Chris A. Patenaude AAS - And Ancient OOPA Inscription's Meaning

Chris Patenaude is co-director of The Equinox Project (TEP) 

The active and swiftly growing “diffusion” movement has plenty of rising stars, lettered scholars and spokespersons with paragraphs of kudos to their titles. Chris Patenaude says she’s quite happy simply being one of the ‘passionate avocationalists’ that simply help carry the workload and keeps an eye out perhaps as scout into new perspectives of awareness. 

“I find myself more often providing a bridge or connection between major islands of other people’s works…Letting isolated people know about each other. I tend to ask the non-linear What If questions that have been taken for granted.” Her key developing interest is in Archaic Script Origins and applied interpretations using the old forms, today. 

Chris was born in Richland, Washington. The family was moved to Seattle while her father, Dr. Wayne Van Meter, got his PhD in inorganic and radioactive chemistry. When he located to Missoula MT for his position at U of M, Chris was 5 and spent her formative years running wild in rural Rocky Mountain countryside. Gaia Earth the main instructor, it helped that her father was also the local scoutmaster, and taught his daughter alongside her brothers. [Theory, to keep a kid from getting burnt in the kitchen, teach ‘em early how to cook.] 

Paradoxically, as a prof’s kid, she had permission to poke curiously into every lab, department and naturalists’ collections on campus. A far-flung, eclectic range of interests developed from survivalist woods-woman skills, scientific reasoning, geology, botany, biology, multi-instrumental music as well as theater arts and Classical Arts major as the years went by. 

As a young adult, Chris moved to Fargo, ND, married and they moved to the tiny Minnesota village of Perley for the last 33 years. Peacefully isolated from urban buzz, Perley is none the less well connected to the digital envelope of modern society. 

Despite living in nw MN, Chris is co-director of The Equinox Project (TEP) which is a grassroots preservational, non-profit Org hoping to save integral rock-art that shows religious and astrological inscriptions at an enclave in east-central California.

The inscriptions there are multi-cultural including Native American, Celtic, Arabic, Semitic and mithraic N.African from eras stretching from 1200 BCE to 1300 CE. In-field, hands on, in-yer-face rock touching began there. This inspired Chris to intense, diffusional, epigraphy study.
She has been involved in personal, interactive Native American Tradition since childhood, continuing on where ever she lived, and has had mentors from Salish Kootnai, Blackfoot, Lakota Sioux, American Chippewa and Canadian Ojibway groups, including two ceremonial adoptions by intitated Elders. She discovered Barry Fell's books in the mid 90's and her world perspective was never the same. 

Online, Chris has been active in diffusional web-forums since 2000. This led to connections inside her own state of MN with research action surrounding the Kensington Runestone. Ms Patenaude is a member of, and a presentational speaker before, the Kensington Area Heritage Society. She is a trained graphic and multi-media artist, able to do drawings and imagery both classic hardcopy and electronic formats. She assisted St. Paul (MN) historian Michael Zalar with his popular Kensington Runestone FAQ booklet, doing the graphic layout, illustrations and as technician to get it to press. She's done enhancements and scientific-grade sketch illustrations for researchers across the globe. Chris is planning a co-authored book with a Russian anthropologist whose specialty includes ancient Greek cultures of the Black Sea. (A decidedly 'diffusional' themed presentation.) 

Having an eye for art, Chris has developed that into a trained ability to pick out overlooked details in rock-art photos. Via TEP website, questors have begun to seek out Chris’ opinions and transliteration skills for the  Out Of Place  epigraphy and artifacts they are turning up. One such is a researcher from Utah with Ogham and Semitic mixed panels pouring out of his regional canyons. Another anthropologist contacted her from TX with a rock shelter sporting mithraic crocodile/alligator worship. These and more will be a part of the presentation for the Atlantic Conference. 

Chris's conference presentation will examine the ability for intrigued students to decipher, or at least how to reference an OOPA inscription, and help decide whether, at root, it might be a secular message, a sacred prayer dedication or an astronomical notation.  More easily than perhaps previously thought. 

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