The Medicine Wheel

Primary source

• S. C. Simms, A Wheel-Shaped Stone Monument in Wyoming, 1903, American Anthropologist 5, no. 1 (1903), pp. 107-110; title and page range confirmed against the Crossref record for doi:10.1525/aa.1903.5.1.02a00120. Eddy prints it as his reference 2.The first scientific description of the Bighorn structure in print, from Simms's 1902 visit for the Field Columbian Museum. It is not the first notice of any kind: WyoHistory records Paul Francke's 1895 piece in Forest and Stream. The article itself was not read for this entry.
• George Bird Grinnell, The Medicine Wheel, 1922, American Anthropologist 24, no. 3 (1922), pp. 299-310; title and page range confirmed against the Crossref record for doi:10.1525/aa.1922.24.3.02a00020. Eddy prints it as his reference 3.The reading of the wheel as a ground plan of the Cheyenne Medicine Lodge - the central cairn as centre pole, the 28 spokes as the lodge's 28 rafters - reported here as Eddy summarises it at his reference 3. The article itself was not read for this entry.
• Rupert Costo, Review of Seven Arrows (The Indian Historian) - circulated under the title 'Seven Arrows Desecrates Cheyenne' and, in reprints of its text, as 'Hyemhoyosts Storm Desecrates Cheyenne Beliefs'; the title as printed is unverified, 1972, The Indian Historian, vol. 5, no. 2 (Summer 1972); pagination given variously as 41-42 and 441-442, neither verifiedThe contemporaneous Native objection, by the Cahuilla founder and president of the American Indian Historical Society: that the book 'falsifies and desecrates the traditions of the Northern Cheyenne, which it purports to describe'. That phrase is quoted consistently across independent secondary reports of the review. The article itself was not read, and no other wording from it - and nothing about Storm's ancestry - is relied on here.
• Hyemeyohsts Storm, Seven Arrows, 1972, First edition Harper & Row, New York, 1972; the copy linked is the 1973 Ballantine printing, on controlled lending at the Internet Archive.The book that carried 'the Way of the Medicine Wheels' - a four-direction teaching wheel with assigned colours and animals - into general American circulation. Cited for what it taught in 1972 and for that date, never as evidence of Cheyenne tradition and never as proof that the scheme originated with it. Which colour the book assigns to which direction is deliberately not stated in this entry: the secondary accounts disagree and the book was not read.
• Sun Bear and Wabun, The Medicine Wheel: Earth Astrology, 1980, Prentice-Hall, 1980. Not readable online: the Internet Archive holds only the later Dancing with the Wheel (1991) and Dreaming with the Wheel (1994).The step from a teaching device to a saleable system: the wheel recast as a birth-sign zodiac, and the workshop and retreat circuit of the Bear Tribe Medicine Society that carried it.

Scholarship

• John H. Moore, Review of Seven Arrows, by Hyemeyohsts Storm, 1973, American Anthropologist 75, no. 4 (1973), pp. 1040-1042; registered at Crossref under the review heading 'Religion: Seven Arrows. HYEMEYOHSTS STORM'.That the book was reviewed and disputed in the anthropological literature within a year of publication, by an anthropologist who went on to write a standard ethnography of the Cheyenne. Existence, journal, issue and pagination are confirmed from the Crossref record; the review itself was not read, and nothing is claimed here about what Moore concluded.
• John A. Eddy, Astronomical Alignment of the Big Horn Medicine Wheel, 1974, Science, new series, vol. 184, no. 4141 (7 June 1974), pp. 1035-1043; doi:10.1126/science.184.4141.1035; JSTOR stable 1738395. Read in full from the scanned copy linked here.The structure as measured: a stone circle about 25 metres across, a central cairn about 4 metres wide, 28 unevenly spaced spokes, five cairns spaced irregularly along the rim and a sixth about 4 metres beyond it. Eddy's own transit-and-tape survey of summer 1972, rechecked in 1973, and the alignments he argued from it - summer-solstice sunrise and sunset and the heliacal risings of Aldebaran, Rigel and Sirius. His note 4, which brackets Grey's AD 1760 tree-death date two ways: construction about AD 1800 if the limb was placed as dead wood at the build, or merely a latest date for cairn F if it was added later. His judgement of 'possibly 200 years'. His objection to Grinnell's Medicine Lodge reading, quoted above, and his remark that the spokes and rim are 'likely of secondary importance and may well have been added later'. The Crow reports at his notes 12 and 13, and Robert Yellowtail's 1952 deposition at his note 10, in which the outlying cairns mark the cardinal directions of the four winds.

  There are too many cairns, and they do not lie at or even very near the cardinal directions.

• Lisa Aldred, Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality, 2000, American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 3 (Summer 2000), pp. 329-352; author, title, journal, volume, issue and pages confirmed against the Crossref record for doi:10.1353/aiq.2000.0001.The scholarly frame for the commercial afterlife of this material and for the grievance about it. Further reading rather than support for any specific factual claim in this entry.

Further reading

• Fred Chapman (WyoHistory.org, Wyoming State Historical Society), Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain: Celebrated and Controversial Landmark, 2019, WyoHistory.org encyclopedia entry, published 10 April 2019The National Historic Landmark designation of 1970 and the 2011 enlargement of its boundary from 110 to 4,080 acres; the Historic Preservation Plan executed in September 1996 after work begun in 1994 by tribal representatives, federal and state government administrators and local elected officials, and its 23,000-acre area of consultation; the first documentary notice of the wheel by Paul Francke in Forest and Stream in 1895 and Simms's first scientific study in 1902; the count of as many as 150 medicine wheels across Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, Alberta and Saskatchewan; and the site's continuing ceremonial use. The page does NOT name the plan's signatories, and no signatory list is sourced in this entry.

  The resulting plan, executed in September 1996, was a compromise that reflected the diverse and contending interests of the consulting parties.

Linked entries

• Set againstYoga Body: Singleton's ArgumentA modern connection

  The same finding in two traditions: Singleton dates the standing postures of modern yoga to the 1920s and 1930s, and the four-colour wheel enters print in 1972 - both taught as immemorial.

• Set againstOne Hundred and EightA modern connection

  Both are objects asked to carry a cosmology, and in both cases the explanation is the part that gets quoted — arriving long after the thing it explains, and then standing in for its history.

• Set againstIsangoma and UkuthwasaAttested

  Both are living indigenous practices whose English-language literature was largely written by outsiders; ukuthwasa is the exception that shows the rule, its standard ethnography written in 1977 by a Zulu woman about her own people.