Bell Hammer Song

The Land Bridge of Bering Strait

A Song Cycle of the Ice Age Migrations to North America

Big Hand's third song cycle explores the first North American migrations over Beringia, the site of the Bering Land Bridge during the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. The first Amerindians as well as the Athabaskans and Inuits traveled from the Great Rift Valley in Africa, across the Middle East to the Asian continent, arriving in Hokkaido, an island in the Japanese archipelago. The journey took aeons of time over centuries in terms of human evolution.

The Land Bridge was unearthed with the retreat of the oceans into sheets of ice. As the Ice Age ended, the seas refilled, and the Land Bridge disappeared under Arctic water. For a critical time in the history of man, "the Gate was Opened, then Closed." The Strait between old and new worlds, discovered by Norwegian explorer Vitus Bering, was the subject of man's fabled attempt to locate the legendary "Northwest Ocean Passage," a sea corridor between the Orient and the Occident.

During the land bridge crossing, the Sasquatch, or Yeti, found himself in new lands also. Known in the Orient as "the Abominable Snowman or Yeti," most likely a mistranslation, he crossed with saber cats and mammoths from Siberia to Alaska on the western side of the Pacific Fire Rim. The Yeti, as he was known in the Himalayan country of Tibet, was familiar to Athabaskans in the Pacific Northwest, frequently carved on cultural artifacts, like cedar boxes and totem poles. He was also hand painted on silk thangkas of tantric Buddhist lamaseries in "the lands of snow."

Bell Hammer Song

Songs:

Beringia

On the Land Bridge

Wave-Swept, Wind-Blown

Gone the Swan

Deerdancers

Grey Whales!

Song of the Sasquatch

skull/antler/bone

Shangri-La

Flower Arrows (The Bear-Sending Ceremony)