The staircase to the top of Monk’s Mound at Cahokia. Taken by myself.
Effigies and Pyramids
K.L. Orion
I stood atop sacred ground.
A then not even fifteen year old pure white kid standing where ancient indigenous priests and chiefs once stood. Where these spiritual and political leaders once looked out at the city they created, springing out of the Earth. To the oblivious eye, these earthen mounds I stood on would’ve looked like bizarre hills. But I knew better. This was one of my favorite places on the face of the Earth. I stood atop Monk’s Mound, the tallest remaining mound of Cahokia, the city of the sun.
I had wanted to go there ever since I first heard of it on a Smithsonian show a few years earlier. Growing up, I thought of Native American cultures typically the way they were portrayed on television. Nomads or complex hunters and gatherers. A race of people almost wild with deep connections to the natural world. I rarely thought of textbook civilizations. I was led to believe they were spread out tribes that never numbered that greatly.
How wrong I was.
Luckily for me, I had a very influential individual in my early life who was of an Indigenous American bloodline and was proud of it. She taught me, a little white child whose ancestors once fought the native people for their land, to respect those here before me. My parents did as well, but having an actual Indigenous American telling me this probably had the most impact. Her influence on my early life made me idolize the Native American, something that would have a profound effect on me as I grew older.
I quickly learned to hate the savage depictions of them in pop culture, though those unfortunately had an effect on me too. Everyone always talked about the warring nomads of the prairies, hunting bison and defending their land from the white man. The truth is far more complex than that, considering Native Americans don’t identify under a single culture. They are a whole continent’s worth of cultures. They all responded to the coming of the white man differently. Some tried to kill him. Some tried to befriend him. Some tried to scare him away. Some saved him. Some tried to ignore him. They all responded differently. The group of people who could be gathered under the same classification are the very invaders who inhabit their lands now. In almost every single one of these situations, the white man cheated or outright murdered the Native American, even when the Native American had shown him compassion.
The white man’s oppression of the Indigenous people continues to this day. Among those injustices is misrepresentation in the media. They are always portrayed as savages. I never thought of them that way. In every movie where they “attacked the innocent” white settlers, I cheered for the natives. If I ever played Cowboys and Indians, I always wanted to be the Indian. I had a deep fascination in the overall culture of North American Indigenous people, but for years I didn’t understand what certain groups of them were capable of. Pop culture had led me to believe they lived in small isolated tribes dotting the American wilderness.
I didn’t know they built cities.
I heard of the Aztecs from Mexico and the cliff dwellers of the west, but being an Iowan kid, I always thought the natives in my neck of the woods (or plains more accurately) were nomadic people. I wasn’t entirely wrong, but there were others here, too. I lived right on the border of an ancient civilization without even knowing it.
The Woodland Culture, as it is often referred to, was a mound building culture of Indigenous Americans that extended throughout what is now the Eastern United States. The culture’s influence extended from the East Coast to the Mississippi River, not going much further west past it. However, while they had significant settlements across the eastern parts of North America, the most outstanding ones were centralized along the Mississippi River.
That brings me to my narrative at the start of this piece. My family took a vacation in the summer of 2022 to St. Louis. It was an incredible trip with many fascinating locations, but my favorite by far was Cahokia. Most people don’t even know Cahokia exists. I’ve asked a bunch of people about it, even my history obsessed friends, and none of them had a clue what on Earth a “Cahokia” was. If you don’t know what it is, then you are not alone.
Cahokia represents the height of the Woodland Culture, when vast regions of it developed into a civilization somewhat similar to the city states of Greece and Mesopotamia. This civilization became collectively referred to as the Mississippian Civilization, and it is my favorite society of all time. This civilization is identified by their spin on the trademark Woodland Culture obsession: really big mounds. Before, ancestral Woodland societies (and even other Woodland societies at the time of the Mississippains) developed an art at making burial mounds. And I do mean art, as I will get to later. At first, they weren’t much more than heaps of dirt piled over remains and valuables. However, as time went on, they began getting more creative with their mound construction.
They began making conical mounds. They made mounds on top of mounds. They even made mounds in the shapes of animals (more on that later). And they began to get absolutely colossal. Finally, in the southern half of the Woodland region, the Mississippian Culture developed. They didn’t build just plain burial mounds. They built earthen cities. At this point, their knowledge of soil and how to build using it had become so advanced that they were capable of designing giant pyramid-like mounds that weren’t used for burials. They were used as platforms. They’d make these enormous mounds to set important buildings and the homes of their leaders on top of them. These earthworks became something of temples to the Mississippian people, similar in basic design and sometimes function as the Ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia. They knew enough about the different kinds of dirt to know where to place the certain kinds in mound construction to limit the effects of erosion. This meant that many of them stood for hundreds of years after they were left abandoned.
That brings me back to Cahokia, kind of literally. Cahokia is the last best example of ancient Mississippian life. It’s the largest remaining mound city like this, giving archeologists a unique look into the lives of Mississippians. That unfortunately brings us to the tragedy of the Mississippians and Indigenous Americans as a whole. We know so little about the Mississippians because they didn’t develop a proper written language, meaning we have to use archeology to learn more about them. Even worse is the fact that European settlers weren’t so kind to the mounds or the descendants of those who built them. Any oral history recounting the Mississippians or anyone who might have known anything about them was killed during the European conquest of the American continents. Remaining mounds themselves were often dug up in hopes of finding treasure or just to put down farm fields in their place. There used to be hundreds, maybe thousands of cities like Cahokia dotting the American southeast. So what happened to them? One must ask why they fell before European contact.
Well, the truth is that they didn’t.
Cahokia’s height was around a thousand years ago, and it was left mostly uninhabited by the time Europeans arrived. It appeared that Mississippians stayed in a city only for a few hundred years before leaving to build a new one. However, there were still numerous Mississippian mound cities when Spanish conquistadors arrived. One of them in particular was looking for a little bit of fame, glory, and gold. Hernando de Soto. Okay, I admit, I don’t know everything about the guy, but what I do know makes me hate him. I watched a lecture series about the civilizations of North America, and the speaker claimed that de Soto was the single worst thing to have happened to Native America.
To keep it short, de Soto was a maniacal conquistador who had heard of the rich in gold cities of Central and South America that the Spanish had already met and stolen from. He wanted to have the same success in North America. So he took an army with him north into what is now the Southeastern United States. There, he ran into cities like those down south. He asked for gold. The Mississippians thought they knew the metal he was talking about. They brought him copper instead of gold, and de Soto got pissed. They were copper workers who had no idea what gold was, and de Soto found that out the hard way.
So if he wasn’t going to get gold out of this debacle, he was going to get glory. He went on a rampage throughout the entire territory, toppling Mississippian cities the entire time. The only thing that stopped him was the fact that he got a cold while on the conquest and freaking died before they could get him back to Spanish territory. Unfortunately, by then, the damage had been done. He destroyed too many cities, uprooted too many trade routes, and probably sent raging diseases throughout the Mississippian society. By the time Europeans decided to explore the Mississippian regions again, their cities lay abandoned.
The Mississippians were gone.
And thus started the crumble of the Woodland Culture, and the fall of mound building traditions. As I said, European settlers would uproot these things in search of valuables, meaning thousands upon thousands of mounds have been lost to history. Now, Western Civilization has only just begun to appreciate and understand an even more western civilization.
Monk’s Mound at Cahokia. Taken by myself.
It was a hot summer day when I hiked up to the top of Monk’s Mound. It is the centerpiece of the remaining Cahokian mounds. Around a hundred feet tall, it stood high above the treeline. Unfortunately, the visitor’s center and other mounds were closed that day for renovations and construction to the center and some trails, but I could see it all from the top of Monk’s Mound. I climbed it twice, actually. Once with my family to take it all in, a second time to take an online tour on an app I downloaded. Both times took my breath away. At the top, I could see everything. Cahokia is located on the other side of the Mississippi River from St. Louis. That meant I could see downtown St. Louie from the top of the ancient earthwork, Gateway Arch and all. I also could see another giant mound that dwarfed Monk’s Mound in the distance. The ugly clump of dirt was a landfill, and you could fit the entirety of the Cahokian mounds inside of it a few times over.
Monk’s Mound was once the largest earthwork in North America. Now, this ancient, sacred site seemed puny compared to the white man’s mountain of trash. I feel like I could write an entire Substack just based on that one statement alone, but I don’t feel the need to. That quote says it all.
To most kids my age, they’d think these mounds are just piles of dirt. But I see them for what they are. They are holy places for modern Native Americans. Some of them could very well be descended from Cahokians themselves. They are the remnants of a long forgotten, mysterious civilization. And I think it’s a shame that few people know these societies existed. Perhaps that’s part of the plan here. We already know we live on stolen land. But it’s a lot easier to ignore that fact when one thinks we stole it from a bunch of disconnected tribes of primitive people. People’s opinions would change if they found out that not only were those “disconnected” tribes once far more numerous at one point, but that they shared a continent with textbook civilizations. Textbook civilizations that were destroyed by Europeans. For the sake of all Indigenous Americans, we need to remember Cahokia.
Cahokia isn’t the only significant site. Just this past Labor Day, my family took the exhausting hike up a Mississippi bluff to see Effigy Mounds National Monument in my home of Iowa. These mounds varied greatly in size and, most importantly, shape. There were normal circular mounds. There were line mounds. There were chain mounds. There were mounds shaped like bears and birds. They were all burials, adding to that sacred sense. Mounds like these weren’t reserved to this national monument, though. All around the area on both sides of the river, mounds like these dotted the tops of bluffs. There were hundreds of them. Not long ago, there were thousands.
Walking through Effigy demands respect. You walk on sacred ground surrounded by the burials of native people. The whole experience forces reverence from you. Both Effigy and Cahokia represent something important. They represent the struggle Indigenous Americans are having to keep their land and their dignity. Modern American culture fails to give them the respect they deserve. They suffer from generational trauma, only worsened by the continuing abuse of them in the modern world. They have been alienated from their own homeland.
The tall grass parts represents a bear mound at Effigy. They are so large it’s hard to tell what they are from the ground. Photo taken by myself.
Mounds like those at Cahokia and Effigy remind you of their continued struggle. Of the hardships they faced along the way. Of the hardships they continue to face. As a matter of fact, while we were driving around looking for more effigy mounds, we found a bunch of historical markers identifying the spots of massacres of Native Americans during the Black Hawk War; a war fought to keep their land. European America has done a good job at suppressing the hold First Nations people once had on these continents, but they haven’t won entirely. Something a lot of people ask about these mound building cultures is, “Why mounds? Why piles of dirt? Why not bricks or stone?”
And to that, I reply, “Why not mounds?”
Mounds are symbolic. They are made from the Earth and still a part of the Earth, making them one with the Earth. Other cultures have man-made structures. The Woodland people had man-manipulated Earth. By building these mounds, they cemented their culture on the Earth. They immortalized their claim on the land. Even after the Native Americans are gone, replaced by urban communities and industrialized farmland, these sites will remain. The Earth itself will remind us who was here first. And in some cases, they buried their dead in these mounds. In that way, they not only cemented their culture in the land, they cemented themselves in it as well. They returned to the land. They became one with the land. One with the Earth. They were born here. They had ceremonies here. They built cities here. They buried their dead here.
This is their land, we’re all just living on it.
I’m impressed with how you have taken your experiences and researched them drawing your own conclusions and expressing them so well. I have always had a deep respect for the Native Americans and how they lived off the land. Living in Arizona I was fortunate to have classmates, friends and acquaintances that were Native American . If only the White Man had the same respect for the land and nature they did.
Awesome article. I’m very happy that you were able to experience these remarkable places and that very special teacher. I hope that she gets a big smile from reading this. Great work!!!