Christen Mucher, Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession

In 2019, the Chicago Architectural Biennial featured two works by the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana and CHamoru architect known as X: two earthworks that he constructed proximate to rivers flowing through the city currently called Chicago.Fololokah Cin Cinto (Coiled Serpent) and Pokto into (Serpent Twin) reference other earthworks, those downriver at Cahokia and those that existed in Chicago before settlers demolished them.Yet X insisted that the newly constructed earthworks were not replicas of past architectural structures but places for considering the ancient past and the future together:"This is also a way of restoring Indigenous place-making and will function as a reminder that the architectural world in America predates what we see now.And, moreover, the structures that we build today will have a post-industrial life-we need to think about reciprocity with the earth as we build on it."("One mound at a time, " 2019) How was that ancient Indigenous world severed from the present and the future in settler colonial historical consciousness?What is the relation of settler American history to Indigenous historiographic practices and temporalities?Why have settlers read earthworks not as instances of Indigenous architecture but as monuments created by a vanished "race" of peoples who came from somewhere else?In Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession, Christen Mucher traces how settler historians in the US and Mexico constructed a past for the territories their nations claimed, in the process bringing into being a period called antiquity that worked to alienate Indigenous peoples from their own monuments, stories, and relations to homelands.