Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts

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Description

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.

Reviews

"This eye-opening book calls attention to earthworks as monumental achievements in science and aesthetics, bringing together geometrical and mathematical knowledge, precise observations of natural phenomena, and feats of engineering. Bearing witness to thousands of years of Indigenous habitation, they continue to flourish in contemporary performances across multiple genres and media. A must-read for all students of American culture."Wai Chee Dimock, author of Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

"While addressing the long line of academic and popular texts that capture Indigenous earthworks within the white imaginary, Chadwick Allen moves far beyond them to center Indigenous writers, artists, and a process of collaborative experiential and embodied engagement to show how earthworks are dynamic participants in creating Indigenous futures."Lisa Brooks, author of Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philips War

"With engaging prose and calculated analysis, Allens Earthworks Rising entices readers away from the static diorama and the black-and-white textbook page and toward earthworks themselves."H-Net Reviews

Author Bio

Chadwick Allen is professor of English and adjunct professor of American Indian studies at the University of Washington. He is author of Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts and Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global NativeLiterary Studies (Minnesota, 2012).