Post-Removal Mounds: Earthworks Rising in Oklahoma

Abstract: Twenty-first-century Oklahoma—where so many Southeastern, Ohio Valley, Mississippi Valley, and other mound-building and mound-stewarding peoples were forcibly removed in the nineteenth century—is witnessing a reactivation of Indigenous practices of building and stewarding large-scale, highly graphic, multiply encoded earthworks. Replicas of historical platform mounds feature prominently at the Chickasaw Cultural Center that opened in rural south-central Oklahoma in 2010 and the Choctaw Cultural Center that opened in rural southeastern Oklahoma in 2021, while a futuristic, spiraling "promontory mound" forms an integral component of the multitribal First Americans Museum that opened outside urban Oklahoma City in 2021. Constructed and curated to meet the expectations of both tribal citizens and diverse Native and non-Native tourists, how do these new earthen structures and their contextualizing environments occupy space, organize relations, and make meaning within their specific contexts of cultural celebration, Indigenous-centered education, and immersive visitor experience? And what do they tell us about the possibilities for Indigenous aesthetics and architectural design in the future?