Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts (Indigenous Americas)

A necessary reexamination of Indigenous mounds, demonstrating their sustained vitality and vibrant futurity by centering Native voices Typically represented as unsolved mysteries or ruins of a tragic past, Indigenous mounds have long been marginalized and misunderstood. In Earthworks Rising , Chadwick Allen issues a compelling corrective, revealing a countertradition based in Indigenous worldviews. Alongside twentieth- and twenty-first-century Native writers, artists, and intellectuals, Allen rebuts colonial discourses and examines the multiple ways these remarkable structures continue to hold ancient knowledge and make new meaningin the present and for the future. Earthworks Rising is organized to align with key functional categories for mounds (effigies, platforms, and burials) and with key concepts within mound-building cultures. From the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio to the mound metropolis Cahokia in Illinois to the generative Mother Mound in Mississippi, Allen takes readers deep into some of the most renowned earthworks. He draws on the insights of poets Allison Hedge Coke and Margaret Noodin, novelists LeAnne Howe and Phillip Carroll Morgan, and artists Monique Mojica and Alyssa Hinton, weaving in a personal history of earthwork encounters and productive conversation with fellow researchers. Spanning literature, art, performance, and built environments, Earthworks Rising engages Indigenous mounds as forms of land-writing and as conduits for connections across worlds and generations. Clear and compelling, it provokes greater understanding of the remarkable accomplishments of North Americas diverse mound-building cultures over thousands of years and brings attention to new earthworks rising in the twenty-first century. "North America's Native peoples's ancient traditions of mound building--large-scale earthworks that remain visible today, particular at sites in Ohio and Mississippi, though evidence suggests that complex mound buildings once existed across much of today's United States. Allen seeks to place the meaning-making around these mounds through collaborations with contemporary Native artists, writers, and performers who confront settler colonial notions of these mounds as "mysterious." Through the lens of Native aesthetics, these mounds become "land-writing" that encode complex knowledges of human thinking and movement. In short, Allen's manuscript asks, "how might we better perceive and how might we better understand from Indigenous perspectives the remarkable accomplishments of North America's extensive and diverse mound-building cultures over a period of thousands of years?""-- Provided by publisher Alongside twentieth- and twenty-first-century Native writers, artists, and intellectuals, Chadwick Allen examines the multiple ways Indigenous mounds continue to hold ancient knowledge and make new meaning-in the present and for the future. Clear and compelling, Earthworks Rising provokes greater understanding of the remarkable accomplishments of North America's diverse mound-building cultures over thousands of years and brings attention to new earthworks rising in the twenty-first century.