Synopses & Reviews
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt/M., Oxford, Wien. American Indian Studies. Vol. 14 General Editors: Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson and Malcolm A. Nelson
Synopsis
Ever since European settlers stumbled upon the eighteenth-century mounds, explanations and interpretations of them - often ridiculous and seldom Native American - have appeared as sober scholarship. Today, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) has intensified the debate over who owns the mounds - modern descendants of the Mound builders or Western archaeologists. Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds is the first cogent look at all the issues surrounding the mounds, their history, their preservation, and their interpretation. Using the traditions of those Natives descended from the Mound Builders as well as historical and archaeological evidence, Barbara Alice Mann placed the mounds in their native cultural context as she examines the fraught issues enveloping them in the twenty-first century.
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. [449]-493) and index.
Table of Contents
Foreword: indigenist scholarship at its finest / by Ward Churchill -- Introduction: on riding that undead horse of native discourse -- The "vulture culture": anthropology collects Native America -- The "slaughter" of the mounds: settler myths and despoliations -- "We can make a Waukauhoowaa": native traditions of the mounds -- Kokomthena, singing in the flames: sky-earth logic in the mounds -- Blabbermouth bones: NAGPRA, remythologized archaeology and documentary genocide -- Epilogue: strategies for Eastern Native Americans.