Earthworks and Contemporary Indigenous American Literature: Foundations and Futures

This essay takes up one of the defining features of twenty-first-century Native American and Indigenous literatures: that American Indian writers working in a variety of genres are turning with increasing frequency to earthworks. Using both story and theory, these contemporary Native writers, primarily women, forge connections between built structures made of earth and built structures made of words. Earthworks hold political, historical, cultural, and personal significance not as relics of “lost” or dead pasts but as living texts that help activate, guide, and support Indigenous intellectual and artistic work now and into the future. Indigenous earthworks studies thus also questions settler narratives that erase or otherwise mystify the history of colonial land theft and dispossession. When they mention Indigenous people at all, these non-Native narratives often strike both elegiac and objectifying notes as they detail “mysterious” absences in historical records, absences of people and cultures, enigmas about how the people lived and how they actually built large earthworks, concerns about the physical degradation of the structures, and more. In sharp contrast, contemporary Native writers present earthworks as inhabitants of a relentlessly colonized but also grounded, centered, resilient Indigenous world that continues to see, hear, touch, speak, read, write, and otherwise sustain living relationships between the mounds and the people. As LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) writes, “I am interested in continuances rather than disappearances.”¹

This interest leads her and other Indigenous writers and artists to understand earthworks not only as literary but also as literature. Indeed, Howe observes that she and Monique Mojica (Kuna/Rappahannock) have for the past several years been “studying the mounds as Indigenous literature.”² Other Indigenous writers, such as Allison Hedge Coke (Cherokee/Huron/Creek), construct Indigenous literature as mounds. In both ways, Native writers shift artistic energy and critical attention to earthworks as a way of moving away from an emphasis on deep pasts and devastating losses toward a twenty-first-century mix of deeply theorized critique and necessary replenishments and renewals of longstanding, living interrelationships.

While these vital fusions can happen anywhere there are earthworks and Indian writers, one of the strongest centers of gravity for literary earthworks studies is the Native South. Trade, diplomatic, and other relations connect earthworks cultures in this area to earthworks cultures in a larger circum-Mississippian network and beyond; however, and similarly, contemporary Native discussions of earthworks range widely. Writing of the Newark Earthworks in Ohio, for example, Marti L. Chaatsmith (Comanche/Choctaw) observes that “the complex can be described, but its meaning cannot yet be accurately interpreted.”³ The “yet” is crucial. Conceptually, it counsels patience and does not mistake a current lack on our part for a lack on the moundbuilders’ part, let alone for a permanent obstacle. James Cox and Daniel Justice agree, pointing out in their introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature that “in some cases, the earliest texts still survive—on paper, stone, hide, string, shell, bark, or other media—although the understanding of these texts by those who inscribed them is sometimes unclear to contemporary audiences.”⁴ Yet, as Chaatsmith demonstrates, contemporary Indigenous thinking provides invaluable insight into what earthworks mean—not just what they meant (and not just, as Cox and Justice importantly affirm, that they mean) but what they mean and how they will help construct Indigenous forms of knowledge into the future, particularly for Indigenous people.

Indeed, Chaatsmith observes that “until Choctaw writer and intellectual LeAnne Howe visited the earthworks . . . our tour narratives emphasized the sites themselves, as physical entities, rather than how the earthworks might have related to people’s lives. . . . Howe’s enthusiasm reinvigorated the narratives to include descriptions of gatherings infused with familiar Indian activities: feasts, singing, games, races, meetings, storytelling, and trading.”⁵ The enthusiasm and passionate regard Howe, Hedge Coke, and other contemporary Native writers give to earthworks unquestionably reinvigorate the narratives, primarily by emphasizing relationships between mounds and people and by placing earthworks in a variety of contexts, building new layers of meaning onto existing structures. Howe’s definition of tribalography, which she first articulates in her 2002...