Performing Serpent Mound: A Trans-Indigenous Meditation

How have Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, intellectuals, writers, activists, and performers from diverse backgrounds engaged the evocative Serpent Mound effigy located in what is now southwestern Ohio? And what do their different approaches tell us about Indigenous representation and embodiment? This essay begins to answer these complex questions by performing a series of interpretative acts across and through a wide range of historical and contemporary engagements with the Great Serpent. These include classic works of interpretation and speculation produced by non-Native archaeologists and historians; the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel Meridian, set in the Us south before, during, and after the 1960s civil rights movement, by African American writer and intellectual Alice Walker; the mathematically encoded sequence of interrelated earthworks poems Blood Run by Native American writer, intellectual, and activist Allison Hedge coke, which also works as a script for imagined or embodied performance; the performance-in-progress Side Show Freaks and Circus Injuns being co-developed by Native American writers, intellectuals, and performers Monique Mojica and LeAnne Howe, which bases its dramaturgy in the materiality of earthworks; forthcoming interpretive poetry by Yi writer and scholar Aku Wuwu from southwest China; and the author’s own embodied encounters with the Serpent effigy and its representations. Through these purposeful juxtapositions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous texts and performances that feature serpent Mound, this essay endeavors to demonstrate a version of the trans-Indigenous as a productive methodology for Native American and Indigenous literary and performance studies.