Singing at a Center of the Indian World: The SAI and Ohio Earthworks

In 1911 the American Indian leaders who began the Society of American Indians understood that they were standing between the chaos enveloping tribal communities and the vast changes taking place within American society. For this group recent American Indian history encompassed far-reaching social change: tribes had been separated from their traditional residences to live in other areas of the country, warfare ended on the northern and southern Plains, tribal land was lost through force and treaty, the reservation system was established. In the South, American Indians were subject to segregation policies. American Indians could not vote. Most American Indian people lived in impoverished and desperate conditions. The education and life experiences of the Society’s leaders informed their belief that this was a crucial time for progressive reforms. The strategy was to work within the system to build resources, authority, and power. They established the sai to bring attention to the most urgent problems facing tribes, to organize their efforts, and to recruit allies. The pressing issues of the day included civil rights, local government, cultural preservation, land rights, and education. The leadership proclaimed the situation as dire. Dismay and outrage fueled their determination to address the events occurring in Indian communities. Each sai leader in 1911 was a survivor of a terrible history. Each had come of age at the turn of the twentieth century.

At the first meeting of the Society of American Indians, the members found themselves in Ohio. The sai delegation had learned of ancient earthen enclosures built by their ancestors in nearby Newark. It is said that they visited the Octagon Earthworks and sang “America.” The concerns of the sai were urgent and immediate, while the ancient earthworks were situated within a public park. The beautiful woodlands setting might have seemed surreal. Did they know that two thousand years before, Ohio was a center of the Indian world?

Fig. 1.

Concentrations of earthworks in Ohio. Reproduced from William C. Mills, Archaeological Atlas of Ohio (Columbus: Fred J. Heer on behalf of the Ohio State Archeological and Historical Society, 1914). Scan courtesy of The Ohio State University Libraries, Rare Books and Manuscripts Depository and OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons.

Brilliant American Indian cultures flourished two thousand years ago, leaving in the lands around the Ohio Valley a spectacular concentration of monumental earthen architecture (for overviews see Lepper; Pacheco; Mainfort and Sullivan). Hundreds of embankments, mounds, walled walkways, effigies, and enclosures were designed to be precise, geometric, and extraordinarily large. Earthen enclosures in the shapes of circular rings with entryways facing east, squares with rounded corners and entryways, octagons with eight entrances, long passageways bordered by smooth earthen walls, conical mounds, low walls bordering large areas, and huge flat-topped rectangular burial mounds were placed along rivers, creeks, and natural land formations, with earthworks traversing the landscape for miles. The Indigenous people of the so-called Hopewell culture constructed them using precise geometry and a single unit of measure, equivalent to 1,054 feet. This measure was used to create giant circles throughout the Ohio Valley. The builders used its multiples to mark the distance between earthworks located far apart from each other and to create smaller circles and squares. Early reports from scouts and settlers indicated finding more than 60,000 conical mounds and approximately 600 earthworks “complexes” with two or more earthen enclosures with mounds and walkways. Today in Ohio, approximately 16,000 conical mounds and earthworks still exist. About 10,000 are conical mounds, 600 are geometric earthen enclosures, and there are a few animal effigies, including the world-renowned Serpent Mound.

Fig. 2.

Survey map of the Newark Earthworks. Reproduced from Ephraim George Squier and Edward Hamilton Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution, 1848). Scan courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Libraries Digital Repository.

The Newark Earthworks are the largest geometric earthen enclosures in the world, and of the four original enormous earthen enclosures, the octagon and the giant circle...