Earthworks Rising: Mound Building In Native Literature And Arts by Chadwick Allen (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Earthworks Rising: Mound Building In Native Literature And Arts by Chadwick Allen
• Lilian Mengesha

EARTHWORKS RISING: MOUND BUILDING IN NATIVE LITERATURE AND ARTS. By Chadwick Allen. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2022; pp. 395.

Chadwick Allen’s anticipated monograph is a rigorous and well-researched engagement with earth-works in both their physical form as well as their representations in literature, visual art, sculpture, and performance. Allen’s work is the first of its kind to compile myriad artworks that engage mounds as sites of complex knowledge. Most academic studies of mounds are grounded in disciplines like history, archaeology and anthropology, and refrain from detailing earthwork’s social, aesthetic, or cultural impact. Shockingly, Indigenous descendants of mound builders are often excluded from the scientific methodologies used for understanding them. Allen, a descendent of mound-building people [End Page 381] (Chickasaw), does the opposite. Central to this book is exploring how Indigenous artists approach mounds as animate beings with whom story is co-created. He organizes the three parts of the text with the three worlds theory of mound building: effigy mounds (above world), platform mounds (surface world), and burial mounds (below world). Allen’s points of analyses follow principles of earthworks themselves: alignment, integration, convergence, and duration. While much of his study within the three sections focus on specific texts and artworks, the codas offer rich embodied reflections from Allen about his experiences being-with these sacred sites. The structure of the book leads to the argument of the text: earthworks are part of a present-past, from the world above to the one below.

This book contributes to an urgent need for Indigenous literacies. Allen teaches readers how to interpret mounds as Native forms of earth writing that hold interdependent meaning and power. Indigenous earthworks are intentionally designed to correspond with the cosmos, seasonal changes, and their natural environments, which he indexes as an enduring precision of Indigenous intelligence. Allen shows how artists listen to and build upon these precise designs in their own work. He is aided in this by tracing a particular through-line of Cherokee, Huron, and Muscogee author Allison Hedge Coke’s book of poetry, Blood Run, named after the mounds on either side of the Big Sioux River. Other artists and cultural producers that guide Allen’s study include Kuna and Rappahannock theatre artist Monique Mojica and Choctaw writer Leanne Howe, sculptor Jimmie Durham, Osage and Tuscarora visual artist Alyssa Hinton, among others. As he writes, understanding earthworks “requires methodologies that are embodied and performative: walking specific sites in order to ‘see’ them in their fullness, making physical contact with mounds and embankments, placing our human bodies in relation to their bodies of earth” (25).

The book builds on Allen’s Theatre Journal article “Performing Serpent Mound: A Trans-Indigenous Meditation” (2015) as part of the impactful special issue “Trans-Indigenous Performance” edited by Ric Knowles. This is also Part I, the above world, with expansive attention to the significance of the serpent in Serpent Mound, ranging from Alice Walker’s Meridian, Coke’s Blood Run and Durham’s The Banks of the Ohio. Allen juxtaposes Indigenous and non-Indigenous representations of the mounds creating a summation of how these representations come to reveal both settler preoccupations with mounds as lore and mystery, as well as Indigenous interpretations reliant upon ecological knowledge, cosmology, and ceremony. Part II, the surface world, turns to literary meditations and imaginings of life at Cahokia Mounds, notably reframing this epic site as an Indigenous city, countering a settler narrative of nomadic and village based Indigenous peoples. Here, Allen puts Chickasaw writer Phillip Carroll Morgan’s Anompolichi: The Wordmaster in conversation with young adult novels that imagine life at Cahokia. We learn that the word for mound in the Choctaw (ampo chaha) and Chickasaw (aaympo chaaha) languages can be understood as “the profound intersection of human birth and death” (198). This important integration of Native language compellingly argues for Indigenous language revitalization as a necessary pillar for understanding mounds. In Part III, focused on, the below world and burial mounds, Allen returns to Coke’s poetry, as well as Howe’s novel Shell Shaker. Turning to Coke...