Bundling the Day and Unraveling the Night

Abstract

To mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Society of American Indians, a group of friends and scholars traveled from Th e Ohio State University to a golf course in nearby Newark. Th ere, among the tended greens, they climbed to the center of Observatory Mound and gazed across the Octagon Earthworks built by the Hopewell people between 100 bc and 400 ad. What can be known when gathering in a place centuries old? How have the shadows shift ed? What traces left by others are real and what traces of today can be left in places where the layers of time are so visible? We knew these mounds, like the ancestors of those gathered, were Indigenous, craft ed by people who planted, sowed, traded, and traveled near the waterways of the Great Lakes. People who fashioned small fi gurines and built vast geometrically perfect shapes centered on the arc of the lunar cycle. Th ey wore large earrings, mined copper, gathered meteors, and buried their dead carefully, with precision, in mounds of earth. Th e stories they carved in stone included bears and severed heads. It is diffi cult to know much more for certain. We also knew that our more immediate predecessors came from many Native nations and were not yet citizens of the United States. Yet, when they gathered on the mound they sang the song Martin Luther King wove into his Dream speech, the song sung at both of Barack Obama’s inaugural celebrations, a song many forget is based on the British national anthem . . . “My Country ’Tis of Th ee.” It is easy to understand the force with which they must have sung, “My native country, thee . . . I love thy rocks and rills, Th y woods and templed hills.” But the poignant irony of this particular group singing “Land where my fathers died . . . Land of the pilgrims’ pride” provokes a sort of melancholy that