Sometimes there are claims that startle even me. My Google News Alert for “Ancient Aliens” directed me to Dope magazine, a publication for marijuana enthusiasts, in which author Katie Conley wrote about claims that space aliens brought the “gift” of cannabis to Earth in the distant past. Given the article’s semi-sarcastic tone, I thought that it must be a joke. However, upon checking the sources referred to in the article, it turns out that there actually is a New Age one-quarter Cherokee ex-porn star who made exactly that claim earlier this year in High Times magazine. Hyapatia Lee was a pornographic actress and stripper in the 1980s, and according to her Wikipedia page, one of the most famous of the time, in large measure because she was the only Native American working in porn in those years. Last year, she remade herself as a Native American spiritual healer, authoring a self-help book called Native Strength. In promoting that book, Lee made the following claim in High Times magazine: Many tribes across the Americas have legends of aliens, or Star People, bringing cannabis to this planet. The Cherokee say that the Star People came from a planet with the same name as the Cherokee word for pot, gatunlati. There are also thousands of stories of Natives being visited by Star People, not only in the past but on a continual basis. As I am sure you can tell, Lee has fallen into the trap of believing the fringe interpretation of Native American lore that imposes an ancient astronaut reading on it. The Star People are familiar enough—gods and demigods reinterpreted as space aliens.
The question of gatunlati is a more complicated one. The word is indeed Cherokee and it refers to a type of wild hemp. It was also used as a proper name, a variant (Cuhtahlatah) being the name of a famous Cherokee woman who avenged the death of her husband in the 1800s. I am not fluent in Cherokee, so I can’t speak to the difference, but the word for wild hemp is spelled differently from the one that Lee ascribes to another planet. That word is galunlati, and it is not traditionally another planet but a realm directly above the Earth from which animals descended to the Earth. It sits atop the vault of the sky. So far as I have been able to find, the two words are not interchangeable, though we would need an expert on the Cherokee language to know for sure.
40 Comments
Bob Jase
6/8/2017 11:46:32 am
There is nothing too whacked to be incorporated into faux native-American folklore.
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David Hollombe
6/8/2017 01:09:27 pm
Wild hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) is unrelated to Cannabis and its effects are similar to Digitalis.
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TONY S.
6/8/2017 01:17:40 pm
Ancient astronauts even brought us weed! Is there anything they didn't think of? No wonder those old clueless primitives thought they were gods. Good times.
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Jim
6/8/2017 05:37:13 pm
Yup, they pretty much thought of everything. After giving them pot, they introduced popcorn, to cure the munchies.
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MartyR
6/11/2017 01:30:47 pm
I thought it was the Europeans who brought weed to the American shores. They were stoned and spaced out, which is why the mounds were built.
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Shane Sullivan
6/8/2017 01:44:27 pm
Hyapatia Lee, you silly goose. Pot grows *up* from the *ground*, not down from the sky.
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Titus pullo
6/8/2017 02:01:21 pm
There might be something about aa beliefs and ancient advanced cilivizations and pot! My personal experience with stoners is they are more into consparicies and fringe ideas! Hey in a free country i dont care if ur stoned, your business
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Americanegro
6/8/2017 02:34:41 pm
Based on the large number of people claiming to be part Cherokee, Cherokees must really like to impregnate.
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David Bradbury
6/8/2017 03:12:59 pm
- or maybe a large number of Cherokee recognised that they were being subjected to genocide, and decided that their best hope of a future was to go and live in white communities, taking whatever work they could find.
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Americanegro
6/8/2017 05:26:40 pm
So you're saying it's unusual for Indians to work for a living?
David Bradbury
6/8/2017 06:31:45 pm
No I'm not, and I think you knew it.
Weatherwax
6/8/2017 07:47:06 pm
Or it suddenly became fashionable to be descended from Native Americans, so great grand parent princesses were created.
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BigNick
6/8/2017 08:16:48 pm
True story:
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Shane Sullivan
6/8/2017 09:34:41 pm
No, my great aunt and her son are Cherokee, and neither of them has ever offered to have sex with me, so I'm forced to conclude that the Cherokee are the only ethnic group in the history of the world who just don't like sex.
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BigNick
6/8/2017 11:04:18 pm
Well, to be fair, you aren't a sex ape.
An Over-Educated Grunt
6/9/2017 03:30:31 pm
To be fair, two people is too small a sample. You need to proposition at least thirty Cherokee for it to be statistically meaningful.
Riley V
6/9/2017 12:49:59 am
Cherokees, along with the other 4 "Civilized Tribes" (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek) were living as stable subsistence farmers in log cabins at time of contact. They quickly assimilated, intermarried, built schools, and began owning African slaves.
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yakko
6/10/2017 09:49:44 pm
@Riley V: Sorry, I stole your pow wow joke in my comment below. I've heard that one myself a few times, and didn't realize it had already been used here.
V
6/10/2017 07:14:08 pm
....look, buddy, the vast majority of the human species, as well as any other species that uses sexual reproduction, LOVES to impregnate. If it's taken you this long to figure that out, perhaps you should seek medical help.
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Americanegro
6/11/2017 11:51:44 am
I'm surprised that I would take myself to task in such a harsh fashion. That's another puzzle for God's codebreaker At Risk, to solve I suppose.
yakko
6/10/2017 08:17:10 pm
There has been quite a lot of intermarriage among the Cherokee, such that most of the Western Cherokee tribe has a blood quantum of one-eighth or less. (What do you call a person at an Indian pow wow who has brown hair and blue eyes? A Cherokee!) A lot of people in the South and lower Midwest really do have a "Cherokee grandmother" (although by that they more often mean a more distant relative such as a great- or great-great grandmother). It's not a person's claim to have an Indian grandparent that matters, but what they say after that, or what they try to prove by it.
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E.P. Grondine
6/11/2017 09:44:43 pm
Hi Yakko -
Americanegro
6/11/2017 10:08:40 pm
@Yakko: Actually a lot of Irish Americans are entitled to Irish passports under Irish law. Keep pickin' those examples!
Americanegro
6/11/2017 10:17:15 pm
@E.P. Grondine: Wow, you are quite the scientist! So the Cherokee like to impregnate and the Shawnee like to pass on the beedees, unless you got the beedees from your 7/8 douche side. Let's run the probabilities on that shall we? Take all the time you want, go carve an excuse out of a buffalo horn or whatever it is "your people" :) do.
yakko
6/11/2017 11:50:35 pm
@E.P. Grondine - Thanks for the correction. We have several tribes here in New England that have had state recognition for several years; some have gotten Federal recognition and some haven't. Their motives vary for why they want such recognition, but I tend to be cynical. :) The CNO is in a controversy now regarding disenrollment, and this is a huge issue in tribes all across the nation. I don't keep up with it well enough to understand the whole thing, though. As far as the BIA is concerned, each tribe makes its own rules about membership, and if they say you're out, or that you don't qualify today like you might have yesterday, then you're out.
E.P. Grondine
6/12/2017 09:55:58 am
Thank you Yakko
Americanegro
6/12/2017 12:47:38 pm
"Besides, being entitled to a foreign passport is hardly in the same category as being entitled to the Federal benefits that recognized Indian tribes get."
Clint Knapp
6/8/2017 04:18:51 pm
That was rather anticlimactic. I was hoping for at least a good story about the star people and space weed. Nope. Just a declaration that it happened and a healthy dose of "trust me, I'm a native healer".
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E.P. Grondine
6/9/2017 10:33:53 am
The spread of the three sisters via the intestines of migrating deer is an interesting observation. Thanks for sharing.
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Only Me
6/8/2017 05:06:05 pm
Man, is Graham Hancock gonna be pissed! He's been telling everyone who will listen he's been in contact with goddesses, spirits and demons via hallucinogens and even got a psychic ass whoopin' by a nasty old entity.
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Jim
6/8/2017 05:21:18 pm
Um,,, is marijuana even native to North America ?
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BigNick
6/8/2017 07:41:26 pm
I think the important question is this- did she ever do a girl girl scene with a sex ape?
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Ken
6/8/2017 07:41:34 pm
I'm pretty sure alien technology is responsible for Hyapatia Lee's fake boobs. You notice how the Hindu and Babylonian goddesses were all extremely well endowed compared to ordinary women of the time - thanks to ancient aliens.
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Erickson
6/8/2017 10:48:05 pm
From Quodoushka to claims of being a spiritual healer?
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E.P. Grondine
6/9/2017 10:40:29 am
"The Star People are familiar enough—gods and demigods reinterpreted as space aliens."
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Americanegro
6/9/2017 11:31:55 am
Stop.The.Presses. What an incredible surprise.
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Catspaw Assassin
6/10/2017 11:42:02 am
I'm flabbergasted, and not by Hyapatia Lee silly claims but at learning that magazines still exist.
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yakko
6/10/2017 02:34:04 pm
Your version of the difference between the word for the world beyond the sky (Galvladi, as I learned to spell it) and word for hemp (gatvlati) is correct. They are no more similar to each other in Cherokee than are the words "banana" and "bonobo" in English. :) The Cherokee did have hemp, which they put to various uses, but not marijuana as we understand it today. To put it plainly, Ms. Lee does not know what she is talking about, but why am I surprised? :/
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Luke
6/10/2017 06:53:32 pm
I think the Spanish brought marijuana to the new world. I'm not positive though.
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James Covalito
6/11/2017 08:08:33 pm
Aliens also gave them the Clap.
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