Sweetgum's Amber: Animate Mound Landscapes and the Nonlinear Longue Durée in the Native South

This dissertation centers the study of the mound landscapes on an Indigenous people’s knowledges and ongoing relationships with ancestral places. Thousands of these earthen mounds sit across eastern North America, constructed by Native American peoples over the previous five thousand years. My data is based on ethnographic research conducted in partnership with members of a small Native American community in the Southeastern U.S. who identify as having Muskogee (Creek) ancestry, but maintain their own understandings of the meaning of individual mounds and their interconnections in the past and present. The mounds visited and discussed are distributed widely across the Eastern U.S. (from Illinois to Florida). Popular history, interpretive signage, and dominant archaeological discourses frame mounds as abandoned sites and places “of the past,” yet these landscapes remain powerful and animate presences for members of this Native American community. Oral traditions shared with me describe mounds as places along roads traveled by celestial teachers and human traders, who helped resolve conflicts between warring communities and create peace. These routes extend into the present as animate mounds enroll my hosts into relations of exchange and care, particularly through circulations of ancestral objects, soils, and dreams. In these moments, members of the community cultivate vulnerability to ancestral affects and attend to landscapes wounded by ongoing settler violence. As my hosts visit mound landscapes, they are drawn into a nonlinear, Indigenous longue durée: an emergent space-time of winding, interconnected paths along which stories, things, soils, and dreams circulate.