#Hopewell mounds

[jwood718]

"They're great civil engineers. They're artists, they're astronomers, mathematicians, and for my people, that's not the way that Shawnee people, or any Indigenous peoples in this country, are typically portrayed in media." Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee Tribe

Tana Weingartner for NPR: "Ohio's Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks are about to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site"

"Of just over a thousand [Heritage] sites worldwide deemed of universal importance and value to humankind, there are only 24 in the United States that carry that distinction."

Outside the Great Circle at Newark (with visitor for scale, to the left in the distance).  The Circle’s earthen berm stands anywhere from around 6 feet, to 14 feet high. Jake Wood

"Now, after more than a decade of work and planning, ancient earthworks in Ohio are poised to join them...

The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks encompass eight sites — a collection of historic earthen mounds built by Indigenous peoples:

Fort Ancient Earthworks and Nature Preserve

Hopewell Culture National Historical Park (five geographically separate elements)

Mound City Group

Hopewell Mound Group

Seip Earthworks

High Bank Earthworks

Hopeton Earthworks

Newark Earthworks

All the sites were built 1,600 to 2,000 years ago by peoples formerly referred to as Hopewell...

It might be unusual to consider huge mounds of dirt as anything significant, however, UNESCO calls the earthworks a 'masterpiece of human creative genius.' That's one of the criteria for inclusion on the World Heritage List. Another calls for bearing "exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has disappeared."

The design and construction of the Earthworks show the people during this early era had a clear understanding of geometry, architecture, and solar and lunar alignments and multi-year cycles."

Full story with audio from Weekend Edition Saturday.

In my various travels, I've visited some of these; more information on some of those astronomical alignments is on available on Jake Rambles n'at, including diagrams on satellite views ('cause I do that):

[not-available-for-comment]

Y’all I am So Excited about this. The Serpent Mound and the other Hopewell mounds are one of the few genuinely cool things about Ohio

Excerpts:

"In the past we might sometimes say 'Hopewell culture' or 'Hopewell people,' but what we really understand 'Hopewell' to be now is not a new peoples," explains Bill Kennedy, site manager and site archeologist at Fort Ancient Earthworks and Nature Preserve. "It's a new religious movement of people. It's happening all throughout eastern North America. It reaches a fluorescence, though, in southern Ohio that it doesn't reach anywhere else."

…Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee Tribe, who was involved in the earthworks nomination, also sees its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List as a step toward combating racist and ignorant stereotypes about his people and his ancestors.

"They're great civil engineers. They're artists, they're astronomers, mathematicians, and for my people, that's not the way that Shawnee people, or any Indigenous peoples in this country, are typically portrayed in media," he says.

In addition, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks address gaps in the World Heritage List identified by the World Heritage Committee. Specifically, a lack of sites representing pre-contact Indigenous American sacred architecture and sites that represent early understandings of science, culture and astronomy.

…Today no federally recognized tribes remain in Ohio. They were all forcibly removed in the 17 and 1800s. Yet it was their ancestors who created these massive feats of design and engineering.

Glenna Wallace is chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and has been active in the World Heritage process. She says inscription on the World Heritage List is part of her mission to teach people about the earthworks that her ancestors built.

She says their inclusion would not be an ending, but another beginning.

"Our people may have been forced away from that place, and they may have disappeared, but what they built, what they constructed, what their values were, that's still there and that should be protected," she states.

"That's the reason for World Heritage."

In becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site, Wallace says she hopes the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks will finally attain the reverence and respect they deserve.

See the linked article for more details!

[middleland]

Seip Earthworks - Hopewell Culture National Historical Park (2) (3) by Roam Your Home

[charring58]

Field Museum's #Hopewell culture ome from the "Hopewell Mound ted about 50 miles south of hio. Archaeologists found more than at any other Hopewell site

[prairie-tales]

Hopewell mica hand, c. 300 BCE –500 CE.

Region: Ohio River Valley.

Discovered within one of the Hopewell mound complexes of burials found in the central Ohio River valley. Flourishing from around the second century BCE in the Eastern Woodlands  area that spread from the east coast of America and Canada and as far south as North Carolina, the Hopewell Indians are thought to be the ancestors of the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Cherokee tribes. They grew maize to supplement their hunter-gatherer diet and were responsible for the many small stone sculptures that have been found in the region.

The Hopewell Indians built special mounds for their leaders, and they were focal points for their religious activities. Their elaborate burials used special rites on the heads and hands of the dead, giving this hand particular significance. Mica are minerals found in certain types of rock and when crystalized, they form flexible sheets. The grave in which this hand was found lies some 480km (300 miles) from the nearest source of mica and the presence of this artefact is an indication of the status of the leader with which it was buried. Some graves have been discovered that were entirely lined with mica.

Source: ‘Folk Art’, Susann Linn-Williams, pp. 152-53.

[johncosma]

Sacred mounds abed, at peace #hopewell #hopewellpeople #woodland #woodlandpeople #precolumbian #mound #mounds #earthworks #rockyriverreservation #metroparks #clevelandmetroparks https://www.instagram.com/p/Cnu0U_XpaEO/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[stankhead]

Beaver Effigy Pipe (circa A.D. 200-400)  Pipestone with mother of pearl and bone inlay. Hopewell Culture, from Tremper Mound in Scioto County, Ohio.

via. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa

[uwlmvac]

Nicholls Mound near the city of Trempealeau on the Mississippi River is an example of a Hopewell site in Wisconsin. When archaeologists from the Milwaukee Public Museum excavated the mound in the late 1920 - 1930's they discovered a burial tomb dug into the ground and covered with logs. A 12 foot high mound was built over the tomb. The tomb contained several individuals who were buried with ceremonial items made from exotic materials. Some of the items included large stone knives over 6 inches long made of obsidian from the Rocky Mountains, copper earspools, 6 copper axes, marine shell beads, and 20 freshwater pearl beads. You can still visit Nicholls mound from the Great River State Bike Trail just east of Trempealeau. Learn more about Nicholls Mound at: https://www.uwlax.edu/mvac/past-cultures/specific-sites/trempealeau/#Nicholls.  Pictured: A recent picture of Nicholls Mound.

[randomnoteforfuturereference]

So Echo is already notable for its connection to the Choctaw Nation, but something that really struck me is that this is probably the first time the Mississippian Mound Builders have been depicted in a mainstream non-documentary film/series.

I really hope this kicks off interest in that civilization and its cities such as Cahokia, Moundsville (which was probably the location in the show), Etowah, and Spiro. Not to mention other civilizations like the Hopewell and Adena.

[1five1two]

The Ohio Hanukkiah Mound was a mound believed to be in the shape of a menorah and oil lamp, located near the Little Miami River in Milford, Ohio. Its origins are typically attributed to the Hopewell culture.

[merelygifted]

The US' 2,000-year-old mystery mounds - BBC Travel

Constructed by a mysterious civilisation that left no written records, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks are a testament to indigenous sophistication.

Autumn leaves crackled under our shoes as dozens of eager tourists and I followed a guide along a grassy mound. We stopped when we reached the opening of a turf-topped circle, which was formed by another wall of mounded earth. We were at The Octagon, part of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, a large network of hand-constructed hills spread throughout central and southern Ohio that were built as many as 2,000 years ago. Indigenous people would come to The Octagon from hundreds of miles away, gathering regularly for shared rituals and worship.

"There was a sweat lodge or some kind of purification place there," said our guide Brad Lepper, the senior archaeologist for the Ohio History Connection's World Heritage Program (OHC), as he pointed to the circle. I looked inside to see a perfectly manicured lawn – a putting green. A tall flag marked a hole at its centre.

The Octagon is currently being used as a golf course.  ...

...  However, after the Hopewell Culture gradually began to disappear starting around 500 CE, other indigenous peoples stepped in to become caretakers of the land. One of those groups was the Shawnee Tribe, which called Ohio home before they were forcibly removed west of the Mississippi River in the 1830s.

"We may not have been responsible for building or creating them, but I know that my ancestors lived there, and that my ancestors protected them and respected them," said Chief Glenna Wallace of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, who believes that other tribes should have a role in the future of protecting the Hopewell Earthworks and communicating their cultural importance.

However, receiving Unesco status is a difficult, bureaucratic process. While sitting on land owned by the OHC, The Octagon is under the control of the Moundbuilders Country Club. The club negotiated an unprecedented lease that extends until 2078 and only allows visitors to walk the mounds four times a year. The rest of the time, visitors can access a platform in the car park to view a very small section of the property. OHC is currently suing to evict the country club (with compensation) through eminent domain. The lower courts ruled in favour of the historical society, but the Ohio Supreme Court is hearing an appeal. If OHC can't guarantee public access, this may affect Unesco's decision.

While a Unesco designation wouldn't entail the return of land or reparations, it does mean greater local representation and education about Ohio's Native American history. It also means more indigenous stakeholders, like the Shawnee, telling that story from an indigenous perspective for future generations.

"I just want people to know about it," said Chief Wallace, "I want people to be able to see it. I want people to be able to visit it and want people to realise that it is a cultural phenomenon. That it's priceless."

[unknownancientamerica]

Timeline for North America Mound Builders Civilizations

5400 years ago the, Ouachita Mound Ring site, Northeastern Louisiana, 11 mounds in a circle

 1700 -1200 B.C.,  several villages with concentric c-shape ridges appears 55 miles from Ouachita Site, most notable is at Poverty Point

 800-100 B.C., Adena Culture flourished, Ohio Valley, part of eastern agricultural complex/ revolution, mounds were mostly burial

100 B.C.-400 A.D Hopewell Culture, sites stretch from Canada to Louisiana, mounds had ritual spaces, grand trade routes, spiritual influence spread

950-1250 Mississippian Culture mostly south eastern region of U.S., East St. Louis Mound Complex, St Louis Mound Complex, Monks Mounds Complex and Cahokia Complex with Sun calendar woodhenge 

Many of these site were inhabited by different ethnic at different time making it difficult to determine the people who first built the mounds

Written by Michelle Evans

[middleland]

August Wildflowers and Grasses by Christa Binder

Via Flickr:

Seip Earthworks - Hopewell Culture National Historic Park. Ross County, Ohio

[charring58]

Clovis points unearthed in the park indicate occupation by people of the Clovis Culture, which was widespread by about 11,000 BC. Clovis hunters specialized in hunting the large Pleistocene mammals, but a variety of other plants and animals were also exploited. Archeological surveys have located Archaic period (8000 – 2000 BC) settlements along the Illinois River. These prehistoric indigenous peoples thrived by foraging and hunting a variety of wild foods;[9] Havana Hopewell settlers during the Woodland period (1000 BC – 1000 AD) built earthwork mounds. They also made pottery and domesticated plants.

[marxism-transgenderism]

The Great Lakes region—including the Ohio River valley, the area around the lakes themselves, and the Mississippi basin up to the edge of the Great Plains—was home to some of the bloodiest fighting and also some of the most aggressive and effective Indian resistance to colonization on the entire continent.

Our present mapmaking turns the lakes into a border between the United States and Canada, an upper limit, rather than the crossroads that they were. Moving from south to north, the Mississippi River and its twin tributaries—the Missouri and the Ohio, draining the west and east, respectively—point like a trident at the belly of the lakes. The lakes themselves draw water from as far west as northern Minnesota and bring it all the way to the ocean. To the north of the lakes, great rivers like the Rainy, Hayes, Severn, and Albany feed north into Hudson Bay and beyond into the Arctic. Seen this way, the Great Lakes and the land that rises on their northern and southern flanks are the confluence of a vast network of waterways. For Indians as far back as the Paleolithic they were the hub of the New World.

Migrating waterfowl, fish, and game have followed these waterways since the end of the last North American ice age twelve thousand years ago. The earliest Native peoples, who lived alongside the game on which they depended, used these waterways, too. By the beginning of the Woodland period in 500 BCE there was a vast cultural and technological network that followed the water, spreading knowledge along with the cultures that carried it. The use of the bow and arrow, pottery, plant domestication, architecture, and burial practices flowed from the Gulf of Mexico all the way up to north of Lake Ontario and back again. In the various climates found in this vast and fecund area native plants, including gourds, sumpweed, goosefoot, sunflower, knotweed, little barley, and maygrass, were cultivated long before the arrival of corn and beans. In the Middle Woodland period, what is known as the Hopewell culture (also called the Hopewell complex or Hopewell exchange network) arose. The Hopewell cultures typically made their homes in or near oxbows and floodplains that seasonally replenished rich planting grounds, aquatic food sources, and waterfowl. The villages could reach significant size and were surrounded by mounds of all shapes and sizes that were one of the hallmarks of the culture. The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks near Chillicothe, Ohio, for example, measures 1,254 feet long and connects thirty-eight mounds within an earthen rectangle measuring more than one hundred acres.

Most, but not all, mounds contained burials of staggering richness. (The purpose of many effigy mounds—like the Great Serpent Mound, southeast of Chillicothe, Ohio, the largest effigy mound in the world—remains unknown or, at the least, hotly debated among archaeologists.) The mounds themselves were constructed using large poles that supported a thatched roof. The deceased were placed inside the shelter and buried with an abundance of trade goods. In Ohio some mounds were found to contain thousands of freshwater pearls, mica, tortoise shells, Knife River flint (from North Dakota), and conch (from Mexico). The finds indicate that these communities were both well-off and well-connected. Around the burial structure, heaps of animal bones suggest that the dead were feasted in fine fashion by their relatives. After the feasting, the gathered goods were burned down and covered over with earth. Along with larger villages and greater economic and caloric security came an explosion in artistic expression. Hopewell Indians were expert carvers. One burial mound at the Mound City site in Ross County, Ohio, contained more than two hundred intricately carved smoking pipes.

But around 500 CE, the Hopewell exchange network, along with the large villages and the mound building, disappeared. So did the artwork. Populations seem to have gone into decline. No one knows why, exactly. Trade and commerce brought goods from all over the continent, but they might also have brought war: some villages from the end of the period were bounded by moats and wooden palisades. The climate grew colder, which may have made game grow scarce. Likewise, improvements in hunting technology may have caused a collapse in animal populations. Agriculture itself may have been a culprit: as of 900 CE, maize and beans were well established throughout the region, and the rise of agriculture could have generated a shift in social organization. Much later, the Mississippian period, from 1100 to 1541 CE, saw the advent of the bow, small projectile points, pottery, and a shift from gathering to intensive agriculture. Large villages replaced small seasonal camps. The largest Mississippian village was surely Cahokia, which was at its peak around 1050–1250 CE, situated at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers near present-day St. Louis, spreading over five square miles and with a population estimated to reach thirty thousand. One burial site there contained twenty thousand shell beads, another eight hundred arrowheads. That, too, went into decline and was abandoned. Whatever the cause, by the time Europeans arrived in the region in the mid–seventeenth century, Cahokia and similar settlements had been long abandoned.

While tribes in the Southeast, Southwest, and Northeast were involved in countless local struggles (and not a few large ones) with the Spanish, English, Dutch, and French, Indians west of the Appalachians had at first only fleeting contact with the newcomers. But as happened elsewhere, harbingers arrived first, in the form of trade goods and disease. Some of this arrived with waves of tribal newcomers as refugees from the coastal groups headed inland, sparking territorial conflicts well west of the Atlantic even before Europeans set foot in the contested territories. The political disruptions caused by masses of refugees were compounded by disruptions to seasonal hunting and gathering cycles brought on by disease. The time and energy it took to weave nets, knap spear and arrow points, set traps, spear fish, and weave material was lost to war, illness, and death. Native technologies had already evolved that were well suited to the worlds of the Indians who invented them, yet what was wanting were specialists to make and use that technology. European knives were no better at cutting. European axes were no better at felling. In the chaos of the times, it became expedient to trade for them rather than to make them. The increased reliance on European trade goods in turn caused more geopolitical conflict.

In times of upheaval as in times of strife and instability, the region was defined by its prehistoric routes and cultures. Jacques Cartier, exploring the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in the 1530s and early 1540s, did ship-side trading with Natives there, exchanging knives and kettles and the like for fur used in trim—unaware of the wealth waiting to be extracted from the Pays d’en Haut (Upper Country) in the form of beaver pelts. According to Cartier, the Indians he met “made frequent signs to us to come on shore, holding up to us some furs on sticks. . . . They bartered all they had to such an extent that all went back naked without anything on them; and they made signs to us that they would return on the morrow with more furs.” Basque fishermen—present since the 1490s—became deeply enmeshed in the beaver trade. Seasonal fishermen, operating on the Grand Banks as early as 1512, traded metal items for beaver furs, which would be sewn into robes to keep the sailors warm during their endeavors and then be sold back in France. It wasn’t long before beaver fur’s unique felting qualities dramatically increased European demand for it (the barbed strands clung to one another with extraordinary strength). This led to an increased focus on exploration into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and the returning reports of a vast continent loaded with furs and Indians eager to trade drove Europeans deeper still into the interior, with a predictable increase in conflict.

The Iroquois Confederacy maintained a stranglehold on travel into the interior via the Great Lakes waterways, which meant, in the middle to late sixteenth century, control over all the trade in the region. Unlike the loosely affiliated Algonquian tribes and nonaffiliated Iroquoian tribes such as the Huron, they had access to trade goods: metal traps, kettles, axes, blankets, guns, shot, powder, and knives. Such items conferred a decided military advantage, and between the end of the sixteenth century and the full blossoming of the fur trade, the Iroquois were engaged in endless wars of advantage with their tribal neighbors to the east. They also managed to negotiate punitive trade deals with the French along the Saint Lawrence and the English down the Hudson.

The tribes to the west of the Iroquois were numerous and powerful but spread out over a vast territory. They included the Shawnee, Odawa, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Sac, Fox, Menominee, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Osage, Miami, Dakota, Cree, Mandan, Arikara, Hidatsa, and Huron (to name but a few). With the exception of the Huron, who lived in large agricultural settlements on the north side of Lake Ontario and later near Georgian Bay and whose population numbered 20,000 to 40,000 or more, western Great Lakes tribes were broken into small mobile villages of around 150 to 300 people, organized by kinship ties. These were the Indians of storybook legend: plying the vast woodlands in birchbark canoes and treading the hushed forests in moccasins. They were primarily hunter-gatherers, though they, too, grew corn, beans, and squash. More westerly tribes such as the Ojibwe had also begun harvesting and cultivating naturally occurring wild rice—a swampy aquatic plant in the oat family that provided a very stable and nutrient-rich food source.

In 1608, Samuel de Champlain (the “father of New France”) pushed deeper into the Saint Lawrence and landed at the site that would become Quebec. As historian Michael McDonnell notes, Quebec was less a colony of settlement than the site of a warehouse and trading factory. Trading posts or factories—which in no way resembled factories as we know them—were combination free-trade zones, consulates, military garrisons, and settlements. European and American goods would be brought there, while Indian trade goods (usually furs and buckskin) were brought from the interior. The factory would be run by a “factor,” essentially a trader, and staffed with other traders who worked under him, along with craftsmen with needed skills, such as blacksmiths and tanners.

The hope at Quebec was to catch furs coming out of the northland and thereby bypass the British to the east and the Spanish creeping up the Mississippi from the south. The French mode of settlement was for Indians in many ways preferable to that of the British and the Spanish. Instead of following a pattern of conquest, subjugation, settlement, and displacement, the French, preferring to trade rather than to settle, were much more inclined to adapt to the new country and its inhabitants. The new outpost was deep in Indian country, and to survive it needed the help of its neighbors. The French began trading with the Huron: metal goods and guns in exchange for stores of surplus corn. The Huron maintained good trade relations with their Algonquian neighbors, the Odawa and Ojibwe, so that, while they themselves did not have access to furs, they had access to and good relations with those who did. A year after Champlain landed at Quebec, the Huron were trading with the French vigorously, then trading with the Odawa and Ojibwe in turn. It wasn’t long, however, before Champlain recognized that in order to get premium northern furs (and at a better price), he had to deal directly with the Odawa and Ojibwe.

As they say: Location, location, location. At this time the Odawa and Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) were located around Michilimackinac, which sat at the straits that separated Lake Michigan from Lake Huron, a day’s paddle from the outlet of Lake Superior and perhaps the most strategically important location in North America at that time. Control the straits and you controlled travel and trade for the majority of the continent. The location also suited the cultural prerogatives of kinship unique to the Algonquians of the region: they were principally exogamous and had a very well developed clan system. Children took the clan of their fathers and typically married out of their village into nearby villages and even other tribes. The son would move out of his family’s home and into that of his wife, bringing with him his clan and sense of relatedness. As a result, “family” became a large thing indeed and pulled populations of mobile and separate tribes into incredibly durable and mutually beneficial relationships over great distances. This well-woven network was an incredible boon in times of war and matters of trade. Moreover, Michilimackinac offered access to reliable food sources. The lakes in all directions mitigated the effects of latitude with a microclimate that allowed for corn production well north of its usual limit and supported an incredible diversity of plants and trees. Ash, oak, maple, elm, spruce, cedar, and white pine grew in profusion. The fall spawn of whitefish was said to be so intense that one could walk across the straits on the backs of the spawning fish. Villages tended to be seasonal and small—groups of usually no more than 150 relatives who lived in largely single-family wigwams, made from saplings driven into the ground and bent and tied together into a dome shape, then covered with woven reeds, cedar bark, birchbark shingles, or elm bark. These populations shifted between winter hunting grounds, spring fishing sites, sugar bush, and summer berrying locations. In summer, when insects were at their worst, villages shifted to high bluffs or rocky promontories to catch the breeze. In winter, when temperatures dropped below zero, as in the Northeast, families often consolidated into larger oblong wigwams or lodges to conserve resources and heat.

In this way the Great Lakes Indians made the most of their homelands in the heart of the heartland. They also had the benefit of timing: they were there at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the fur trade blossomed into the first—and for centuries the most important—global industry. Their strong position allowed the allied Anishinaabe tribes (Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi) to pressure the French to supply more than trade goods if they were going to be suffered to stay in the Pays d’en Haut. In 1609, they coerced the French into joining them in war parties against the Iroquois Confederacy, who were a constant threat on the southeastern flank of the Great Lakes. And so began a well-regulated pattern of trade.

By the late seventeenth century the Anishinaabe allowed the French to build forts and trading posts as far north and west as Michilimackinac itself, sustaining a seasonal cycle of trade in Indian lands. The French followed Ojibwe and Odawa trade terms and their cultural protocols for feasting and gift-giving. When they failed to comply or tried to dictate new terms, the Anishinaabe would court the British and trade with them until the French fell back in line. With such leverage, the fate of the Great Lakes Indians came to differ radically from that of Indians in tribal homelands everywhere else in North America. Even during the French and British conquest of the Great Lakes, and disease notwithstanding, the population of Algonquian tribes such as the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi boomed, quadrupling between 1600 and 1800. The land base of the northern Algonquians expanded by a factor of twenty. Material culture, arts, and religion flourished. The strategic alliances and balance of power that inspired this “golden age” were nowhere more in evidence than in the attack at Pickawillany in 1752.

The French, after early successes in the seventeenth century, had been losing (globally and in North America) to the British. Piankashaw chief Memeskia, having grown dissatisfied with French trade goods and the French themselves, formed an intertribal coalition and began attacking the French. Many disaffected bands and individuals joined him. They formed a village at Pickawillany (at present-day Piqua, Ohio). They welcomed the British and allowed them to build a garrison and trading post nearby. Memeskia was becoming formidable, and his pan-Indian alliances threatened the balance among European powers so crucial to continued Indian control of the Great Lakes. If the British and French were kept wrong-footed, neither could consolidate their power and expand. With that in mind, the Anishinaabe played to their strengths and engaged in some furious diplomacy with their allies and their enemies. They warned the British that they were going to attack them in a general war. And they traveled from Michilimackinac by canoe to meet with the Onondaga Iroquois far to the east. The Iroquois Confederacy claimed the land in Ohio as their own, but they were in a tough place: they were allied with the British, and the British were trading and working with Memeskia. They gave the Algonquians their tacit blessing to remove Memeskia and his people, saying that they would “not permit any Nation to establish posts there; the Master of Life has placed us on that territory, and we alone ought to enjoy it, without anybody having the power to trouble us there.” In other words, they would not clear out the offenders, but they gave the Algonquians leave to do so.

In the winter of 1751–1752, Charles Langlade, a young mixed-race Odawa-French leader, began assembling a war party of Odawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe warriors who traveled by canoe south to Detroit and then upriver and over land to Pickawillany. They attacked the village in mid-morning on June 21, 1752, when the women were in the fields, and killed thirteen Miami men and captured five English traders. The survivors of the first assault fled back to a rough stockade, where Langlade and the Anishinaabe warriors fired on them for the better part of the day. Eventually the Miami, down to twenty or so warriors and low on water, tried to negotiate terms of surrender. Langlade said he wanted submission, not defeat, and said the survivors could leave if they promised to return home and if they handed over the English. The Miami failed, however, to honor the agreement, sending out only three of the five Englishmen. When they reached Langlade’s lines his men set on one of them, “stabbed him to death, scalped him, and ripped his heart out. They ate it in front of the defenders.” Then they seized Memeskia himself. They ordered the remaining defenders to stand and watch as they “killed, boiled, and ate Memeskia in front of his family and kinsmen.” Afterward, they released the Miami women they had captured and left for Detroit with the four captured Englishmen and more than $300,000 (in today’s money) of trade goods. This frontier victory against the English set off the First Anglo-Indian War, helped to ignite the French and Indian War, and was one of the sparks that began the worldwide conflagration known as the Seven Years’ War.

Whatever balance had been reestablished between the French and British in this region was lost during the Seven Years’ War, after which, for all intents and purposes, the French ceased to be a force in the New World. This left the British, who could be played off against the colonists only until the Revolutionary War, after which the Americans remained the sole colonial force in the Great Lakes region. This was the worst possible outcome for the Indians there. With the fur trade drawing to a close (by the mid-1800s the beaver was extinct east of the Mississippi), the Americans were free to force Great Lakes tribes into punitive treaties that reduced their territories, confined many to reservations, relocated others to Indian Territory (in what is now Oklahoma), and further eroded Indian influence. But while it lasted, the power of the Great Lakes tribes was immense, if underacknowledged. In part this is because these tribes, while they killed many French and English, didn’t engage in outright war with the new Americans. The cultural habit of negotiation (even from positions of relative powerlessness) persisted through the treaty period of 1830–1865. For this reason, as of 1891, Odawa, Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, Oneida, Meskwaki, and Ojibwe tribes remained in their homelands around the Great Lakes in the same geographical range they had at the height of their power.

– David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 the the Present

[lapsed-bookworm]

"UNESCO World Heritage Committee Names Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks to Prestigious List" (19 September 2023):

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee on Tuesday, September 19, 2023 named the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, a group of eight ancient earthwork sites in southern Ohio, to its World Heritage List. The decision by the World Heritage Committee was made by consensus at its 45th session in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. 

The monumental earthworks were built 2,000 years ago by Native American communities. Five of the earthwork sites are managed by the National Park Service and three are managed by the Ohio History Connection.

The destination was applauded by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo), whose department oversees the National Park Service.

“Today’s designation by UNESCO is a tremendous opportunity and recognition of the contributions of America’s Indigenous Peoples,” Haaland said in a press release. “World Heritage designation is an opportunity for the United States to share the whole story of America and the remarkable diversity of our cultural heritage as well as the beauty of our land. The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks are unique creations of America’s indigenous people and a remarkable survival of our ancient history.”

The sites that comprise Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks were built between 1,500 and 2,200 years ago by people now referred to as the Hopewell Culture. The earthworks, built on an enormous scale and using a standard unit of measure, form precise squares, circles, and octagons as well as a hilltop sculpted to enclose a vast plaza. The geometric forms are consistently deployed across great distances and encode alignments with both the sun’s cycles and the far more complex patterns of the moon. Artifacts, which are among the most outstanding art objects produced in pre-Columbian North America, show that those who built the earthworks interacted with people as far away as the Yellowstone basin and Florida. These are among the largest earthworks in the world that are not fortifications or defensive structures.

The properties comprising the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks:

Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Chillicothe, including the Mound City Group, Hopewell Mound Group, Seip Earthworks, High Bank Earthworks and Hopeton Earthworks

The Ohio History Connection’s Octagon Earthworks and Great Circle Earthworks in Newark and Fort Ancient Earthworks in Oregonia

During a recent vote, the World Heritage Committee members agreed that these earthworks deserve to be recognized alongside such places as Stonehenge in England and the Nazca Lines in Peru, as well as other iconic places in the United States, including Independence Hall and the Grand Canyon. The National Park Service manages all or part of 19 of the 25 World Heritage Sites in the United States. It is also the principal U.S. government agency responsible for implementing the World Heritage Convention in cooperation with the Department of State.

The inclusion of a site in the World Heritage List does not affect U.S. sovereignty or management of the sites, which remain subject only to U.S., state and local laws. Detailed information on the World Heritage Program and the process for the selection of U.S. sites can be found at the National Park Service’s website.