Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts

Chadwick Allen

ISBN 10: 1517912334 / ISBN 13: 9781517912338

Published by University of Minnesota Press, 2022

About this Item

2022. Paperback. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9781517912338

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1517912334
• ISBN 13: 9781517912338
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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 meaning—in 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 America’s diverse mound-building cultures over thousands of years and brings attention to new earthworks rising in the twenty-first century.

About the Author

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 Native Literary Studies (Minnesota, 2012).