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Earth Ancients

Mahooty, Steeves, Sixkiller-Clark: Star People, Sky Beings, and Indigenous Cosmology

Earth Ancients

Cliff Dunning

Social Sciences, Society & Culture, Science

4.62.9K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2026

⏱️ 120 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Across many Indigenous traditions of North America, stories of “Star People” are not fringe mythology but part of living cosmology. Nations such as the Zuni and Hopi describe ancestral relationships with celestial beings and migrations guided by star knowledge. These traditions appear repeatedly in oral histories collected by scholars and Indigenous knowledge keepers. This program brings together Native elder Clifford Mahooty, Indigenous scholar Paulette Steeves, and researcher Ardy Sixkiller Clarke to explore whether these traditions preserve encoded knowledge about ancient migrations, cosmology, or contact narratives. The conversation bridges Indigenous oral memory with academic archaeology and anthropology.


  • Clifford Mahooty — Zuni Pueblo elder, retired civil/environmental engineer, and wisdom keeper active in Zuni religious orders including the Kachina and Galaxy Medicine Society. On Earth Ancients he discusses Zuni oral history, ritual life, kachinas, and connections to star people.
  • Dr. Ardy Sixkiller Clarke — Professor Emeritus at Montana State University who devoted her career to Indigenous populations and published work on Native accounts of “Star People.” Earth Ancients presents her as a noted American Indian researcher whose interviews collected first-person Indigenous narratives.
  • Dr. Paulette Steeves
    Cree-Métis archaeologist and professor (Algoma University). Author of The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Americas. Her research argues Indigenous presence in the Americas extends far earlier than mainstream archaeology recognizes.


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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

We've been talking so much about the ruins of Guatemala and Yucatan Mexico and Central Mexico and places like that that we've been visiting on tour.

0:33.2

And I've had a great sense of it myself.

0:37.1

Working with archaeologists and working on my own theories of the age of the great various people of Mesoamerica.

0:45.1

To the point where I've kind of missed my friends.

0:48.4

You know, we've lost so many people.

0:50.3

We lost Clifford Mojoulli, Carlos Barreros.

0:55.2

They both succumbed to COVID.

1:00.9

And it was terrible.

1:04.3

We had people that were very, very outspoken about native traditions and teachers that passed away.

1:15.3

And so I'm kind of feeling right now, and we haven't, you know, we used to have Clifford Mahody,

1:20.8

my Zuni friend, on quite regularly, and he would come and do the tours,

1:31.1

and he would also do conferences here in California or different parts of the United States. So he is presenting this information and handing

1:37.0

it down. So I felt the need to put together a program with some of the better known and insightful indigenous people.

1:49.2

We're going to have Clifford Mahoudi on today, as well as Dr. Paulette Steves, who's the

1:54.8

anthropologist from Canada. And I even have some pre-recordings from R. Six Killer Clark who wrote very, very detailed books on sky people and star people and their influence.

2:10.2

Now, one of the things that came up a few years ago that I thought was quite interesting is the belief and the sacred geometry around alignments,

2:23.7

complete city alignments that the indigenous people felt were necessary.

2:31.2

And they built these alignments into their architecture, as well as their

2:38.3

layout.

2:39.9

And a few years ago, a Canadian student using various celestial maps, star maps, aligned a city

2:50.6

in Yucatan with a known cosmology,

2:55.6

a celestial constellation.

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