Event Host: Center for the Study of Religion and the Center for Ethnic Studies, American Indian Studies
Short Description: Drawing from his new book "Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts," Chadwick Allen analyzes works by contemporary Native writers and artists that demonstrate Indigenous conceptions of interment within mounded earth.
Since the eighteenth century, settler cultures have represented North American burial mounds as ancient “mysteries” and historical “enigmas” — sites of Indigenous vanishing that provide settlers with opportunities for creating scientific discovery, economic profit and cautionary tales of angry ghosts from “lost” civilizations. But there are other narratives to tell about these sophisticated earthworks, other conceptual frames for understanding not only their functions as technologies for interment but also their ongoing power as symbols for Indigenous presence. Drawing from his new book Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts, Chadwick Allen analyzes works by contemporary Native writers and artists that demonstrate Indigenous conceptions of interment within mounded earth. These provocative “earth”-works unsettle dominant narratives by reactivating Indigenous understandings of burial mounds as active sites of renewal and regeneration.
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