Waking Up on Turtle Island: The Wonders

Monday, September 25, 2023

The Wonders

Sites in Ohio may be as vital to human history as the pyramids. Why have they been ignored for so long?

BY DAN KOIS (SEPT 24, 2023):

“Among the most curious submissions was the United States’ proposal: a group of eight sites in southern Ohio featuring earthen mounds and walls, collectively called the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. For nearly two decades, a mostly volunteer group of dedicated archaeologists, historians, and Native American tribal officials has been patiently making the case that these mysterious, not particularly photogenic piles of dirt are as culturally and historically significant as Stonehenge or the Colosseum. They’ve battled local opposition and national obscurity, and in some ways, the sites themselves, which are sprawling, sometimes heavily forested, and at several locations, plowed over by centuries of farmers. One is across the street from a federal prison. Another has been turned into a golf course…

Glenna Wallace was a professor and college administrator when she was elected chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma in 2006…A year after Wallace’s election, she visited Ohio State University to hear a talk by the author of a book on the Shawnee warrior and resister (sic) Tecumseh. The next day, she drove about 45 minutes east of Columbus, with the author and others, for a scheduled visit to Native American earthworks in the town of Newark, Ohio. To her surprise—she’d never heard of the Newark Earthworks—they were enormous. To her dismay, a substantial part of the ancient structures was located on a golf course owned by a local country club.

“There was a golf tournament happening that Saturday,” Wallace told me (Kois). As her group made its way toward the small observation platform that overlooks the course and earthworks, they got into an altercation with a group of golfers on carts.

“They said, ‘You need to step back, you need to come back another day,’ ” Wallace recalled.

“They actually said, ‘You don’t belong here.’ ”

When she made it onto the wooden platform, she said, she was overwhelmed with admiration for the ancestors who had made these monumental geometric shapes. She watched as golfers teed off from atop ancient mounds and drove their carts over the earthen walls. She told me, “The longer I stood there, the sadder I became, because of how they were being used—abused. There was no knowledge. No reverence.”