Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds

The Author: Barbara Alice Mann is a Lecturer of English at the University of Toledo, as well as a noted author and speaker on the culture and history of Native Americans of the eastern woodlands. She authored Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (2000), edited Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands (2001), and co-edited The Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) (2000), in addition to writing major articles on various aspects of the Iroquois League and its culture.

«‘Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds’ is a tour de force...in its breadth and significance. Displaying conversance with an astonishingly broad range of traditional understandings as well as the relevant corpus of eurocentrist literature (‘scientific' and otherwise), Barbara Alice Mann compellingly demonstrates, time after time, that the former are vastly more consistent with available evidence than are the latter. She is thus able not only to reconstruct the reality of Mound-Builder culture in the Ohio River valley far more coherently and convincingly than have past researchers, but to offer the beginnings of an overall history of the interactivity of these ill-perceived and oft-ignored people with their more familiar modern descendants to both the north and the south.[...] Along the way, she chronicles how archaeologists, in particular, have long asserted and still seek to maintain control over the artifacts and skeletal remains interred in the mounds, mainly as a means of obscuring the contrived and often ludicrous nature of their own interpretive schemas.» (Excerpt from the Foreword, Ward Churchill, Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder; Author of ‘A Little Matter of Genocide’)«People who disdain the Native American dead also disdain their living descendants. This destructive process is still going on and is why I say of Barbara Alice Mann's monumental book, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, ‘Read it-for truth's sake, for life's sake.’From her deep store of indigenist scholarship and personal experience with the issue, Mann speaks Native-style, a courageous act in academia. She keeps her promise to the reader not only to be ‘direct and unapologetic’ in her ‘use of bold language and oral tradition, ’ but also to ‘root’ her discussion, tracing the ‘convoluted path’ of the issue from its inception into the present.One strategy of colonizers is to keep authors and their readers boxed in categories of ethnicity, or gender, or discipline, but Barbara Alice Mann's voice is so powerful and resonant that it carries through academia and on to the general public, where there are also many people with ‘ears to hear’ her truth-telling-and to respond.» (Marilou Awiakta, Author of ‘Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother's Wisdom’