photograph by alex greene
A ritual vessel excavated from the Nodena Site in northeastern Arkansas, occupied from 1400-1650 A.D., now on display at the Hampson Archaeological Museum in Wilson, Arkansas.
I grew up in haunted lands. I suppose all Americans do, but it was especially clear in the fields near Memphis, Nebraska, where the seasonal tilling of the soil on what my father called “Indian Hill” would reveal arrowheads and scrapers on a regular basis. He and I would comb the dirt for the telltale points and edges of flint shaped by human hands, and I would imagine those hands in their daily routines of hunting, fishing, washing, or cooking — all the actions we humans share — as the prairie winds whipped around me like voices from the past.
Those voices, those people, had lived in a relatively recent recorded history which, if read unflinchingly, revealed the dark side of my own ancestors. Those among the Otoe-Missouria tribe who’d survived smallpox were driven out to clear the way for my kin. And yet, while the stone mementos of their existence suggested to me a collective shame, they also hinted at a kind of transcendence. The world into which I was born, the modern way of life that seemed so inevitable, was not the only way. One could learn from the voices in the wind. Even the name Nebraska came from the Otoe-Missourian words “Ni Brathge,” meaning “flat water.”
I can’t help wondering if those Otoe-Missourians experienced the same ruminations I did. Did a curious Otoe youth ever dig up a copper image of a hand with an eye in its palm, so common along Mississippian trade routes, and wonder who’d come before?
In my youth, I romanticized the lives of those Otoe-Missourians, but even as I matured and devoted myself to cultural anthropology, stripping away illusions of the “noble savage,” I could see in their differences a way out. More importantly, looking at the sharpened flint I collected in a shoebox, I could also see a way in. Every arrowhead, every flaked edge of bone striking flint, spoke to the innate humanity of those now gone. They’d been relocated to Oklahoma only a few years prior to my great-grandparents’ arrival, but I could still learn from them.
Now, reading Chris McCoy’s account of the widespread Mississippian culture that pre-dated North America’s more familiar historical tribes (September 2024), I can’t help wondering if those Otoe-Missourians experienced the same ruminations I did. Did a curious Otoe youth ever dig up a copper image of a hand with an eye in its palm, so common along Mississippian trade routes, and wonder who’d come before?
Such was the reach of Mississippian culture (“from Iowa to Ohio, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast,” as McCoy writes) that this hypothetical Otoe youth may well have been seeing signs of their own ancestors from Cahokia, near today’s St. Louis. As archaeologist Robert L. Hall writes in the Art Institute of Chicago’s 2004 exhibition guide, Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand, the historical descendants of Cahokia’s people were likely speakers of Sioux-related languages, including the Winnebago, Iowa, Otoe, and Missouria tribes. He even considers a model whereby the huge urban society centered on Cahokia didn’t so much collapse as disperse. “After A.D. 1200,” he writes, “bison hunting was becoming more visible in the archaeological record among the village farming cultures of the Missouri valley and in the prairie margins of the Plains … thereby reducing the population pressure around Mississippi valley centers such as Cahokia.”
If the spread of Cahokian ritual artifacts — sporting the imagery of the hawk, the Hero Twins, the open palm with an eye at its center — went hand in hand with the religious trappings of concentrated political power built on sedentary agriculture, perhaps alternatives to such agriculture made the religion (and the political elites) obsolete. Yet the mounds like those at Chucalissa and Shiloh still remained, silent silhouettes from the past, leaving the historical era’s Native Americans pondering the provenance and the personhood of those that came before them — just as I pondered the sharpened flint in the fields of my homeland. All archaeological science aside, such lines of thinking may represent the greatest power of the past’s lingering remnants: they hint at other ways of being, other visions of humanity and the cosmos, other histories that might have been or may yet come to pass.
