The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a "Lost White Race" by Jason Colavito, and: Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing by Edward Watts (review)

Myths and folklore have held a strong influence in societies throughout human history and have the power to shape political discourse and sway public opinion. The United States was not, and is not, averse to the power of myth-making or what may be termed in the modern era as conspiracy theories. Edward Watts's Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing and Jason Colavito's The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a "Lost White Race" delve into the powerful myths that attempted to argue for a connection to "whiteness" in North America's ancient past that captivated scientific discourse throughout the nineteenth century. The existence of numerous Indian mounds throughout the North American continent provided many nineteenth-century antiquarians with quasi evidence to make unsubstantiated arguments that predicted the success of the young American republic by inventing a pre-Columbian past that included ancient connections to the Old World. Reasons behind these myths are as numerous as the number of myths themselves, but their creation stemmed from the social anxieties of a young nation and the colonial desire of the United States for empire. As Watts argues, "the vast unclaimed tracts of continental history before 1492 [were] unsettling" to white Americans, and the idea of "primordialism was invented to fill them" (Watts, p. 21).

The creation of "nation-building myths and legends" around the concept of primordialism emerged in the early years of the nineteenth century (Watts, p. 1). Watts's important work on these myths focuses on the racial component of settler nationalism, settler nation-building, and settler colonialism, rooted in the idea of terra nullius and an invented pre-Columbian history of the continent with fantasies of ancient "white" people. Watts compellingly unpacks this argument about the powerful primordial myths by examining in five chapters five fictitious connections to the Old World: "Welsh Indians in the Early Republic"; "The Lost Tribes of Israelites and the Found Nation"; "White Mound Builders and the Lessons of Prehistory"; "Dwarf Epics and the Ancient Irish"; and "Norse Forefathers of the American Empire." Each myth provided early American antiquarians with a "white" prehistory that served their specific political agendas for a given time and space. For example, the nineteenth-century creation of an ancient connection to Irish immigrants claimed that Saint Brendan, a sixth-century monk, crossed the Atlantic and settled in the Carolinas, and later in the tenth century, the Vikings supposedly substantiated this claim in the Icelandic sagas by recording the discovery of Irishmen in the Carolinas. Watts's argument convincingly demonstrates that this myth served the southern agrarian elites to support their slave society, in contrast to the mound builder myth, which argued for the success of industrialism in the North and circulated among antiquarians in states such as Ohio and Massachusetts. The claim of the presence of ancient Irishmen in the Carolinas gave white southerners the primordial argument that quelled social anxieties about the success of the young American republic, and proved southern society was compatible with the future aspirations of the nation.

The invention of white mound builders was used to justify the colonial ambitions of the United States and the genocidal policies to remove or eliminate the Indigenous population forcibly. Jason Colavito's book about the mound builder myth explores the "Fake History and the Hunt for a 'Lost White Race,'" arguing that the mound builders provided the United States with an ancient "white...