Meanings of the Medicine Wheel

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Strange, or unusual things have always fascinated me. I want to know all about them, especially if it’s a strange thing that is still unexplained, and really especially if that strange thing is close by.Valley City,North Dakota, is about one hundred miles. To me that’s fairly close.Valley City’s name aptly describes the small city. It’s located in the Sheyenne River valley, right on the river.Eastern North Dakota is flat, but when one begins going west, hills do begin appearing, plus there’s a gradual incline that one doesn’t even notice, and suddenly you go over a rise and there the little city is. Interstate 94 goes right through town. I always get a small thrill going down that hill and then up the other side.

But it’s what’s located at Valley City that attracts me. A really huge medicine wheel. It’s a tourist attraction, schools visit, and there are summer and winter solstice and spring and autumn equinox events. I mean, this baby is big. (My own is only about 16 feet in circumference.) The one at Valley City is 214 feet in circumference. It has 28 spokes representing the 29 days in the lunar month, or “moon” by which American Indians figured time. The 28 spokes also are the number of spokes in the roofs of ceremonial lodges; they also represent the number of days in the human reproductive cycle.

Unfortunately, I have discovered that “this” medicine wheel is “not” unexplained. It was built by modern man, college students and a math instructor from Valley City State University, so, is “very” explained. Huge boulders have been placed in strategic locations from the center of the wheel to represent the nine planets in our solar system, some hundreds of feet away to represent actual distances, a miniature display of our solar system, our own little spot in the galaxy.

But that’s not to say that all medicine wheels are explained.

The Big Horn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming remains “unexplained,” and is thought to be 500-800 years old. The local Native Americans were asked about it by the first white settlers in 1855. The Indians didn’t know. They said “…it was here when we came…” or words to that effect. So where did it come from? Who built it? And why? Some prehistoric group, of course, built it.

It sits on top of a crest of a hill/mountain, at 9642 feet, far from any town, can only be reached in the warm summer months, and can be said to be “…in the middle of nowhere…” And that, in my mind, could really be a great place. Think of those original Native Americans (probably relatives of the original people who walked across the dry Bering Strait) hiking up to that peak, and the ceremonies they must have held there. It is still used by Crow youth for fasting and vision quests, and is used by Native Americans to give thanks for the creation that sustains them. Members of the Crow, Shoshone, and Cheyenne, tribes, still gather at this sacred place high above the rest of the world, for ceremonies.

One really good page at About.com paganism/wicca gives some interesting Native American viewpoints. Sorry, I don’t know how to link you up, but one I want to share comes from Black Elk, a Lakota Sioux elder, who said the following about the medicine wheel circle:

“Everything the power of the world does, is done in a circle. The sky is round, the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls... the sun comes forth and goes down in a circle. The moon does the same… even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were before. The life of a man is a circle… and it is in everything where power moves.”

(from Black Elk Speaks, by John G. Neibardt,Univ. ofNebraska Press)

There are some really great images of the Wyoming medicine wheel on the internet. Sorry, but I also haven’t yet learned how to share photographs on HubPages.