Mounds and Memory: Indigenous Sovereignty, Ceremonial Spaces, and Stories of the Mound Builders (Spring 2023)
April 25-27, 2023
About the Conference
Mounds and earthworks are monumental human-made landforms which, over the past 5000 years (or more), have served as ceremonial gathering spaces, burial sites, astronomical landmarks, pilgrimage destinations, and centers of Indigenous politics, mobility, and commerce. As settlers moved into the Great Lakes region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they increasingly speculated about who created the mounds. Largely ignoring Indigenous narratives of and interactions with the mounds, missionaries, explorers, surveyors, and archaeologists (both amateur and professional) invented new “religio-racial” histories of North America. These new narratives combined Christian-inflected mythmaking with the new science of archaeology, often erasing Indigenous histories of the mounds and legitimating settler excavation and destruction of these ceremonial earthworks.
The presenters gathered for this workshop will analyze the multiple, entangled, and contested claims about Great Lakes mounds and earthworks that have shaped these landforms as sites of memory and territorial jurisdiction for both Indigenous peoples and settlers. Presenters will examine narratives of the mound builders as building blocks of national memory in multijurisdictional frames, with special focus on the Manitou Mounds at Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre (Rainy River First Nations, Treaty #3 territory/northwestern Ontario) and the Newark Earthworks, near Columbus, Ohio. The papers will draw critical attention to how settler imaginations of North American antiquity tried to empty the land of Indigenous stories, ceremony, and sovereignty, further exposing treaty lands to white settlement, Christian cosmologies, and capitalist resource extraction. The papers will also address how mounds and earthworks persist as reminders of the past and as contemporary spaces of gathering and ceremony in a way that has enabled Indigenous sovereignty.
Program
Tuesday, April 25
Travel and Arrival
6:00 pm – 9:00 pm: Reception & Dinner at the Faculty Club, Harvard University
Wednesday, April 26
8:30am | Coffee & light breakfast at the Faculty Club
9:00am – 10:30am | Opening & Public Keynote Lecture
Thompson Room, Barker Center
- Pamela Klassen, Mackenzie King Visiting Professor, Canada Program, Harvard University/University of Toronto
- Welcome & Opening Greetings from the Consulate General of Canada to New England
- Chadwick Allen, University of Washington, Keynote Lecture: “At a Remove: Re-storying Earthworks in Oklahoma”
10:30am-10:45am | Refreshment Break at the Faculty Club
10:45am –12:15pm | Theme: Mounds, Earthworks, & Petroforms from Indigenous Perspectives
Faculty Club
- Moderator: Anthony Trujillo, Harvard University
- Robert Greene, Elder-in-Residence, Canadian Museum of Human Rights, Iskatewizaagegan Independent First Nation, “Anishinaabe Moundbuilders of Treaty Three and the Significance of the Treaty in Relation to Rainy River and the Mounds”
- John Low, Newark Earthworks Center, Ohio State University, “A Native Perspective on the Newark Earthworks”
- Stacey Taylor, Terrestrial Archaeologist, Parks Canada, “Maandawaab-kinganan: “Strange form of rocks”, the Pukaskwa Pit Petroforms”
12:15pm – 1:30pm | Lunch at the Faculty Club
1:30pm – 3:00pm | Theme: Honouring and Protecting Mounds and Earthworks
Faculty Club
- Moderator: Philip Deloria, Harvard University
- Giitaagiizhig Art Hunter, Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre & Rainy River First Nations, “Mewizha (a long time ago): Honouring and Protecting Manitou Mounds”
- Krista Barclay, University of Toronto, “‘its absence is still felt’: Robert Pither and the Contested History of the ‘Point Park’ Mound in Treaty #3 Territory”
- Chadwick Cowie, University of Toronto, Pamitaashkodeyong/Hiawatha First Nation, “Our Duty is to Honour and Protect: The Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg and the Burial Mounds at Rice Lake”
3:00pm – 3:15pm | Refreshment Break at the Faculty Club
3:30 – 5:00 pm | Visit to the Peabody Museum
- Hosts: Stephanie Mach, Curator of North American Collections
- Meredith Vasta, Collections Steward
- Emma Lagan, NAGPRA Regional Coordinator
7:00pm – 9:00pm | Dinner at Maharaja Restaurant
Thursday, April 27
8:30am – 9:00 am | Coffee & light breakfast at the Faculty Club
9:00am – 10:30pm | Theme: Imagination & Desecration
- Moderator: Ann Braude, Harvard Divinity School
- Meghan Howey, University of New Hampshire, “Earthworks, Looting, and Memory in the Northern Great Lakes”
- M Dougherty, Toronto Metropolitan University, “The Serpent in the Wilderness: Indigenous earthworks in settlers’ sacred histories”
- Kendall Sneyd, University of Toronto, “Pre-empting the Past: George Bryce and the Mounds of Manidoo Ziibi”
10:30am – 10:45am | Refreshment Break
Faculty Club
11:00am –12:30pm | Theme: Excavation & Racialization: Mounds and the Work of Dispossession
- Moderator: Kabl Wilkerson, Harvard University
- Lindsay Martel Montgomery, University of Toronto, “Black Labor on Indigenous Lands: The Racial Politics of Mound Archaeology in the United States”
- Spencer Dew, Ohio State University/Kenyon College, “‘Indigenous Disposition’: African American Religious Claims to Mounds and Indigeneity”
- Pamela Klassen, U of Toronto/ Canada Program, Harvard University, “Buying and Selling Mounds & Earthworks”
12:30pm – 1:30pm | Lunch at the Faculty Club
1:30 – 2:30pm | Theme: Relating to Mounds & Earthworks
Faculty Club
- Moderator: Christina Pasqua, University of Toronto, “‘Stories for Everyone’: A Visual Archive of Visiting with the Manitou Mounds”
- Maureen Matthews, University of Manitoba, “Mememgwesiwag: Cree and Ojibwe Ideas about ‘The Little People’”
2:45-4:15 | Closing conversations & next steps
Faculty Club
- Alan Corbiere, York University & Philip Deloria, Harvard University
Other out-of-town guests:
- Kim Detweiler, Council Member, Rainy River First Nations
- Natalie Nachtman, Co-manager/Museum Technician, Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre
- Jessie Richard, Archivist/Grant Manager, Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre
- Teagan de Laronde, Relations on the Land Project Manager, University of Toronto