I know this region, this valley, this place. I lived in this region for years.

There is no place like this on earth. I am not Native American, just an American who knows and understands a bit.

Thank you, just makes me homesick for the high country, the badlands, living at higher altitude than I do now.

Could I suggest that if you were born here you are a native American.

My family did indeed immigrate here 7 generations ago. But the families of every "native American" immigrated here 20 or 30 or 40 generations ago. There were, it's believed, 3 major immigrations from Asia and many small immigrations in the past.

Each new immigrant group displaced (a nice way of saying the fought and killed) the previous immigrants. So to call what we now think of as "native Americans" "native" belies their immigrant history and their bloody past.

I like the Canadian way of calling them "first nations" but since there were three large immigrant waves it would only be fair to call them third nations in honor of those they displaced in their geneocidal wars.

Has a nice ring to it don'tcha think.

On that subject there is ample evidence that some of those "waves" of ancient immigrants were from Europe. Explore the rich history of Europeans here perhaps as far back as 18,000 years ago.

The Clovis point does not look anything like points from Asia but closely resembles points from the same time period from France. So possibly the present Indians are 3rd nations and the Europeans are merely newcomer relatives of the 1st nation.

Wouldn't that be ironic?

Pretty!