A cultural anthropologist discusses Muskogee mound-building
This anthropologist uses both archaeological research and conversations with Muskogee elders to argue that Native American mounds are living places that connect contemporary communities with their ancestors. The anthropologist also notes how Indigenous narratives challenge understandings of time and even history itself.
“You know,” Hakope’s voice spoke, distorted through my phone, “sometimes people picked up whole mounds and moved them.”
As an undergraduate student working on my thesis, it was only a few months prior that I had begun learning from Hakope, an elder and Heles-Hayv (Maker of Medicine) of Pvlvcekolv: a small, Native American community in the US South who claim Muskogee (Creek) identity. The mounds in question are earthworks and shellworks built by various Native American nations over the past six thousand years between the North American Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes, the Atlantic and the Ozarks. While I had imagined these structures to be fixed in place, I learned that some mounds migrate. Visiting mounds over the past decade with Hakope and other Pvlvcekolv people, I also occasionally noticed my teachers gathering pinches of soil or plants to bring home to their ceremonial space and gardens.
Our paths meandered through these landscapes, twisting along nature trails and circling around mounds. Soils—and also glass beads, stone points, and ceramic sherds found on the earth’s surface—circulated through descendant communities and were gifted to friends on either side of the Mississippi River. This movement was a far cry from the straight lines that I walked as an archaeologist conducting systematic surface surveys, my back aching from bending over and searching the ground, or the neat walls of excavation units carved into Cartesian grids transposed over sites. Such techniques help document the spatial context of artifacts found—without which, as I tell my students, artifacts themselves have little to no scientific value for illuminating past peoples’ lives. Yet these methodologies also fix Indigenous places and things within Eurocentric epistemologies and ontologies, or ways of knowing and being in place. They ironically immobilize traces of ancestral lives in the archaeological imagination even as they dislocate the archaeological record…. These myths of separation continue to inform the basic methodological practices that generate the archaeological record.
However, some mounds migrate, refusing to be so fixed.
In Alabama, along the Tallapoosa River, a dirt road winds between cotton fields littered with fragments of ceramics and glass, flaked stone, and the occasional bead. Just behind the tree line, through thick river cane, the earth rises into a tall mound overlooking the river. A historical marker sits down the way where the dirt road meets the highway. One side of the marker is written in English. The other is in Mvskoke (Creek).
The marker informs readers that this place, Tukabatchee, was once the site of a powerful town in the Creek Confederacy. It was here that Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee leaders and prophets, urged the Creek National Council to join their pan-Indian movement of spiritual renewal and military opposition to the expansionist United States. I am told that when the marker was written, authors from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma had wanted to include a sentence at the end to the effect of, “Imagine what it would be like here if white people never came.” This language was removed from the final text. Even so, an old site becomes a place for imagining alternative Indigenous futures.
Ancestral Native American peoples built thousands of mounds across eastern North America over the past six thousand years. Although important exceptions exist, archaeological research on mounds as a disciplinary project has been overwhelmingly organized around the assumption that these are “prehistorical” places, construed as terminal sites fixed within self-contained chronological periods. The scientific realism that dominates archaeology in settler colonial contexts relies on the erasure of Indigenous bodies and presence. In contrast, Mojica writes of drawing the living forces of ancestral ceremony into her body, as an archive of knowledges and dramaturgies sedimented within the earth, and extending these through her performance art. Like the alternative futures imagined at Tukabatchee, such practices exceed what Mark Rifkin calls settler time: a concept that names the temporal dimensions of elimination practices—including physical genocide, displacement, forced assimilation, and symbolic erasure—at the heart of settler governance. This foreclosure of Indigenous life renders land dispossessable as the very condition of possibility for settler society, law, and wealth. Settler time reduces mounds to prehistorical spaces and abandoned ruins within regimented, linear temporalities: in short, places without future. It organizes the Indigenous past around a Eurocentric history/prehistory divide… and fixes mounds within a terminal past removed from a settled present. Yet mounds continue to draw descendants into ancestral lives and movements, insisting on specifically Indigenous futures.
This article theorizes the contradictions and convergences between colonial power and what I call mound power, attending to deep histories and slow processes as they animate social possibility and hope in an era of proliferating apocalypses…. Settler power specifically, however, already constitutes a process of ruination. It both constructs Indigenous landscapes as prehistorical ruins and itself enacts apocalyptic, political-ecological catastrophes.
Leigh Bloch, “Animate Earth, Settler Ruins: Mound Landscapes and Decolonial Futures in the Native South,” Cultural Anthropology Vol 35 No 4 (2020).