Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts by Chadwick Allen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts by Chadwick Allen Jonathan Radocay (bio) Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts by Chadwick Allen University of Minnesota Press, 2022 Scholarship in Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies has long emphasized how the creation of settler societies has always depended on the elimination, extraction, and annexation of Native worlds. This "colonial restructuring of spaces" (p. 33), as Mishuana Goeman describes it in Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations, unfolds not just on our lands and on our bodies, but also in the symbolic realm—in the spaces of narrative and representation. Indigenous peoples have always contested and "remapped" these restructurings within Native worldviews, histories, and practices. Engaging these remappings, scholars have increasingly looked to Native concepts of space both to critique colonial forms of (racialized, gendered) spatial domination and to affirm the continuance of these concepts in contemporary Indigenous life. Lisa Brooks, for example, reorganizes histories of literary production and space in the Native northeast around awikhigawogan, an Abenaki concept that braids together the activities of writing, mapmaking, and the production of (Native) space. Among other Native spatial concepts, Goeman herself has drawn on the spiraling world of the Mvskoke (Creek) stomp ground in the poetry of Joy Harjo. In Earthworks Rising, Chadwick Allen brilliantly contributes to this body of scholarship by exploring contemporary Indigenous artistic, literary, and performative productions that engage with Indigenous [End Page 109] earthworks and earthwork principles. These productions include poetry by Alison Hedge Coke and Margaret Noodin, sculpture art by Jimmie Durham, fiction by Phillip Carroll Morgan and LeAnne Howe, and mixed media art by Alyssa Hinton. Earthwork landforms shape and contour the book's nonlinear, spatial organization too, which draws on the three-worlds theory of the universe shared by many mound-building cultures. Aligned with the above world, part I focuses on engagements with effigy mounds located primarily in the Ohio River Valley. Part II, which aligns with the surface world, covers engagements with platform mounds in Cahokia located in southern Illinois and with mounds in Aztalan in Wisconsin. Lastly, part III, associated with the below world, examines productions that engage with burial mounds. The range suggested in the book's subtitle—Native literature and arts—dramatically understates its scope and critical practice. Earthworks Rising is an incredibly ambitious and wide-ranging text. As much as he painstakingly analyzes a dizzying array of Indigenous and non-Indigenous engagements, Allen prioritizes developing research methods that "think with, through, and among—the mounds" (p. 8, emphasis original), including those that draw from Allen's own personal encounters; his relationships with Indigenous scholars, activists, and communities; and his lifelong experiences living among the earthworks he examines. Earthworks Rising approaches mounds as Indigenous writing, and his innovative methodology combines skillful close reading and visual analysis with personal reflection, site-specific collaboration, and other performative, embodied research practices inspired by Monica Mojica, Howe, and relational anthropologist Mary Weismantel. However, Allen's occasional use of complex numerical descriptions in his otherwise compelling and detailed close readings can at times be disorienting and undermine his attempt to demonstrate an alignment between an engagement's "thematic geometry" (p. 55) and a broader geography of earthworks. Allen's reading of Hedge Coke's poems "Snake Mound" and "The Mounds" in Blood Run (2006) illustrates Allen's original critical practice. Drawing on Gregory Cajete's notion that mathematics play a key role in quantifying and encoding Indigenous knowledge about the world, Allen develops a careful but difficult close reading of Hedge Coke's numerical sequencing and use of space. He argues that throughout Blood Run Hedge Coke develops an earthworks poetics that "reveals new ways of seeing and new ways of conceptualizing" (p. 50) the Serpent Mound in the Ohio River Valley. Allen's reading moves beyond the page and considers the possibilities that emerge when the poems are performed, when a reading takes into consideration the "modulations of the performers' voices, expressions, and gestures" as well as "the physical orientations of the performers' bodies in relation to the audience" (p. 59). Allen argues that the embodied performance of Coke's [End Page 110] earthwork poetics is...