“Why Do Tourists Visit Ancient Ruins Everywhere Except the United States?”
“Americans have not treated what Dr. Pauketat calls “Ancient America’s great city on the Mississippi” with reverence. Four-lane roads and highways surround and bisect Cahokia, the sprawl of East St. Louis covers more of the ancient site, and many of the earthen pyramids have been scraped away to use as infill.
Cahokia has since been dignified with a state park and visitors center, but it’s not well known outside of Illinois and Missouri. It hardly attracts the number of visitors you’d expect for America’s version of the pyramids and the ruins of the country’s greatest, ancient city…
When Americans did notice Cahokia’s ruins, most of them assumed that Indians could not have made them. They theorized that Vikings, Greeks, or Egyptians built the mounds; Thomas Jefferson advised Lewis and Clark to look for white, Welsh-speaking Indians who raised the pyramids. Even later archeologists struggled to imagine an Indian city…
What we do know is that a village was razed in 1050 to rebuild Cahokia on a grid, with a grand plaza and ceremonial structures built on two hundred huge, earthen pyramids. The population increased so rapidly — Dr. Pauketat writes that walking from the edge of Cahokia’s territory to the city center would have taken two days at its peak — that Cahokia must have drawn thousands of immigrants inspired by its religion, culture, or politics.”
There is a series of Star Trek where the first officer of the ship is Native, and he talks about how his tribe (and others) relocated to other planets where they could live in peace. And, the first time I watched the show, when I was little, I thought this was a great piece of the future-utopia of the show, that they were finally able to “live the way they wanted to”. Except now it’s like, wtf, we aren’t recognizing them as part of the Earth like everyone else?
And I think it comes back to this perception, of these simple and nomadic people in small groups who didn’t make an impact on the world around them and primarily function to teach white people spiritual lessons.
Related: “Native American Rap Is the Most Authentic Rap We Have Today”
