The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a "Lost White Race"

by Jason Colavito

Say you found that a few dozen people, operating at the highest levels of society, conspired to create a false ancient history of the American continent to promote a religious, white-supremacist agenda in the service of supposedly patriotic ideals. Would you call it fake news? In nineteenth-century America, this was in fact a powerful truth that shaped Manifest Destiny. The Mound Builder Myth is the first book to chronicle the attempt to recast the Native American burial mounds as the work of a lost white race of “true” native Americans.

Thomas Jefferson’s pioneering archaeology concluded that the earthen mounds were the work of Native Americans. In the 1894 report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas concurred, drawing on two decades of research. But in the century in between, the lie took hold, with Presidents Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Abraham Lincoln adding their approval and the Mormon Church among those benefiting. Jason Colavito traces this monumental deception from the farthest reaches of the frontier to the halls of Congress, mapping a century-long conspiracy to fabricate and promote a false ancient history—and enumerating its devastating consequences for contemporary Native people.

Built upon primary sources and first-person accounts, the story that The Mound Builder Myth tells is a forgotten chapter of American history—but one that reads like the Da Vinci Code as it plays out at the upper reaches of government, religion, and science. And as far-fetched as it now might seem that a lost white race once ruled prehistoric America, the damage done by this “ancient” myth has clear echoes in today’s arguments over white nationalism, multiculturalism, “alternative facts,” and the role of science and the control of knowledge in public life.
 

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Archaeology, Native Americans

402 pages, Paperback

Published February 20, 2020

Reviews

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A topic I'm fascinated by and a book that's generally well-written, this was a bad fit for University of Oklahoma Press. There are some glaring oversights in terms of sources that should have been engaged (especially by Native writers and ESPECIALLY from a press with a history of publishing Native Studies) and there are an embarrassing number of typos. Trimmed down and reworked for a popular press, this would've been a better read.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very informative read about the origins of bizarre theories surrounding the great Native American mounds. I have even heard some of these so called theories spouted as truth by educated people I know.

This book explores religious, political, scientific, and cultural drives behind the theories from the 18th century through the modern era.

It's very sad that from the very origins of this nation, the Native Americans were treated so badly- even their own ancient history was dismissed.... and it is still going on.

[Amy H. Sturgis · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review will be published in Reason Magazine. When it is, I will link to it here.

[Laurel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was interested in this topic because of the historical Mormon connection to this belief, but found the writing to be a bit dry. It's an interesting and important topic but offers little new insight if you've delved into the subject matter previously.

[DAJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colavito's specialty is the history of false ideas: examining their sources, tracing them to earlier sources, and describing how they evolve through time. Here he turns his attention to an idea that is virtually forgotten today but that had major consequences that are still with us: that the monumental mounds of North America were built by a "lost white race" whom Native Americans slaughtered and replaced.

What's astounding about the mound builder myth is how universal it once was. Nearly as strange is how rapidly the idea took hold and how rapidly it collapsed. When Europeans arrived in the Americas they assumed Native Americans must be offshoots of some Old World society, and they produced a lot of outlandish theories along those lines. But nobody questioned that Native Americans had been the first inhabitants of the land, and few questioned that the mounds were theirs—Thomas Jefferson's estate included a small mound, and he remembered Monacans making pilgrimages there when he was a child. In the 1780s, however, theories about a lost civilization of mound builders began springing up. The stimulus seems to have been the discovery of larger and more impressive mounds west of the Appalachians, which many white people regarded as too sophisticated for Native Americans to build. (Colavito kind of buries this point because he talks about one of the more important disseminators of the idea, John Hector St. John, before he discusses why the idea arose.) By the 1810s these theories had become widespread, advocated by some of the most reputable people in the nation.

Colavito devotes a great deal of discussion to the different theories about who the mound builders were—and the frauds that some people created to support their claims—but he does not lose sight of the real-life consequences. Mormonism is one; the Book of Mormon conforms exactly to the myth of the lost white race. Most disturbingly, the myth was cited as a justification for driving Native Americans off their land, because, after all, their ancestors were guilty of the exact same thing. The myth was so entrenched by the 1830s that Andrew Jackson could allude to it in a message to Congress about the Indian Removal Acts. This political motivation seems to be the reason for the rapid rise of the myth: it took hold at the beginning of the 19th century as the settlement of the Ohio Valley intensified the Indian Wars. Similarly, it vanished from the popular imagination with surprising speed once John Wesley Powell and Cyrus Thomas debunked it in the 1890s, apparently because the Indian Wars were over and no longer needed justification.

Yet it didn't quite die out. Some of the frauds perpetrated by supporters of the myth are forgotten today, but others, such as the Bat Creek Stone, the Grave Creek Stone, and of course the Book of Mormon, are still sometimes cited as genuine. A few ideas derived from the myth, such as the notion of a vanished race of ancient giants and Ignatius Donnelly's strange assertions about Atlantean civilization, are pervasive in the world of fringe history. As Colavito says in his conclusion, these ideas are undergoing a resurgence: they are a staple of the junk history series on cable television and in conspiracy-minded corners of the internet.

The book would benefit from a discussion of what is genuinely known about the cultures that build the mounds. The preface gives a general outline, and the prologue describes Hernando de Soto's encounters with mound-building Native Americans, but that's about all. But the book is a history of a false idea, and one can't fault Colavito too much for not expanding his scope beyond that. Colavito has spend the past decade on his blog showing how today's fringe-history community habitually recycles obsolete 19th-century ideas such as the mound builder myth. Exposing their faulty, and often fraudulent, origins is a worthy goal in itself.

[Greta Gonzales · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was very interesting to me because it revealed the white supremacist narratives that underlie the Mound Builder Myth. I had never heard of this myth before, but Colavito delved into it very thoroughly. I think awareness of this myth is incredibly important, as it's echoes can still be seen today in the way we think of Native American cultures and the way the public discussed the human past. Despite the importance of this book in challenging popular pseudo-archaeological narratives and their implications, I do have a few critiques of the book.

Firstly, I think the book wrongly implied that white supremacy is at the root of all or most alternative archaeological theories, such as the ones regarding aliens or mythical races. I think racism is a dangerous undercurrent that should be watched out for in these discussions, but I also disagree with the idea that every person who searches for supernatural explanations does so because of an attitude of indigenous inferiority. I don't think every person who believes in a lost advanced civilization is reflecting a remnant of the Mound Builder Myth. I think the discourse on lost advanced civilization is older than that, and mincing it all down to one aspect of the conversation is a vast oversimplification.

The issue that gave me the most trouble while reading though, was the overly dense writing filled with so many seemingly arbitrary details. It felt like every time a new person was mentioned, Colavito had to first mention every noteworthy achievement of their 2nd cousin and the weird speech their pastor gave at their local church. While sometimes enriching the narrative, at other times it just distracted the reader from the main argument of the chapter, and made the writing feel scattered and disorganized overall.

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now we are talking.

Myths, such as the builder, are used to justify not only an economic order, but racism and genocide.

Colavito's argues that since president Jackson, boulder myths have been used to massacre natives and propagate nocive ideas.

This historical analysis is la crème de la crème to unite ideology, in the whole marxist sense, and fringe theories.

In other articles, Colavito maintains coherence with his own theories and finds Atlantis, Nacaal tables and the Mu continent also as fringe theories that justifiy aryan dominance and discrimination.

Tldr; pseudoscienes are racist.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful and expansive study of how the myth was born, shaped, and leveraged to sustain regimes of inequality across the span of the US's existence right up to the present.

If you're interested in the intersections of race/racism, speculative fiction, and political economy, you'll want to get hold of this book.

[Jay Paparella · Rating 5 out of 5]

So informative!
The author has a great knack for explaining different controversies and putting everything in a historical perspective. I am blown away.

I definitely recommend the kindle edition. I think the subject matter was a little dry for the audio book treatment, unfortunately.