The Mound Levelers

Recently, Jacki Rand, my colleauge in the History Department at the University of Iowa, endured sub-zero temperatures at the Wisconsin capitol to protest legislation that would have opened the state’s many indigenous effigy mounds to destruction by gravel mining operations. As  isthmus.com reports,

12540585_10153828113887095_6417149669742159799_n

Left to Right: Jacki Rand from the UI History Department, along with Elizabeth Reetz and Brianna Hoffman from the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist.

“The bill from Sen. Chris Kapenga (R-Delafield) and Rep. Robert Brooks (R-Saukville) would require the Wisconsin Historical Society to establish the presence of human remains before cataloging a burial site on private land. Under the bill, property owners would be allowed to use ‘ground-penetrating radar, other imaging technology, or archaeological excavation and examination.'”

Experts at the Wisconsin Historical Society have published data that shows about 90% of professionally excavated mounds contain human remains. They also point out that 80% of the state’s original mounds have already been damaged in some way. In Madison, a famous roundabout in the Greenbush neighborhood skirts a large mound shaped like a bear. The UW Madison campus contains 38 effigy and burial mounds; another 20 have been lost to construction. Mounds are simply everywhere in Wisconsin.

Protesters are rightly focusing on human remains, because—for many—these are the burial places of their ancestors. They are members of the Ho-Chunk Nation and have been in Wisconsin for a very long time. The earthworks, sometimes formed into the shapes of animals and legendary beings, are among the oldest human-made structures in the region.

Yet fighting over “mounds” is not new. In North America, mounds became sites of political contention soon after the establishment of the United States, when Euro-Americans promulgated a “mound builder” myth in which the Native peoples of colonial America bore no part. As the anthropologist Meghan Howey observes,

because it was a lot easier to take land from ‘savages’ who could never use it ‘properly’ than from people who were capable of the level of culture implied by the great mounds and earthworks . . . a myth that began developing in the waning years of the eighteenth century suggested in fact that these mounds were actually constructed by a white race destroyed by the modern Indians, the Mound Builder race, a myth that would greatly amplify such land grab justifications. The myth of the Mound Builders blossomed in the nineteenth century, promoting the idea that the earthen mounds had been built by a civilized white race that was then destroyed by red savages (“The Question Which has Puzzled,” 441).

So, what is going on in Wisconsin has a long and reprehensible history in the United States.

For me, disturbing burial sites is out of the question. Except for the fact that some rest on private land, the law is clear about the sanctity of human remains. But that is only part of the story. I believe that even the 10% that are presumed not to contain burials ought to be preserved. Why? Simply because the mounds are also significant features of the indigenous peoples’ built environment, and as such, demand preservation in their own right.

The proposed Wisconsin law brings up essential questions regarding the relationship between state historic preservation issues and NAGPRA compliance. In some ways, they seem at odds in this case, but in my view, the two need not be pitted against each other. Repatriation of human remains and the preservation of “objects of cultural patrimony” (which the mounds assuredly are) should be considered a part of an ethical continuum by which we serve as stewards of all things—human and non-human—in this present world of ours.

When viewed from the perspective of stewardship, mounds and earthworks easily fit into the original mandate of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966, which argued “the preservation of . . . irreplaceable heritage is in the public interest so that its vital legacy of cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, economic, and energy benefits will be maintained and enriched for future generations of Americans . . .” Especially relevant are two of the law’s original published goals:

  • “[to] contribute to the preservation of nonfederally owned historic property and give maximum encouragement to organizations and individuals undertaking preservation by private means . . .”
  • “[to] assist State and local governments, Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations, and the National Trust to expand and accelerate their historic preservation programs and activities . . .”

The mandate is there, all we need to do is follow through.

5280e758e7223.preview-300

A group of people from the Osage Nation tour a Native American mound in St. Louis on Tuesday, March 19, 2013. The tribe purchased Sugarloaf Mound and the house built on top of it, located at 4420 Ohio Street in St. Louis, in 2009. Photo By David Carson, dcarson@post-dispatch.com

Of course, this problem is not unique to Wisconsin. In 2009, the blog post “Facing South,” a publication of the Institute for Southern Studies, reported that the city of Oxford Alabama was using earth removed from an ancient mound as fill dirt for the construction of a Sam’s Club. While state archaeologists concluded that the mound was indeed “cultural,” not “natural and “used only for smoke signals” (as the town’s mayor claimed), they were unable to list it as an official “National Historic Place” because of legal technicalities.

Either non-Native citizens of the U.S. believe in the value of the past or they don’t. There is no distinction between Indians and non-Indians when it comes to “the vital legacy of cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational” benefits we all derive from preserving our shared histories. Our history hasn’t always been pretty, but it will always be instructive.

In 1912, a group of Native intellectuals formed the Society of the American Indian (SAI). They were sometimes labeled “progressives,” and certainly not all indigenous peoples agreed with their views on citizenship and the Native American Church.

The_Quarterly_Journal_of_the_American_Society_of_Indians copyYet the image they chose for their logo suggests how important they felt it was that  Americans understand that Native peoples were heirs to intellectual traditions that had existed for a thousand years before Europeans ever settled here. On the left-hand side of their publication’s mastheads, they reproduced an image of a copper repousse plate of Mississippean origin. Originally part of a mound burial, the image served the SAI as the historical ground for their own efforts. By re-appropriating the wrongly exposed remains to the service of 20th-century Indian activism, the SAI made its own small contribution to  preserving the legacies of their ancestors.

More recently, Ojibwe poet and scholar Meg Noodin has offered a song to help guide us in our own efforts to honor the past:

Gimikwenimigo copy

One thing seems clear. Repatriation should be treated as a broad term that encompasses the various sovereignties—political, social, and cultural, topographical— that make communities whole.

SOURCES

Howey, Meghan C. L. “‘The Question which has puzzled and still puzzles: How American Indian Authors Challenged Dominant Discourse about Native American Origins in the Nineteenth Century,” The American Indian Quarterly, Volume 34, Number 4, Fall 2010, pp. 435-474
http://isthmus.com/news/news/save-the-mounds-rally-draws-hundreds-to-capitol/#sthash.6IZFzVT4.dpuf”
Visit SavetheMounds.com for further details and to access the tribe’s petition.
Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/01/06/desecration-graves-sanctioned-wisconsin-assembly-bill-162970
(http://www.southernstudies.org)

 

 

Leave a Reply