Photo Hunters: Triangle

After a brief hiatus from Photo Hunters for this blog, I’m going to start it up again here. I’ll still have my singular photo contribution at I Love New York Travel.net, too. So feel free to visit both if you are so inclined. Both promise to be riveting, fascinating photographic adventures filled with wit, wisdom, and whimsy! OK, I may be overselling myself…. be a pal and humor me, k?

On with the show…

This week’s theme is triangle.

This is one of my favorite photos. We took it while visiting a Civil War re-enactment at the Fort Herkimer Church. I have four triangles here, one for each kid.

Here’s a triangle in the tree, on a replicated Oneida Indian wampum belt. We saw this at the Children’s Museum in Utica, NY. This is the Hiawatha Belt, the Iroquois treaty that the Five Nations made, finally promising peace to each other after many years of vicious fighting. The Great Tree of Peace is in the center, rooted in the League’s center, the Onondaga Nation. The other squares represent the other Iroquois nations: Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, and Mohawk.

Speaking of war and peace, here’s another form of a triangle– this is an old map of New York State. The arrows represent the battle plans of the British against the Americans in 1777. The British planned to invade and conquer Albany, NY, our state capital. In doing so, the British would slit the 13 Colonies in half: the plan was a brilliantly devised one of divide and conquer.

But it didn’t work, obviously.

Through the hand of Divine Providence, the British plans went awry. The British army led by General St. Leger coming from the west were stifled at Fort Stanwix in Rome, NY. The British army led by General Burgoyne was sabatoged and captured in Saratoga, NY. And the British army led by General Howe that was supposed to come up from Philadelphia from the south never even got started. New York proved much more resistant than the British thought– after this event, the French joined the Americans and the British scampered down to the Southern Colonies to try to conquer there. You can read more about the three-pronged attack in what is considered the “bloodiest battle of the American Revolution” here.
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Photo Hunters: Support

A person could do so much with this week’s Photo Hunt! I decided to use “support” as a verb. Here’s a photo of the Hiawatha Belt. This is not the real belt, it’s a replica of one, and we saw it at the Children’s Museum in Utica, NY. You can read about our visit to the Museum here.

Why do I have a wampum belt for Photo Hunt? The original Hiawatha Belt was made of wampum, which were beads made from clam shells, found in the Atlantic Ocean. These beads were extremely precious to the Indians of Upstate New York. They used the beads to make wampum belts, which were binding contracts or treaties. Nowadays people use hidden spy cameras to enforce treaties, but back then, people kept their word with a binding contract!

This wampum belt is the contract– the covenant– that the five individual Iroquois tribal Nations (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk) agreed to. They agreed to support each other and to have peace with each other. This peace lasted for about 500 years, until the American Revolution. Only the Oneida Indian tribes joined the American patriots and they gave us their support. They suffered horrible losses, but they believed in our cause.

How did your Photo Hunt go today?