THE WESTERN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION’S
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Earthworks: Land, Bones, and Native Literatures in the Classroom
A Workshop led by Chadwick Allen and Susan Bernardin
Friday 3 October, 3:00 – 4:15
Overview:
This pedagogy workshop will introduce participants to several innovative American Indian texts that raise issues central to western literary studies. Our goal is to model alternative formats for their teaching and study.
Our primary literary text will be Allison Hedge Coke’s book of poems Blood Run: Free Verse Play (Salt Publishing, 2006). Hedge Coke is a well-known poet, writer, scholar, and activist of Cherokee, Huron, and Creek descent. Blood Run documents her work advocating for the preservation of the little-known Blood Run mound site on the South Dakota-Iowa border. Occupancy of the site dates to over 8,500 years ago, but Blood Run was most heavily populated by Oneota peoples at the beginning of the eighteenth century. As many as 400 mounds spread across 2300 acres may have been constructed at the site. An 1883 survey documented 276 mounds spread across 1200 acres; today, after more than a century of looting, physical removal, and agricultural cropping directly on the site, less than 80 remain visible.
Blood Run is the first American Indian literary text to give voice to the tradition of American Indian earthworks. Hedge Coke has created a series of persona poems in which all of the elements of the Blood Run site and its history “speak” for themselves, including not only the various ceremonial, burial, and effigy mounds, but also skeletons, ghosts, river, sun, moon, corn, dog, deer, redwing blackbird, looters, early anthropologists, tractor, horizon, and memory. The individual poems work together as a kind of play—a series of monologues spoken from multiple relevant perspectives.
We will augment Blood Run with discussion of the documentary film Shellmound and of additional poems by other American Indian writers who engage similar issues of communal investments in land, grave sites and the repatriation of human remains, and who give voice to land and its multiple inhabitants and to the built environment. We will also contrast Indigenous traditions of building earthworks with western experiments with building earthworks as contemporary art installations, such as Robert Smithson’s well-known “Spiral Jetty” built in the Great Salt Lake in 1970.
Preparing for the Workshop:
Before arrival in Boulder, you can
1) Read Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run: Free Verse Play, available through amazon.com.
2) Visit web sites relevant to earthworks and shell mounds, including:
A. State Historical Society of Iowa, Blood Run National Historic Landmark
B. Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Illinois
Once in Boulder, you can:
1) Look for photocopies of selected poems from Blood Run and other works available at the Conference Registration Table.
2) Join us for the Workshop.
For further information, contact:
Chadwick Allen, Ohio State University and/or Susan Bernardin, SUNY-Oneonta