Blood Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, story 5. Rock Bunnies

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House (all reviewed earlier in this blog), Rock Bunnies (reviewed here), Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

In Rock Bunnies, once again, Rice takes an idea from the fiction of H. G. Wells, in this case from The Time Machine. In Wells’s novel, the human species has evolved into two: the infantile Eloi and the shabby but hard-working Morlocks, as different as any two animal species. In Rice’s story, the Urbanites are rich white technologists who have evolved into a slightly-different race that lives in artificial cities, while the dark poor Rock Bunnies live in places the whites have destroyed. This story is set in the Black Hills, which (as anyone visiting Mt. Rushmore knows) is currently covered with pine trees, but in this story, set in the future, is a desert. The Rock Bunnies leap from cliff to cliff and live off of mountain goats and little clumps of edible wild plants.

A white Urbanite graduate student out in the desert sees a Rock Bunny who, as they almost never do, fall from a cliff and injure herself, perhaps mortally. He wants to rescue her but her fellow Rock Bunny vandals have destroyed his car, and he becomes their captive. The Rock Bunny woman, however, is the niece of their chief. They develop a friendship, and the chief—whom they call the Scientist, because he keeps the spirit of science alive among his people—wants the white man to stay with them as his son-in-law.

In this view of the future, which is otherwise bleak, Rice shows that this tribe of Rock Bunnies reveres science and its practitioners. Nice fantasy.

An Urbanite helicopter comes and finds the white man. The white man assumes it is to rescue him. In this, he is quite wrong.

As in other stories in this collection, Rice makes a strong case that altruism—the evolutionary basis of love—is the most important human adaptation. This is the message of both science and religion. As in many other Rice stories, there is also the theme of racism.

Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, story 3. Flow of Blood

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles and Light Apparel (reviewed earlier), Flow of Blood (reviewed here), Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

 

In Flow of Blood, the science is not impossible, as was the case with the two previous stories. It is about a viral fever killing people in Africa, including graduate students trying to stop it. As I write these words, the ebola virus is spreading almost uncontrolled in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Perhaps the most important plot component of this story is racism. The white male grad student was raised to be a racist, until he meets and loves a black female grad student from Africa. He goes with her to study and fight the disease in her birth village. He becomes ill, and she goes back to Kansas to be with him. His family at first rejects her, thinking that Africa is where all viral diseases come from. But they have just suffered another loss: another son has died of a viral fever, but this time it was the American hantavirus. This shared experience of death brings them together.

Medical science is not just about germs and medicine, but about the struggles and perils of real people. And sometimes it takes a medical tragedy to bridge the gulf of racism.

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part three

This novel, which I introduced previously, is a kind of novel only a practicing and experienced scientist could write.

 

The author, Stan Rice, explains all the science in the book, even high-performance liquid chromatography, so that anyone can understand it. He does a particularly good job of explaining evolutionary biology, which is not surprising since he is the author of nonfiction books about evolution such as Encyclopedia of Evolution. One example is when one of the characters explains the evolutionary basis of the human aversion to incest. But what Rea’s stepfather tried to do—rape her—is not biological incest, since she is genetically unrelated to him.

The characters all have a healthy sense of humor—except Earl, of course.  For math teachers Conway and Thurman, the sense of humor is an unstoppable spring. Science offers lots of opportunities for humor, especially the Meeh coefficient and the way Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton used trigonometry to measure the buttocks of an African woman rather than to touch her. The Meeh coefficient, the wacky mathematicians insist, requires the measurement of the surface area of a naked human body. Rice takes his fellow scientists no more seriously than did the British humorist David Lodge, author of novels such as Small World: An Academic Romance. The academic world is a place where you can be weird.

Unlike some of Rice’s other novels, this one does not have a lot of religion in it. But, like probably all Rice’s novels, it addresses the meaning of life. As Rea tells her audience at the end, “A happy life consists of doing ordinary things in a grateful manner.”

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part two.

This novel, which I introduced previously (cover), introduces some very serious issues, even though the author treats them with humor.

First, racism. Rea and her mother are full-blood Cherokee, while Earl is a white racist. (He obviously wasn’t when he first married the mother. Rice leaves this unexplained.) The way Rea describes it, white people see Native Americans as “dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the rez in flyover country.” Can’t get much worse than this, can it?

Yes, it can.

Not only is the racism contemporaneous but extends also into the past. Most white people (as Rea explains, echoing the words of Rice’s nonfiction book Forgotten Landscapes) see Natives as, at least in the past, savage hunter-gatherers. But many tribes, including Rea’s Cherokee tribe, fed large populations from big farms, and lived in big cities—some of them the biggest in the world a few centuries ago. Whites see themselves as not only being but having always been the forefront of civilization.

And there’s more. The adoption of Native children by white parents sounds like a good idea, only it resulted in the erosion of Native cultures, even when the white parents had the best of intentions. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act directly addressed this problem. You can read about it in at least two novels by Barbara Kingsolver.

The second issue is the oppression of women. Earl is not only violent toward Rea but also intends to rape her—and would have, were it not for the intervention of poison ivy. One of the reasons Rea loves Marten is, as she says, “You know how to grab a woman by the part of her body that matters most—her brain.” Rea becomes something of a heroine among women and among Cherokees, although she was just trying to live her life.

The Princess of Kashgar: A Historical Romance about a Neglected People

Historical romances are often set in exotic locations, but not too exotic. One group of people that gets overlooked in fiction, and non-fiction, in the English-speaking world is the Uyghurs of central Asia. Central Asia itself, a land of dusty hills and sheep, gets overlooked except in fiction about Marco Polo. And right now the Uyghurs desperately need our attention and respect. They live primarily in the extreme northwest of China, where the Chinese government is trying to force them to abandon their culture and assimilate into the dominant Han culture. About a decade ago, they were in the news because China had begun re-education camps to this end.

But Stan Rice’s novel The Princess of Kashgar takes place within this neglected Asian culture.

This is the author’s summary of the novel from the Amazon website:

“Arzu is a beautiful young artist from a Uyghur village near Kashgar, on the Silk Road. She is accustomed to being admired, especially by Muhemmet, who leads a revolt against the ruling Mongol Empire. The Mongol warriors kidnap Arzu, planning to take her to Xanadu for Kublai Khan. But she and her mandarin lover Tao escape to a secret paradise in the Altai Mountains, the Valley of the Peach Blossoms. They unintentionally corrupt this paradise. Expelled, they go to Xanadu, where Arzu becomes not only Kublai’s favorite woman but also his close confidante. Only Arzu can keep the Mongols from destroying Kashgar. The Khan then wants Arzu to go back to Kashgar and assassinate Muhemmet. Still unsure if she wishes to join Muhemmet’s rebellion or obey the Khan, she finds Muhemmet and takes a dagger with her into his bedroom. Her assassination attempt fails, and the Mongols slaughter her people. When the Khan dies, Arzu and Tao flee back to the mountain paradise that may or may not accept them.”

 

 

The author has taken on a very difficult literary trope: a paradise hidden in the mountains of Asia. It is almost a cliché, which sounds like the Shangri-La of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. The Shangri-La trope is itself enough reason for some people to put down the novel without even looking at it. But wait. It all depends on how the author handles it. Hilton’s novel was not actually about the people living in Shangri-La; it was about the Europeans who fly into it in an airplane and meet a wise old man, who turns out to himself be European. The native Asian people themselves play no part in Hilton’s novel except they raise the food and provide sex. Hilton’s Lost Horizon therefore falls into the same racist category as H. Rider Haggard’s She and William Henry Hudson’s Green Mansions: a true lost paradise, whether in Hudson’s South America or Haggard’s Africa or Hilton’s Himalayas, must have begun as an outpost of white civilization. It is time for this racist trope to end. The author of Princess of Kashgar has given us an indigenous Asian paradise, based upon Chinese legend.

The novel The Princess of Kashgar has filled an overlooked spot in the map of historical romance.

The Incredible Burden of White Guilt

Every human being who has ever lived (except, Christians claim, Jesus) has sinned. We all know this is true, even though we cannot easily define sin. Every culture group, race, and country consists of people all of whom have sinned, many of them in a spectacularly evil fashion. There is no group from which we cannot find a long list of atrocities, from prehistory to the present.

But whites have committed atrocities way out of proportion to their numerical importance in human history, and in human culture today. The example I will examine now is slavery. Every cultural group has had slaves, primarily from among captives from other social groups. But whites have had more slaves, treated them worse, and continue to honor the tradition of slavery, more than any other group.

Take, for example, black slavery in the southern colonies, later the southern states. (These thoughts have been inspired by reading Geraldine Brooks’s novel Horse.) The main reason that southern whites started buying black slaves was that they had killed most of the Native American slaves. Native slaves were cheaper, but they were mostly dead by about the year 1600. So the whites bought slaves from Africa who were captured from their tribes and transported as cheaply as possible (tied up in their own filth in slave ships) to the South. The shrewd slave traders took into their calculations that many of their captives would die while on board.

The Southerners treated their slaves much more cruelly than was necessary or even profitable. The slaveowner men would force not just work but also sex on their slaves. I remember an exhibit of slave artifacts in a museum in Tulsa (which is the reddest red state, but museums everywhere tend to be progressive) that showed a bill of sale for slaves. A 45-year-old man went for about $50, while a seventeen-year-old girl went for $600. What did the girl have that made her twelve times as valuable? Sexuality, that’s what. Not only was it legal rape, but it was the way that plantation owners could keep up their slave populations without having to import more of them, which was theoretically illegal after 1808.

The owners would force the slaves to do whatever they chose, regardless of the strengths and talents of the slaves. In Brooks’s novel, a very skillful slave horse trainer was forced to work in the fields while inept white trainers allowed a champion racehorse to be injured. If slaves were an investment, southern white enjoyed abusing their investments in a stupid fashion. Few slave owners would permit slaves to learn to read and write; illiterate whites would look down upon even the free blacks who could read.

Not only that, but the white slave owners would take credit for any innovations or improvements in land and property that the slaves came up with.

In some cases, southern whites were nearly crazy with their lust for cruelty. A prime example was the Confederate terrorist William Quantrill, who exulted in cruelty not only against blacks but against any whites he suspected of not being racist enough. He is one of the characters in Brooks’s novel.

Whites would find or create opportunities to insult and injure even free blacks, that is, the few that were allowed to purchase their freedom. Any black person could be arrested and detained until their status as a free black could be established. This may sound uncomfortably like ICE detaining anyone they suspect of being in America illegally, but at least ICE once in a while allows claims of legitimate presence in America to be investigated.

Slaves were considered property of their white owners, but they treated their slaves worse than they would have treated any of their other property, whether mules or saddles. In some cases, they enjoyed torturing their slaves.

White racists try to use the imperfection of blacks as an excuse for past slavery and ongoing cruelty. A vendor of Confederate flags, at a roadside market in Oklahoma, told me that it was the blacks who began enslaving other blacks, that’s how the slave trade got started. But who was the market? When I told him that what he was doing was offensive, he called the sheriff, but I got away before being arrested. No, this was not back in the 1960s. This was about 2015.

I am Cherokee. Some of my ancestors owned slaves. But our collective Native guilt is far less than that of southern whites.

What about northern whites in America? Some northern whites, and some Europeans, profited from black slavery, but the entire southern American culture was based upon it.

I did not contribute to any of this. I am not responsible for the sins of my ancestors. But part of my white privilege has resulted from the oppressions of the past. Maybe nothing can be done about it now, but when I look a person of color in the eye I feel a level of guilt that goes beyond the calculus of legal liability. I cannot simply pretend that it is not there.

White guilt is a heavy burden, but the only people who feel it are those who, like myself, are trying very hard to live in a redemptive fashion and contribute to a fair and just society. I love people of color (with a few individual exceptions) even if they do not, and cannot, know it. In contrast, racists do not feel any guilt.

The burden of white guilt continues today. In Brooks’s novel, the twenty-first-century black protagonist gets shot by police who assumed, at a glance, that he was a criminal. His white friend was very upset by this, but his black friends said he should have expected it. If a black man sees police, he should just assume that he is likely to be shot. I hate to admit that this is true.

The black protagonist from the nineteenth century in Brooks’s novel chose to live in Canada, and explained why: even after emancipation, he could feel white hatred all around him.

I live in France. I am embarrassed to be an American right now, with unabashed racists in charge of the country of which I am a citizen. I am always instantly ready with an apology on behalf of my country. What can I say to the Lebanese woman in my French language class, whose cousin was just killed by an Israeli, or American, bomb? I can see in her eyes that she does not blame me, but I have to go further and assure her of my sympathy, and that I do not support Trump’s war, nor was I or American citizens in general consulted before He chose to start it as if He is God who can decide everyone’s fate.

Race and History, As If You Needed Another Example: Jackson Barnett, part two

Jackson Barnett was an easy-going, illiterate, uneducated Creek Indian who lived near Henryetta, Oklahoma. The federal government forced him to accept an allotment in Drumright, near Cushing. Boy, did they regret doing that, as you will see. Barnett did not go and live on his allotment, because he wanted to be near family and friends in Henryetta. Some whites considered this to be a sign of incompetence, but it just sounds like he wanted to live near the people he knew and loved. My grandfather did not live on his allotment either.

But it turned out Jackson’s land was right over the Cushing oil field, one of the biggest in the world. Cushing still calls itself the oil capital of the world. There was so much oil that it seeped up in Barnett’s land. Jackson Barnett even looked a little bit like Jed Clampett from the Beverly Hillbillies; only, unlike Jed, Jackson did not have to go “shootin’ at some food, and up from the ground come a bubblin’ crude.” It was just bubblin’ by itself.

Suddenly, Jackson was very rich. We are talking millions. Or he would have been, except his county-court appointed guardian Carl O’Hornett controlled the money. And from there things started to get complicated. I am writing from memory, based on my reading of Tanis C. Thorne’s excellent biography, The World’s Richest Indian.

The federal government controlled Native tribes not through the Department of Justice, but the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA, which could also stand for Bossing Indians Around), as if Indians were natural resources, not people. When the BIA started hearing about guardian abuses (as described in the previous essay), they wanted to bring the situation under control. Actually, the federal government also wanted part of the action. So the BIA wanted to prevent O’Hornett from having so much power over Barnett. Eventually, the Department of Justice and Congress got into the fray also.

The state of Oklahoma got into the fray. Kate Barnard was driven—I mean driven—by the purest of motives, which led to her breakdown and premature death. But other members of her staff also had careers to build. And the state legislature got involved also.

Oh, and the Baptists. They talked Barnett into promising them a bunch of money.

Of course, the county where Jackson Barnett lived—Okmulgee County—wanted to keep control over Jackson’s money also.

The feds fought the state which fought the county which fought the Baptists in all possible combinations and in a series of laws and lawsuits that this here poor Injun can’t keep track of. The game piece was flying around like it was a game of stickball.

Of course, there was more. There was the woman Anna Randolph Lowe Sturgis who got a taxi ride down to see Jackson Barnett. She told the driver she was going to marry Jackson Barnett, whom she had never met. Now, Jackson was a nice but rather clueless guy, who either did not recognize Anna as a gold-digger or else thought a gold-digger was as good of a wife as any other woman would be. Anyway, they got married right away, though they had to drive real fast over the state line to Coffeyville, Kansas, to do so. So now, by law, she was entitled to half of Jackson’s worth. The other people mixed up in all this were not pleased. To her credit, Anna stayed with Jackson the rest of his life, even or especially when she bought them a mansion in Los Angeles. She made sure he stayed clean and well dressed and kept his Jed Clampett stubble shaved off.

Of course, nobody could actually say that Barnett was mentally incompetent, because that would make their contracts with him (for example, his marriage to Anna, but also his promise to give the Baptists a lot of money) invalid.

Everybody was upset about everything, except Jackson Barnett, who just rolled in a blanket by the fire and stayed happy. He had what he needed, more than he wanted, and was puzzled that everyone was so upset, especially Anna. After Jackson died, Anna went insane or close to it.

The point of this essay, as of the last, is that racism has no scientific basis. Jackson Barnett did some things—and seemed to enjoy doing them—that made people think he was incompetent to handle his money. But if he had been white, nobody would have questioned his right to do anything he wanted with his money. Examples abound, such as Donald Trump, but let me use a fictional example you might know about: The Great Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. Of all of the empathetic things that Fitzgerald wrote about Gatsby, he never once said Gatsby did not have the right to spend his money as he did. Probably most of the white people who were criticizing Jackson Barnett’s strange expenditures were spending their own money in an even more reckless fashion. Everyone, that is, except Kate Barnard, who died intestate.

Now suppose you wanted to move to another county. Jackson (and Anna) decided to move from Okmulgee to Muskogee County within Oklahoma. But they were almost not allowed to do it, because O’Hornett would not have authority over Barnett outside of Okmulgee County.

Isn’t it just like white people (including most of my ancestors) to think they know what everyone else should do with their money or their lives.

The Jackson Barnett case generated a lot of negative publicity about Oklahoma grafters, because so much money was involved. But there were tens of thousands of lesser Native victims, very few of whom ever had their fortunes restored.

Race and History, as if You Needed Another Example: Jackson Barnett, part one

If there is one thing that conservatives are proud of in America, it is that rich people can do whatever they want with their money, so long as it is not criminal, and then maybe even if it is. But this rule did not apply to people of color. In particular, Native Americans were regarded by the white governments (federal, state, and county levels) as being childishly imbecilic and unable to decide what to do with their own money.

When the federal government sent the Five Tribes (including my tribe, the Cherokees) to what became Indian Territory and later Oklahoma, they guaranteed by treaty that the land belonged to the tribes. For example, a large part of what is now northeastern Oklahoma belonged to the Cherokee Nation.

The Cherokees, like the other Five Tribes, considered that they owned the land as a tribe, not as individual landowners. The white authorities did not like this. It was too communist. They decided they would force the Natives to become capitalists. With the Dawes Act of 1887 and later the Curtis Act of 1898, the Five Tribes were required to have their tribal land divided into individual allotments for each tribal citizen, including minors. This may not sound unreasonable in itself, but it was a solution in search of a problem. So why did the white federal government do it?

They did it for two reasons. First, when they divided up the land into allotments, of which my grandfather Edd Hicks got acreage in section 26N township 17E, the total acreage of the allotments did not add up to the tribal territory. That is, there was land left over—which the government could sell. Second, the government could then control what each tribal citizen did with their land. There were restrictions.

For Natives with one-sixteenth or less blood quantum, there were no restrictions. Edd was about one-quarter, but he registered as one-sixteenth so that he would have no restrictions. For Natives with one-half or more blood quantum, they were restricted from selling the allotment or anything pertaining to it, which would include mineral (oil) rights. Their allotments had to be managed by guardians, as if the Natives were children who did not know how to take care of themselves.

Guardianship, as you might expect, was considered necessary for minor orphans. They really did not know how to manage their land. Guardians were supposed to take care of the land until the orphans grew up, then let them have it. The guardians could charge a reasonable service fee for the work. The national average for guardianship was 3 percent of the value of the property. In Oklahoma, it was on the average of 20 percent and in some cases 80 percent. Meanwhile, the orphans in many cases received no money at all from the sale of oil from their land. The guardians who practiced this method were known as grafters, and in Oklahoma in the early twentieth century this was a term of pride. Sixty thousand Native minors in Oklahoma owned $129 million in property. Some of the guardians had 200 to 300 wards. Two Creek children had land that was worth $250,000. They lived—and died—in an orphanage that was mysteriously dynamited. Then the guardian handled their probate. Guess who got the money.

The crusading reformer Kate Barnard, who ran the Department of Corrections and Charities, and who was one of the few honest people in the Oklahoma government, found out about it during her routine inspection of the living conditions of orphans. She found some Creek Indian children living in a tree, drinking from a stream, and living on handouts. She vividly described having to take scissors and cut out matted filth from their hair. These kids were millionaires, but they didn’t know it because their guardian, who had sixty other wards, did not tell them. He just kept the oil money. Kate spent the last part of her life trying to bring the grafters to justice. While she had been popular for her crusades to improve conditions in orphanages and prisons, she met with hatred from Oklahoma and county governments when she tried to rescue the Native orphans from grafters. This broke her health and she died without having finished her work. You can read all about it in the wonderful new biography by Connie Cronley (A Life on Fire: Oklahoma’s Kate Barnard).

In other cases, oil executives hired people to kidnap the minors and take them someplace where no one would recognize them. It was not, as far as I have heard, violent kidnapping. According to Cronley’s book, one of the oil executives who did this was Thomas Gilcrease, best known as the benefactor of the museum that bears his name in Tulsa. It is hard to, even today, think of any name more revered in Tulsa even by progressives than that of Thomas Gilcrease. But he hired someone to take a rich Creek orphan to England and get him to sign his oil rights to Gilcrease. More about Gilcrease in a later essay.

But it was not long before the federal, state, and local governments figured out that all they had to do was declare adult Natives to be mentally incapacitated in order to appoint guardians for them, who would decide what to do with the land. This was fairly easy to do, since state and county officials all believed that all Natives, even adults who were successfully running their farms, were mentally incapacitated. If Edd, who was smart enough to be on school boards and could raise any crop and any kind of livestock, would have been deemed incompetent if his land had oil on it.

This is the plot of the 1949 movie Tulsa (“the lusty, brawling saga of a city of adventure”), starring Susan Hayward, Robert Preston, and Chill Wills. Jim Redbird, the rightful Muskogee owner of oil land, played by Pedro Armendáriz, was declared mentally incompetent by a judge. When he looked at the oil extraction and cracking on his land, for which he was receiving no money, and which spilled flammable pollution all over the ground, he touched a cigar to the hydrocarbons and burned up the oil rigs. This is one of the few early movies that shows Natives fighting back against white oppression. Perhaps oblivious to the fact that this movie was showing white Oklahomans engaging in criminal acts, Tulsans welcomed Hayward and Preston to their city and celebrated the opening of the movie. Tulsa grew as “the miracle city” directly because of the discovery of oil, and almost all of its early twentieth century philanthropists were oil men. To what extent the most famous of them might have profited from illegal acquisitions from the Muskogee Creek tribe, and to what extent the artistic culture of Tulsa is still dependent on that money (aside from Gilcrease), is something that few people, if anybody, knows anymore.

And this is exactly what happened to a Creek Native named Jackson Barnett. The reason this essay is on this blog is that racism has no scientific basis. See part two, to be posted soon.

The Biggest City in the World You Never Heard About: Cahokia

It is the biggest city that you never heard about. It may well have been the biggest city in the world somewhere between 1000 and 1250. With more than ten thousand inhabitants, this city was at least as large as London at the same time. Why, then, have you never heard about it?

The city today is called Cahokia, in southern Illinois. All that remains of it are large earthen mounds built by Native Americans, one basket of soil at a time, in which bones and artifacts were buried. Warrior-priests lived in wooden structures on the flat mound tops. For square miles around the main mound (now called Monks Mound), workers (slaves?) lived in huts and grew vast fields of maize (corn, unknown at the time outside America) and other crops. Except for the lack of brick and stone and cathedrals, it might have looked like a medieval English landscape. The main urban complex covered 1.8 square kilometers but associated areas covered many more square kilometers. All around Monks Mound, even several miles toward the west, there are other mounds, many of them large, though Monks Mound is the largest.

 

I visited Cahokia in June, 2023, and have posted a video about it [https://youtu.be/cqUPn9cWFkk ].

We do not know who these people were. They left no writing for us to even try to decipher. We do not know what language they spoke or what they called their city or themselves. Based on artistic similarities in pottery, archaeologists have concluded that the Wichita and Caddo tribes are the physical descendants of the mound builders, although these modern tribes have no tradition or memory of a vast civilization.

Cahokia was the center of a small empire. About five other empires were centered around similar mound-cities in North America, each a separate empire (we think). I will write about one other mound city, Spiro, in a later blog essay.

The Cahokia empire was connected to the other empires by a vast trade network that covered most of the eastern deciduous forest. The trails were of dirt well pressed by thousands of feet. Trade goods were carried by hand, as there were no horses, oxen, or wheels. There was also extensive trade by boat. Cahokia was within sight of the Mississippi River, which is why the culture is called the Mississippian Culture. Eight hundred years ago, the urban center was on the east bank, which today is an economically depressed area and includes East St. Louis. Today, St. Louis on the west bank fills the economic role that Cahokia had eight hundred years ago. Then as now, the Mississippi carried commercial shipping. Today, freeways (of which St. Louis has numerous large ones) have replaced trails.

Trade goods were usually high-value decorative items. As far as we know, food was not usually transported, since the amount needed would weigh too much. Most of the food was corn, beans, and squash, with venison and “wild” nuts for protein. Remains of copper, shell, and sandstone artifacts have been found, and it is possible that perishable items such as clothes and blankets may have been imported. The shells came from the Gulf of Mexico. The copper came from the Great Lakes area, and some of it was reshaped into new artifacts in a copper workshop at Cahokia. Pipe bowls were made from a soft light brown clay similar to that found today in the vicinity of Pipestone, Minnesota. Though the Mississippian culture did not extend into Mexico, there was some trade with the Natives we collectively call “the Aztecs.”

Nobody knows why the Mississippian civilization collapsed. There was apparently a major drought about 1300, but this might not have by itself caused food production to collapse. There was undoubtedly soil erosion caused by the intensive agriculture needed to feed the population, although this would also probably have not caused the collapse. Most likely, it was these two factors (and others?) working together.

You cannot see the Mississippi River today from even the top of Monks Mound, accessible by a modern stairway. The view of the river is not blocked by modern buildings. It is blocked by trees such as oak and elm which have grown back since European and white American occupation. Native Americans cut down small trees and used fire to clear away saplings and undergrowth. The Natives transformed the landscape not only by creating urban centers and by agriculture, but also by fire.

Why have you never heard of the Mississippian civilization? This is the important question. Everyone has heard of the Mayans (the contemporaries of the Mississippians), the Aztecs, and the Incas. But popular racist images show Native Americans north of Mexico as being small populations of hunters and gatherers, leaving scarcely a footprint as they gathered berries and nuts and hunted deer. The reason this image is racist is that it justifies the conquest of North American tribes, who were not using the land to its full capacity, by civilized Europeans who transformed the landscape into a fruited plain with whitewashed cities, a process popularly called Manifest Destiny. What is sometimes called “revisionist history” proclaims the facts about the advanced Native American cultures. But this new view of history is attacked and maligned by conservative state legislatures. There is even a law in Oklahoma that forbids the teaching of any history or sociology that would embarrass white Americans or make them feel inferior.

The conservative racist (these are not necessarily the same things) viewpoint has been triumphant, because if you ask Americans about major precolumbian urban centers north of Mexico, very few will know anything about it. The myth of the savage, vanishing Red Man persists.