The World of Indigenous North America

Robert Warrior, Robert Warrior

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136331992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The World of Indigenous North America is a comprehensive look at issues that concern indigenous people in North America. Though no single volume can cover every tribe and every issue around this fertile area of inquiry, this book takes on the fields of law, archaeology, literature, socio-linguistics, geography, sciences, and gender studies, among others, in order to make sense of the Indigenous experience.

Covering both Canada's First Nations and the Native American tribes of the United States, and alluding to the work being done in indigenous studies through the rest of the world, the volume reflects the critical mass of scholarship that has developed in Indigenous Studies over the past decade, and highlights the best new work that is emerging in the field. The World of Indigenous North America is a book for every scholar in the field to own and refer to often.

Contributors: Chris Andersen, Joanne Barker, Duane Champagne, Matt Cohen, Charlotte Cote, Maria Cotera, Vincente M. Diaz, Elena Maria Garcia, Hanay Geiogamah, Carole Goldberg, Brendan Hokowhitu, Sharon Holland, LeAnne Howe, Shari Huhndorf, Jennie Joe, Ted Jojola, Daniel Justice, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Jose Antonio Lucero, Tiya Miles, Felipe Molina, Victor Montejo, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Val Napoleon, Melissa Nelson, Jean M. O'Brien, Amy E. Den Ouden, Gus Palmer, Michelle Raheja, David Shorter, Noenoe K. Silva, Shannon Speed, Christopher B. Teuton, Sean Teuton, Joe Watkins, James Wilson, Brian Wright-McLeod

Part I
Preludes and the Present

Chapter One
Life in a 21st Century Mound City

LeAnne Howe and Jim Wilson

Introduction

Mound cities are reborn and growing in 21st century Oklahoma through modern tribal headquarters and cultural complexes. Ancient mounds in the Southeast such as the Nanih Waiya¹ in Mississippi were built with baskets of earth mounded up by hand, and used for ceremony and ball play at the center of a town. Contemporary mound cities like Ada, Oklahoma (tribal headquarters of the Chickasaw Nation), are built of brick and mortar, but still function for ceremony and games. Moreover, new cultural complexes in Oklahoma like the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur or the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum in Oklahoma City, foster Native return and renewal. For Choctaws, the large platform mound Nanih Waiya represents the birth of the people. For Chickasaws, new mound cities like Ada evoke rebirth and renewal. Mound cities, whether in the ancient past or the 21st century, affirm Native peoples as ever alive and ever present.

The Book of Mounds

Living in a modern mound city, Ada, Oklahoma, the seat of the Chickasaw Nation takes a bit of explaining. The house that once belonged to my grandmother, now my home (LeAnne), is located one-half miles from the Chickasaw Nation’s tribal complex. The Chickasaws moved into their new headquarters in Ada in 1977. Today the set of buildings within the tribal complex consists of the Chickasaw Nation’s Treasury Building, the Nutrition Center, tribal Library, the Miko Building, a sprawling Community Center, the Tribal Legislative Building, the Judicial Department, and an Administrative Services office building. Three thousand years from now when archaeologists excavate the tribal site and surrounding areas, they’ll no doubt conclude that the people living in our house must have been from a high status chief’s lineage, as the house is so close to the tribal government’s epicenter. So, to set the record straight: the land my grandmother’s house is located on was Choctaw allotment land. According to the abstract, in 1904 William W. Daggs, Choctaw-by-blood, leased the six blocks including the land where our house sits, to the Ada Baseball Association for a baseball park. Daggs received $64.00 worth of shares in the future Ada baseball team. Before the Choctaws were removed here, the land was Osage land. Then came the white settlers in the 1890s and the town became known as the Queen City (always affecting to the British). Now that the Chickasaw Nation is nearby, Ada, the Mound City, seems more appropriate. Tribal people from across the United States have moved to Ada to work for the Chickasaw Nation. The tribe continues to build everything including a new hospital, museum, a theater for film screenings, and a black box theater for theatrical performances. Just two years ago the tribe completed the Chickasaw Cultural Center, a multi-million-dollar museum complex that includes replicas of a traditional 18th century village (Figure 1.1), including a platform mound (Figure 1.2), at Sulphur, Oklahoma. They not only built a museum, but a beautiful mound! What we’re experiencing among Southeastern tribes is a cultural revival, a reemergence that may be best viewed through the lens of seasonal returns.

Figure 1.1 Chickasaw Cultural Center Traditional Village replica structures; view is west. Photograph by LeAnne Howe.

My seasonal return to Ada, Oklahoma, happens every May, when I leave the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and drive south and west to my grandmother’s house in Ada. When asked about my yearly return to Oklahoma, I tell people that I’m a migrating bird disguised as a Choctaw. No one gets the joke.

Figure 1.2 Chickasaw Cultural Center Platform Mound in background, Plaza in foreground; view is west. Photograph by Jim Wilson.

But, like a migratory bird, I’ve been returning home all my life. When I was five days old, my adopted Cherokee mother carried me in a large white basket to the house in Ada. I have pictures of my adopted Cherokee grandmother that day, holding me out in front of her like a prize. As a child I spent most summers in Ada with a large extended family. Relatives that had moved to California in the 1930s returned to Ada and to my grandmother’s house each summer. Often they would stay a month or longer. I was raised on their stories of ancestors, and ghosts, and how to make medicines out of various plants that cured everything from whooping cough to kidney problems. This may account for why I’m so comfortable in the company of elders.

Yet, it isn’t just the physical house that compels me. It’s the Southeastern landscape, Native pecan trees, rolling hills, and the many varieties of birds that return yearly. Cardinals, Hummingbirds, Blue Jays, Robins, and English Sparrows spend their summers in nests in trees around our house. The Northern Mockingbird, however, evokes the strongest memories of my grandmother. Each summer morning she would awaken early, sometimes before dawn, to try and learn the medley of songs and sounds of the mockingbird in her yard. Birds were her vocation. She’d whistle along with them and try to teach them a new sound. In 2012, I listened to the exact same outpouring of songs from the Northern Mockingbirds nesting in the trees around our house that I heard as a child. I don’t understand how this can be. I suspect the descendants of Grandmother’s mockingbirds taught the identical melodic phrases to their chicks, making their songs, in effect, a mnemonic for finding their way home to their birthplace. Conjecture, I know.

By this time you may be asking what birds have to do with ancient mounds and modern mounds cities. A great deal. Throughout prehistory Natives observed the lifeways of birds and have been telling stories about the Thunderbird, the Great Mythic Hawk, Raven, Hummingbird, and countless others. The Muscogee Creek, Cherokee, Seminole, and Chickasaw have bird clans within their tribes. On March 10, 2012, the Seminole’s Bird Clan held their first reunion in 50 years at the Miccosukee Village in Miami, Florida. Birds played such an important role in Southeastern Indigenous cultures that as early as 4,000 years ago Natives created the Bird Mound at Poverty Point, one of the largest sites of its era in the western hemisphere, complete with open spaces for ball fields and dances.

So whether it’s learning the songs and phrases of Northern Mockingbirds, as my grandmother did, or listening to the accounts by Native storytellers about how the animals and birds taught Indians how to play ball game, birds are significant symbols of our lifeways, and even embodied in our mounds.

Embodied Performance: Mounding up Stories

Since April 2011, I’ve been one of the team of playwrights and theatre scholars working on a research project, “Indigenous Knowledge, Contemporary Performance,” that involves developing new Indigenous performance models based on Indigenous cultural texts: mounds. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) awarded the project grant to five playwrights (including myself) and three theatre scholars. The Indigenous performance model that Monique Mojica (Kuna and Rappahannock) and I create employs the deep structure of earthworks as dramaturgical models. Using the mounds as a starting place, we asked two questions: 1) How is land embodied in the Indigenous peoples in North and South America; and, 2) Are tribal peoples the embodiment of specific mound sites from their homelands?

In our research project we visited mound sites from Canada to Louisiana in 2011. They include the sites from the Archaic, Early Woodland, Middle Woodland, and late Woodland/Mississippian periods. In the Southeast some of the great mound cities are Poverty Point (Louisiana), Moundville (Alabama), Nanih Waiya (Mississippi), and Okmulgee (Georgia). Other earthworks known as Hopewell era sites are located across Ohio and the Ohio Valley north into Canada. At one time, hundreds of thousands of mounds, including embankments, conical mounds, platform mounds, and effigy mounds dotted Indigenous North America, beginning as early as 4000 bce. In fact, the very name “Turtle Island” connotes a vast effigy mound rising out of the water. By looking at the various ages of the earthwork sites, the different locations, and the eras in which they were built, we realized that we would be well served to consider the Native novel as the analogue for reading the stories of mounds. Consider Love Medicine by Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich, a novel-in-stories, told by different characters from different eras and places. Similarly we should think of mounds as linked chapters in the novel of Indigenous North and South America. With different characters and points of view that de-emphasize chronology and plot, but give voice to a plethora of storytellers writing on the land, we may find that earthworks are mnemonics designed to help Natives remember to return home for solar and lunar ceremonial events. And, by returning home, we rebuild and recreate another chapter in the book of mounds.

Consider the Bird Mound at Poverty Point, Louisiana (Figure 1.3), the western hemisphere’s largest Archaic period earthwork, and second in overall size to Mississippian-era Monk’s Mound at Cahokia, Illinois.² Located near West Carroll Parish, Louisiana, and 15 miles from the Mississippi River on the Macon Bayou, Poverty Point is only 183 miles from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The site was likely known by many ancient peoples, including those that would one day coalesce and emerge out of prehistory into the Choctaws. Built during the late Archaic period, archaeologists say they do not know why Mound A, or the Bird Mound, came into being. Yet, the spectacular bird was created in only three short months.³ Why? Because I think the builders of the site were performing the creation story of a literal bird. If the Bird Mound is itself a kind of theatrical performance, one in which the performers tell the story by collectively sculpting the earth, it calls into question the very nature of mound building, as “writing on the land.” Bird Mound as a creative performance affirms collaboration as an ancient Indigenous epistemology, perhaps considered the highest art form expressed by Indigenous builders, artists, and players that carried the soil in baskets.

Figure 1.3 Poverty Point Bird Mound wings; view is north. Photograph by LeAnne Howe.

The site includes six mounds, six rings, and six compartments within the rings. According to archaeologist Jon Gibson, the number 6 could coincide with the six directions: four cardinal, plus the above and below directions.⁴ Natives in the Southeast literally moved a mountain of soil, some 8.4 million cubic feet, in approximately 90 days, to create the story of a giant bird. She flies west and her wings seem tilted downward, as if landing. Gibson says her head once towered up to six stories high,⁵ though still lower than the bird’s arched shoulders and wings, at the high point of the mound (Figure 1.3). Perhaps the head was turned to one side, as shown in one of Gibson’s bird drawings from the stone engravings presumably found at the site.⁶ It’s impossible to know what it really looked like, though, because the head was dug away by looters in the 19th century looking for treasure. However, it’s conceivable that her broad north-south wingspan of 640 feet could signify that she’s gliding to perch in order to be mounted by her mate.

The giant bird earthwork stands seven stories high. Considering the size of the effigy, I suggest she’s a Red-Tailed Hawk, a bird of prey. Red-Tail Hawks embody special attributes for Southeastern Natives, especially Choctaws. It is also a solar bird, one of power and strength, and the tail feathers are bright red in sunlight. Red signifies lifeblood, and is sometimes a metaphor for war.

Red-Tailed Hawks mate over a period of a few days in late winter or early spring. By March, the female lays her eggs, one every other day; two eggs will take up to four days. The incubation period for hawk eggs is typically 35 days. It generally takes another four days for the small nestlings to hatch out of their shells. Once out of their shells, the nestlings will spend another 46 days or so in the nest before the baby birds begin to leave on short flights. Total number of days needed to create a Red-Tailed Hawk, from mating to a fledgling leaving the nest, is approximately 90 days. Three months. Therefore the Bird Mound at Poverty Point embodies a Red-Tailed Hawk’s creation to first flight. Perhaps the architects of the Bird Mound were Bird Clan people. Or maybe they simply revered Red-Tailed Hawks that returned to Macon Bayou each spring to raise their fledglings. Speculation, I know, filtered through the experience of having a grandmother that spent years observing birdlife and telling stories about them.

There’s still more to the story of the Bird Mound. It may have been built to coincide with at least two major solar events for Southeastern Natives: March 21, the Vernal Equinox, and June 21, the Summer Solstice. If a Red-Tailed Hawk’s eggs were laid in March, the fledglings would be ready to leave the nest sometime in late June, close to the time of the Summer Solstice. Traditionally, Choctaws (and other Southeastern tribes) extinguished all fires on Summer Solstice, known as Luak Mosholi. This Choctawan ceremony marks the end of a six-month cycle, and begins a new six-month cycle around June 22. If the building of Bird’s Mound began in March and ended in June, it would coincide with two ceremonial practices of Southeastern Natives. Even in the Archaic period ceremonies around solar and lunar events m...