Indigenous Burial Mounds

This extraordinary scene from a 348-long muslin painting called “Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley” was done by an American artist named John J. Egan in 1850. Looking carefully at the details, you can see that white Americans are using their black slaves to open up an American Indian burial mound. The mound is shown as a cut-through, so that viewers can see how the American Indians carefully built up the layers of their burial place.

The white settlers encountering these mounds had a respect and admiration for their archaeological complexity, even though they often demolished the mounds when it suited their economic interests to do so. And one of their excuses for eradicating these mounds went hand-in-hand with justifications for how they handled the living population of American Indians: this is their creation of a myth of the “lost civilizations”.

In this myth, the peoples who had built the mounds had come from an advanced civilization. These architectural monuments had been wonderously complex and sturdy — Thomas Jefferson himself oversaw an excavation near his Virgina home called the “Rivanna Mound,” and noted that the bones of the deceased had not been killed in warfare, and had been especially treated before internment. But, went the myth, that was long ago and those monuments could have no relationship with the indigenous peoples living in these areas in the present.

Andrew Jackson used this myth, as genetic archaeologist Jennifer Raff points out, as his excuse for the Indian Removal Act of 1830, arguing: “In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the west, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disappeared, to make room for existing savage tribes”.

The problem, of course, is that this myth wasn’t true — connections among the living populations of Native peoples and their mounds have been established. But it does show how history can be manipulated by those in power.