Last year, on the day before my birthday, an article appeared in my RSS reader about a new book by Ardy Sixkiller Clarke that had just been published. It was called More Encounters with Star People: Urban American Indians Tell Their Stories. I was elated with the news! I had been looking forward to anything new from her for months on end. And all of a sudden, there it was, almost like a birthday present for me.
I ordered the book right then, and read it as soon as it arrived. As usual, there were some wild stories that gave me a lot to think about. I knew I would write a blog post on it, but for some reason it's taken me an entire year to do so.
To recap, Ardy Sixkiller Clarke is a retired professor from Montana State University. Over the past several decades, she's collected stories from American Indians about their encounters with star people (aka aliens/extraterrestrials). In 2012, she published her first book on the topic, Encounters with Star People: Untold Stories of American Indians, which I wrote about at length here. It focused on interviews with American Indians on reservations. In 2014, her second book was published, Sky People: Untold Stories of Alien Encounters in Mesoamerica (which I briefly mentioned in this post). That book saw her fulfill a lifelong dream of traveling through Central America, following in the footsteps of the 19th century explorers Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood. Along the way, she interviewed Mayans who'd had experiences with star people. Her third book, which is the topic of this blog post, was published last year (2016) and focused on interviews with American Indians who'd left the reservation.
I love her books for a variety of reasons:
- You get a glimpse into the lives of indigenous people. In the latest book, you get a sense of the challenges people face when they leave the reservation for modern society. They walk in two worlds, not quite belonging to either one.
- The stories of the star people. How do people react when confronted with a star person? What do the star people say? What does the experiencer say? What did they learn?
- Reading about Ardy's adventures. She has a number of serendipitous events, like when her car breaks down in New Mexico, and the mechanic who fixes it is an Indian that not only has read her books and recognizes her, but has his own story of UFO sightings to share. A fair number of her interviews happen like that, purely by chance.
The main thing from this book that stuck with me the past year is just how far behind humans are from the star people. For example, in one story, a star person said that verbal communication is not very common in the universe, and is actually a sign of how primitive humans are. That really shocked me, even though nearly everyone who communicates with a star person reports it happens telepathically. Another star person said that where he comes from, they do what's best for the species, whereas humans do what's best for the individual. He said humans have the cure for disease and old age, as well as forms of energy that would eliminate the need for fossil fuels, but these are not released because it's not profitable for those in power. Sadly, this did not shock me.
I'll share two stories in particular that have also stuck with me. The first comes from a doctor in Oklahoma, who is from the Southern Cheyenne tribe. He said he hit a deer one night as he was driving home from the hospital. When he got out of the car, the deer transformed into a star person! They stood on the side of the road, communicating telepathically. The star person said he wasn't hurt; he had healed himself with his mind, something humans would eventually learn to do (and that a few humans could already do, but they were scorned by the medical profession). The star person went on to say:
- In the grand scheme of things, Earth is not that important. No one wants to invade it. There are far too many habitable planets that don't have intelligent life that would be easier to colonize.
- His species does colonize uninhabited planets and have taken humans who were willing to leave Earth to those planets to help colonize them.
- He was aware of a species that was abducting humans. They have been encouraged to stop, but there is nothing his species can do to stop them. There are many other intelligent species that are unhappy with the attention human abductions have brought to space travelers, because their goal is to explore and study without changing the culture.
The other story is so wild it's difficult to believe. The story played out over 3 years. It started at a conference honoring Indian women leaders, where Ardy was approached by a woman who was a widow with a 14 year old daughter. She believed her daughter would be taken by the star people at the age of 17 to help colonize a planet inhabited only by human females. The star people had learned that human males always bring violence and greed with them, so they were trying a female-only colonization as an experiment. The mother was terrified of losing her daughter, and refused to seek counseling, so Ardy kept in touch with her by calling her weekly and visiting her periodically.
A couple of years later, when the daughter was 16, Ardy visited them. The woman revealed she was now allowed to join her daughter on the new planet, and as a result had become vegetarian, like her daughter, since the only food source would be plants. Then, a few months later, the mother and daughter vanished. Their phone stopped working. The house was donated to charity. Someone else was at the mother's job, saying the woman left and didn't leave a forwarding address. Ardy said she couldn't get the woman out of her mind for months. Every time the phone rang, she thought it would be her, but it never was. She even visited the family's ancestral village, but no one knew where they were. Now, Ardy says, she looks at the stars and wonders if there really could be a woman-only planet, and whether or not it would be a happy place.
In a way, I was slightly disappointed in the book. While the stories were fascinating, there was much more fear among the urban Indians. The reservation Indians from her first book had more positive interactions with the star people. I'm not sure why that is.
Some critics have questioned how Ardy can encounter so many people with stories of UFOs and star people (she says she's interviewed more than 1500 individuals). Her answer to that is simple: she asks.
I have never seen a UFO or encountered a star person. For anyone reading this post, have you?