No gods, no masters: Indigenous environmental knowledge in Mississippian art

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mississippian and Woodland art and iconography is often interpreted as representing supernatural subject matter within a three-tiered cosmos. This approach, what I call the mythological-structural model, has been highly generative. However, it also reproduces assumptions rooted in a social evolutionary definition of religion as essentially “mistaken beliefs,” such that ancestral Southeastern Native American art is reduced to representations of realms and beings in excess of nature. This misconstrues Indigenous realities, including the Upper, Middle, and Lower Worlds. Building on scholarship in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) and the ontological turn, I propose an alternative interpretive model of Indigenous environmental knowledge. I draw on community-based research with members of Pvlvcekolv, a Native American community in the US South claiming Muskogee identity, to interpret three examples of Mississippian art—the so-called “birdmen/women,” the Birger figurine, and the Willoughby Disk. These interpretations foreground the significance of environmental relationships and Indigenous philosophical traditions about the nature of life, the body, and difference that are not easily reduced to “supernatural beliefs.” An Indigenous ecological knowledge-informed framework provides a new path into the study of spirituality and political life that privileges living Indigenous perspectives and deeper dialogues with NAIS in archaeology.