louisiana State University. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983. Early life In addition to his academic pursuits, Schaefer is reme ...

stated that the claimed alignments for three wheels studied, the

Bighorn medicine wheel The bighorn sheep (''Ovis canadensis'') is a species of sheep native to North America. It is named for its large horns. A pair of horns might weigh up to ; the sheep typically weigh up to . Recent genetic testing indicates three distinct subspe ...

, one at Moose Mountain in southeastern

, and one at Fort Smith, Montana, there was no statistical evidence for stellar alignments.

Medicine Wheel Park

Joe Stickler of

Valley City State University Valley City State University (VCSU) is a public university in Valley City, North Dakota. It is part of the North Dakota University System. Founded in 1890 as Valley City State Normal School, a two-year teachers' college, it was authorized to confe ...

, North Dakota, with the assistance of his students, began the construction of Medicine Wheel Park in 1992. The Park showcases two

solar calendar A solar calendar is a calendar whose dates indicate the season or almost equivalently the apparent position of the Sun relative to the stars. The Gregorian calendar, widely accepted as a standard in the world, is an example of a solar calendar. T ...

s: "a horizon calendar (the medicine wheel) and a meridian or noontime calendar." According to the Medicine Wheel website, the "large circle measures 213 feet (approximately 65 meters) around. The 28 spokes radiating from its center represent the number of days in the lunar cycle. Six spokes extending well beyond the Wheel are aligned to the horizon positions of sunrises and sunsets on the first days of the four seasons."

References

External links

Medicine Wheel Park at Valley City State University

Stanford University Solar Center Medicine Wheel Page

A Report on the Medicine Wheel
{{coord, 44.826, N, 107.922, W, display=title, source:dewiki Religious places of the indigenous peoples of North America

Nomenclature

Exegesis

Stone structures as sacred architecture

Locality, siting and proxemics

Structure, fabrication and patterning

Cultural value, attribution and meaning

Medicine Wheel Park

See also

References

Further reading

Books

Articles

External links