Chadwick Allen’s most recent monograph is another excellent offering by the University of Minnesota Press’s Indigenous Americas series edited by Robert Warrior. This series includes several influential theoretical texts in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS). Earthworks Rising is the winner of the Beatrice Medicine Award from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures and the Thomas J. Lyon Award from the Western Literature Association.

Earthworks Rising continues a line of inquiry Allen introduced in Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (2012)—specifically, the study of Indigenous earthworks as “modes of land-writing” (p. 27). The book also represents the culmination of more than a decade of collaboration on earthworks research throughout North America with writer LeAnne Howe and playwright Monique Mojica.

From the book’s outset, Allen engages with archaeological study of earthworks, sometimes critiquing it and sometimes finding kinship with it. Allen’s approach centers Indigenous theory, such as Howe’s vision of “embodied tribalography” (p. 29), which describes a reciprocal relationship between humans and land. This concept emerges over a series of essays published between 2013 and 2015; in “Embodied Tribalography: Mound Building, Ball Games, and Native Endurance in the Southeast” (Studies in American Indian Literature 26[2]:75–93, 2014), Howe (2014:76) “[links] Southeastern Native architects who emplotted the land with meaning” to various examples of contemporary cultural movements. For Allen, embodied tribalography is a way to understand “ongoing Indigenous relationships to ancient earthworks and to enduring earthworks principles” (p. 30).

Allen first encountered mound research in an undergraduate archaeology classroom in the mid-1980s. He notes that he often found the “technical details” of the articles he read “numbing” (p. 39), and he reflects on his discomfort with images he occasionally encountered of “disinterred [Indigenous] dead” (p. 42). His interest in archaeology evolved when he realized it could be a way to approach literary research—specifically, analysis of the earthworks poetry in Blood Run (2006) by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. This shift occurred after Allen attended a lecture by William Romain about his analyses of Ohio earthworks using lidar. Allen describes how “[rereading] Hedge Coke’s sequence through the lens of aerial-based lidar imaging reoriented [his] thinking,” leading him to “‘map’ the structures undergirding the interrelated poems of Blood Run: counting stanzas, lines, words, and syllables, diagramming mathematical relationships and complex alignments within and across the book’s multiple sequences” (p. 48). Allen’s completed analysis of Blood Run in Earthworks Rising suggests a “thematic geometry” (p. 55); this approach is not entirely anomalous when considering the significance of scansion—the method for determining rhythm through the measurement of stressed and unstressed syllables—within formal poetics, but an Indigenous-centered mathematical reading inspired by what Allen learned from lidar imaging of mounds offers a new and illuminating way of thinking about structural poetic analysis.

Similarly, the organization of Earthworks Rising is a revelation: “three parts that evoke the three-worlds theory of mound-building cultures—an above world, a surface world, and a below world—and that correspond with three major descriptive categories for Indigenous earthworks: effigy mounds, platform mounds, and burial mounds” (p. 31). Alongside earthwork-structured literary analyses, Allen includes codas and personal anecdotes that speak to his own “embodied encounters” (p. 32) with earthworks, often as part of his collaborative research with Howe and Mojica, whose creative processes he aligns “with other Indigenous intellectuals … who advocate approaching research as an operation of ceremony” and with “a growing cadre of Indigenous archaeologists” (p. 61) including Joe Watkins.

In addition to critical analyses of literary texts by Hedge Coke, Howe, Mojica, and Alice Walker in the first chapter of “Part I. Effigies // Crossing Worlds // Above and Below,” Allen explores sculptor Jimmie Durham’s engagement with Ohio’s Great Serpent Mound in the second chapter of part I. “Part II. Platforms // Networking Systems // Cardinal Directions” contains one chapter of analysis focused on Phillip Carroll Morgan’s novel Anompolichi: The Wordmaster (2014) set at the end of the fourteenth century in a North American mound-building community. Allen reads Morgan’s novel alongside archaeologist Timothy Pauketat’s Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (2009) because he sees both books as teaching contemporary readers “how to see the complex materiality and scale of mound cities and thus how to perceive the potential of this materiality to make meaning and create significance” (p. 168). “Part III. Burials // Gathering Generations // Center” offers two chapters of analysis, the first of which puts stunning digital photo-collages of burial mounds by Alyssa Hinton into conversation with Hedge Coke’s Blood Run. The second chapter of part III includes analyses of Lanford Wilson’s play The Mound Builders and Howe’s novel Shell Shaker (2001), ultimately making the case that mounds “not only serve as nodes within networked systems, but also as points where multiple systems meet and interact” (p. 322). Beyond these texts, Allen explores contemporary Indigenous film, Cherokee oral tradition, and even a story from the horror pulp magazine Weird Tales. In short, the multiplicity of literary and artistic genres juxtaposed in Earthworks Rising is as complex and interesting as is the structure of the book itself. Allen concludes his study with a narrative about the contemporary “reactivation of our mound-building cultures” (p. 334), such as the mound at Oklahoma City’s First Americans Museum, aligned with solar movements during the solstices.

Earthworks Rising is not an archaeological study; rather, it is an approach to thinking about Indigenous earthworks as textual forms that demonstrates a perspective informed simultaneously by historical and contemporary archaeological research and Indigenous-centered methodologies. Allen’s work compellingly underscores the possibilities of interdisciplinarity, demonstrating how seemingly disparate research agendas in different kinds of scholarship might be enhanced and even transformed by comparative engagement.