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

Abstract

S P R I N G & F A L L 2 0 2 0 W I C A Z O S A R E V I E W 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 Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts by Chadwick Allen University of Minnesota Press, 2022