Who was cleared? Chucalissa museum, a land-clearing project

Abstract

Within Memphis’ T.O. Fuller State Park, formerly the Shelby County Negro State Park, lies the C.H. Nash Chucalissa Museum where skeletal remains of the Tunica people are on display. Because it is a popular tourist attraction and a hub for archeology research, it has been dubbed the “central clearing house for Western Tennessee archeology.” Despite the many journal articles written about Chucalissa, underwhelmingly few critically engage with the Black labor exploited and the sacred burial mounds disturbed in the “clearing” and excavating of this exhibit. In this paper, I exchange the definition of “clearing,” a technical term common among archeologists with one that exposes it as a euphemism that disavows the historic violence of extraction.1,2 Through an interdisciplinary textual analysis of Nash’s “Chucalissa Indian Town,” this paper inquires what does it really mean for Chucalissa to be a “land clearing project” and a “central clearing house”? Who was cleared? How will digging up the history of the Chucalissa Museum shape our interpretations of regional archeology at that time? Finally, how can these findings contribute to the present Black and Native tensions with Chucalissa and to the broader conversations on repatriation?