Earthworks Rising by Chadwick Allen and Shell Shaker by LeAnne Howe

For many who either seek or stumble upon them, burial mounds signal loss, herald doom: dead Indians, dead savage civilizations, dead pagan pasts ground to dust and now overgrown in brush, obscured by weeds and trees. And yet for others burial mounds announce regeneration, the possibilities of reclamation and renewal; they continue to connect and bloom. Native individuals, families, communities, and nations rise up against narratives of loss and doom to reclaim and repatriate, restore and reactivate. On their lived experiences and felt knowledges. On their abilities to dream intensely. But there are no easy divisions, no clear-cut binaries of Indigenous and settler in the twenty-first century (if there ever were), and there are no easy escape routes out of dominant ideologies and worldviews.

Two weeks ago, I got to visit Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa, a place I have long wanted to go: a green bluff overlooking the Mississippi, the monument is dotted with Indigenous earthwork mounds, some in the shapes of birds and bears, some perhaps over two thousand years old. In most cases they're no more than a few feet tall--you might miss them completely if they hadn't been cleared of trees and neatly mowed--but where else in what is now the United States can you see human architecture that old? To walk around them is to connect with a deeper past, and reform a present understanding of the land. Photographed from above, the bird and the bear appears, but on the ground, no effigy can be seen totally at once; you have to walk around and experience the shifting perspective of the earth to really "see."

Effigies like these have, from time to time, captured the imagination of modern writers and artists, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Chickasaw scholar Chadwick Allen's Earthworks Rising is a new critical work that examines some of the ways that Native American mounds and earthworks have been used in art and literature. His scope is vast, taking in non-Native works like Alice Walker's novel Meridian and 20th-century pulp novels like Mog the Mound Builder and The Horror From the Mound by Conan the Barbarian creator Robert Howard. In non-Native imaginations, earthworks tend to speak of vanished races, whose creation of the mounds is shrouded in irrecoverable mystery. No one knows why they were created, we are told, and no one knows what happened to those who made them. (Of course, we do know, because their descendants--Choctaws and Chickasaws and other Native nations--are still around.)

By contrast, the Indigenous works Allen explores offer interpretations of the earthworks that emphasize the possibility that they are still sites that produce meaning, for Native peoples and through Native epistemologies. Allen devotes chapters to the work of visual artists Jimmie Durham and Alyssa Hinton, whose brightly colored photo collages of burial mounds are contrasted with the kind of clinical cross-sections you might find in a museum gallery. Literary sources include Allison Hedge Coke's Blood Run, a poem cycle in which the Mounds themselves--and associated elements like the River and Trees--are allowed to "speak," not as mute or ghostly voices--like the Indian curse unleashed in The Horror from the Mound--but as interlocutors that connect the present to the past and the future both, and sit at the axis mundi between earth and sky. Allen's methods are a mix of recognizably academic cultural criticism and more Indigenous ways of knowing. I rolled my eyes a little at Allen's reliance on numerology to understand the structure of Blood Run, but an anecdote where Allen watches on as Choctaw scholar LeAnne Howe records a song she hears being sung by a "little girl" in a burial mound seems beyond my powers of judgment or evaluation.

Attention woman, listen to my remarks. The gravediggers are wrong. Not all the ancient burial mounds were stuffed with beloved leaders. Some contain bad people who were given everything in death that they had coveted in life. Shell beads, copper, axes, knives, pottery bowls, baskets, animal skins, blankets. There were times when good people followed the bad ones into the spirit world to care for them. Like the parent of a spoiled child, they were there to give things to the band ones. Make them comfortable so that they would not want to leave their resting place and harass the living. But when the mounds were opened by gravediggers, these flawed spirits escaped like flesh-eating flies. They passed through many changes. Always becoming predatory. Put your dead chief in a mound so he will be protected from escaping again. Give him everything in death he wanted in live. That way he will never leave it again.

Howe figures large in Allen's book, as a colleague who helps guide his thinking about the mounds themselves and their significance. On more than one occasion, Allen describes traveling to a significant earthwork site with Howe, walking around it, laying down upon it and feeling its physical presence. I'd read a couple of Howe's works--the excellent play Savage Conversations and the baseball novel Miko Kings--but not Shell Shaker, which Allen analyzes at length. Shell Shaker is a novel about two murders, which take place at different points in time but which are presented as analogs of one another: in the present, Choctaw vice chief Auda Billy's apparent murder of the chief Redford Macalester. In the past, the murder of Red Shoes, a Choctaw warrior who played the English and French off of each other and who ended up igniting a bloody war between the colonial powers, Choctaw factions, and neighboring tribes.

Redford, like Red Shoes before him, begins his career with noble ambitions that are corrupted by greed and violence. The casino he brought into the Choctaw Nation has brought economic prosperity, but also an alliance with the mafia, from whom he has been embezzling money in order to send to the Irish Republican Army (!). Like Red Shoes, he has become too much warrior and not enough peacemaker, and his belief that he can play one side of hostile forces off the other threatens to bring a lot of violence. Moreover, his ego has made him into a monster: when the book opens, we see him raping his longtime assistant and former lover Auda.

Auda, like Redford, has an analog in the past, named Anoleta. Like Auda, Anoleta is accused of Red Shoes' murder, and Auda's mother Susan--like Anoleta's mother Shakbatina--takes credit for the deed to spare her daughter's life. The parallels don't end there: Auda's two sisters each have an analog, as do her father, her uncle, her cousin. Howe gives us a sense not so much of the past repeating itself as a kind of mythical story that emanates in different temporal registers; past and present are brought together and made the same, thus rejecting traditional notions of Indigenous disappearance or disintegration. It was too much for me, frankly. Howe juggles the two time periods, and the numerous figures between them, with careful dexterity, but I found myself easily lost, wishing that the two stories had been simplified. The particulars of the Choctaw Civil War that Red Shoes ushers in were especially opaque to me. I had a much better time with the present narrative, whose magical realist elements and focus on generational ties reminded me of Louise Erdrich, and not merely, or even particularly, because of the novel's Indigenous themes.

In one memorable scene, which looms large in Allen's analysis of the novel, Auda's aunts are kneading dough in the kitchen when it turns into mud. And not just any mud: the rich black earth of the family's ancestral Choctaw homelands, in Mississippi. In visions they are instructed to take the dead chief Macalester's body to Mississippi and bury it in a mound for safekeeping, along with the embezzled cash. Far from being the burial of an honored person, the mound becomes a way to keep a troublesome spirit from making more trouble, and perhaps from reappearing in a different time, in a different guise, the way that Red Shoes reappears as Redford Macalester. There's some resonance here with the despised "curse" narrative of The Horror From the Mound that goes unremarked upon, but both Allen and Howe depict the act of burying Redford in a mound as a sort of kindness as well as a defense. By reintegrating Redford into the land, they are not merely imprisoning him, but bringing him back into the fold--bringing him home.

Along the railings at Effigy Mounds National Monument, you can see prayer ties, little scraps of cloth tied there, that mark it as a sacred site. Not a site of death or disappearance, of a vanished mystery, but a living place that still speaks to Indigenous people who visit it. I really got a kick of reading both Earthworks Rising and Shell Shaker, which helped me see these mounds a little more fully, a little more clearly.