A group of giant mounds built by Native Americans thousands of years ago just became the US' newest

[wnylib]

13. My husband and I toured the mounds on our own when we lived in Ohio.

We lived in Cleveland, but I was always interested in anthropology and archaeology, so I took out some books from the library about the Hopewell mounds and we headed south toward Chillicothe with a Rand McNally Road Atlas (long before GPS).

We spent a week driving around the state, from Moundsville to the Serpent Mound. Some people go to Vegas, Hawaii, or Europe for vacation, but that was one of my most enjoyable vacation weeks because it involved something I was enthusiastic about.

One thing that I learned from the books that we took with us was that the presence of the mounds became a source of anti Native racism when European Americans began settling the area. White Europeans did not believe that Native American "savages" could have built anything so sophisticated. So they developed a story to explain the mounds. Their story was that a sophisticated, advanced civilization had preceded Native Americans in North America. Then savages arrived from somewhere and wiped wiped out the advanced people. Therefore, White settlers did not owe Native people any respect and were free to take their lands just as they must have taken land from the advanced people before them.