A Turtle Island Fugue
On Mounds, Languages, Histories, and Becoming Native to a Land
i. Nʋnih Waiya
In the far southwest corner of the Mississippi county in which my people lived for close to two hundred years there are two dramatic rises of the earth beside a bald cypress filled river bottom, about a mile distant from one another. Nʋnih Waiya, a Choctaw name meaning something like “leaning hill,” is the name of the human-built mound, while the other mound—more aptly in English a “hill”—is evidently natural, though very odd if not utterly unique, in my experience of the bottomlands of the South anyway, rising as it does straight from the swampy bottomland. Not only that, but there is a cave, a straight sloping descent of a passageway, yawning wide open on one end of the hill. You can stand in the mouth and see the swelling cypress trunks and knobby knees mere feet away. I’ve never been more than a few steps down, for as you might guess water shows up fast most times of the year. Only during a dry autumn can the full extent of the cave be plumbed without plunging into dark waters within.
Down the braided swampy stream is the human-built mound, the only one (that I know of anyway) for miles around, standing out from the main geographical arc of Mississippian culture (and of the progenitor cultures to the Mississippian, this mound probably itself dating to the Woodland period) mounds and mound complexes. I’ve little doubt that it was built there because of its proximity to the cave mound—caves were clearly significant places to pre-Columbian Southern peoples, as they were, and are, to so many peoples around the world. To have a cave at all on the Coastal Plain is in itself exceptional; there are only a handful in the entire state of Mississippi, and none with so dramatic a setting (there is at least one other—Cat Den Cave—that has a view of bottomlands, but from a low bluff above a creek, not hard against the swamp).
In the Choctaw origin stories that were recorded in “historical” times, Nʋnih Waiya always features as a key locus, though the stories vary in how that function is described. In some, the Chahta people emerge, fully formed by the Creator, out of the cave, their eyes falling on a prime piece of bottomland right away, with the more hospitable for human settlement gentle upland right behind them. In other stories, the people migrate from the West in the distant past and come to stop at the Nʋnih Waiya mound (probably meaning the human-built one, though there is clearly slippage between the two mounds in stories and ritual observance). Either way, these two mounds (somehow akin, perhaps, to the Hero Twins so pervasive in native Southern myth) have long been key sites of memory and meaning for the Choctaw. In my lifetime they have seen varying degrees of attention and neglect, the state park that once existed there gradually crumbling away, literally, underfunded and overlooked. In recent years the site—the human-built mound at least, I am not sure what the status of the cave-mound is at present—was transferred to the ownership of the Mississippi Band of Choctaws, though it remains fairly obscure and occasionally abused, few travelers or pilgrims making their way there today outside of a few special annual occasions.
I remember once as a child going out there with my mom and brother—my maternal grandparents lived not too far from the site—back when it was still a state park, though the boardwalk through the bald cypress swamp was collapsing and the stairs up the mound were in rough shape. There was still a staffed park office, but when we looked inside to ask for additional information we saw the park ranger, the lone employee on site, was sound asleep, and I do mean sound. Didn’t stir, and we didn’t have the heart to wake him. The mound site now has neither awake nor somnolent staff, standing alone and quiet, sleeping, the tannin waters lapping against the cypress knees, dreaming in the humid air.
ii. tongues and hands, native and becoming native
Lately I’ve started dipping, pretty casually really, into some indigenous American languages, starting with a still widely spoken Maya tongue, but also working to build some familiarity with the languages that were once spoken all across the parts of the South in which I have lived and which have fundamentally formed me, languages that are now limited to a few small pockets here and there east of the Mississippi (and not much more territory west of it): Cherokee, Mvskoke Creek, Choctaw.
While there has always been a suggestion on one side of my family that we have some Choctaw ancestry—and certainly on my mother’s side of the family our phenotypical expression would suggest as much—there’s no proof, with no such evidence coming up from my own genetic ancestry tracing, while much of my maternal ancestry’s documentation runs out around the turn of the twentieth century. Genetic ancestry testing doesn’t always turn up everything, of course, particularly for under-represented groups, but even if there is truth to that family lore, any such direct genetic connections with indigenous peoples would have been long ago submerged. Yet more significant, and much more verifiable, are the ways in which people along my ancestral line, like that of many rural Southerners, white, black, or indigenous, carried on lifeways with very deep roots indeed in this landscape, lifeways either passed on through hook or crook from native peoples or arrived at convergently, through a simultaneity of attitude, available resources, and the illiquid input of the land itself and its plethora of non-human inhabitants and energies. For a long time for many poor to middling Southerners, the ideal life was the same as it had been for the past two or three thousand years here: some farming here, a little gathering there, and plenty of fishing and hunting to keep the larders stocked. You aimed at living just a little piece from your neighbor, close enough for folks to lend a hand when necessary, but far enough apart for some breathing space—pretty much the same way people have been living here for a very long time. Maybe the scale and the embrace of our ecosystems and our capacious landscape lend themselves to such distribution, to an easing into the folds and rises of the land.
Well. Going back to native languages—it’s possible, albeit very remotely so, that I have a biological genetic connection, to Choctaw, but none whatsoever to Cherokee or Creek. The connection that I do have is one of having been inhabited by the remnants of those tongues for my entire life, just as is anyone really anywhere in America who pays the least bit of attention to the toponyms all around us, draping over the land and coursing down its watercourses and wrapping around its political units. This is especially true in Mississippi—few states have such a density of toponyms drawn from indigenous languages, foremost Choctaw (even outside of the traditional historical heartland of east-central Mississippi, stretching down towards the Gulf Coast and the River in the west). I am far from objective, but I have always thought the place-names of my native land some of the loveliest in any language. Even mutated through transfer into English speakers’ mouths, they flow on the tongue and drip with the feel of the rivers and bottomlands and sandhills.
Set of Mississippi Choctaw songs and dances, performed by Prentis Jackson, Ida May Frazier, Henry Joe, and Ouie Joe, at the Bogue Chitto School in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1965 (Smithsonian, Howard Sound Recording 15)
And yet. I am thirty eight years old now, will be thirty nine this fall Lord willing, and most of my life has passed within a geographic zone that does not really have a name, not one that I’ve been able to find anyway, but which almost exactly overlaps the Muscogean language family’s area of likely origin and certainly presence over the last thousand years or two. This is not news to me, of course, and to some extent I’ve been vaguely or explicitly aware of this history—and present, it is not just history—my entire life. But I do not recall ever thinking until very recently that it would be interesting, or even possible, to learn Choctaw or Creek or Yuchi, despite my trenchant from my teenage years on for “collecting” languages and just generally enjoying the joys of other tongues’ grammars and syntax and vocabularies (mind you, I am not very good at language acquisition, I am no savant, would that I were!). There are many reasons for this oversight on my part, some of them I think quite legitimate, others due to my own ignorance at the time, or, perhaps better, lack of sufficient imagination.
I now regret that lack of imagination on my part, realizing that like so many people of my intellectual and cultural bent growing up in rural, often frankly run-down and out-of-luck places, I failed to see (or hear) what was right in front of me, my eyes and ears fixed on more distant places and histories and landscapes. I now wish that as a teenager I’d have tried at least to learn some Choctaw, from native speakers even, something that would have been if not easy certainly possible, to have paid more attention to the physical and linguistic traces of deeper pasts and obscured presents that were there in front of me the whole time. I wish I’d learned more from my elderly kin, even the things—especially the things—that I registered as marks of poverty: hauling out road-killed animals to salvage meat and skin, hunting squirrels and possums for meat to store up in the freezer, which roots and leaves and flowers were good for different things, how to track a coyote or a deer. I learned how to shoot a gun, went hunting a couple times, know how to fish, but that’s about it. And now it’s too late to learn, my great-grandparents are long gone from this mortal life, and my grandparents almost all passed away.
Languages and practices have a lot in common of course, twining together. They both will tend to lie over and shape for us the land itself, repositories of not just knowledge but of ways of being and sensing and feeling. I have found, in my very cursory studies thus far, that the native languages of the South connect, if that’s the right word, with this place more readily than English, for the simple reason that they evolved within this landscape and its flora and fauna. The stories and myths and legends—I doubt any single word quite captures the texture of such things—of Southern native peoples speak directly to the landscapes we still inhabit, to the animals and plants we still encounter (or can if we take the trouble). The iconography and architecture of our fore-bearers on the land speaks in a way nothing else really quite can, not yet anyway. It is an open question whether we’ll find a way to really listen, and what that could mean for our cultural, ecological, personal futures.
iii. the dead and the distant
The major Mississippian culture site of Moundville, just outside of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was the center of a major chieftancy for some period of time, decades or even centuries, a large complex of impressive mounds and plazas being built up alongside the Big Black Warrior River. Like many such chieftancy centers it was eventually abandoned for reasons that remain opaque, though I suspect that most such abandonments were the result of tribute-paying people in the vicinity getting tired of centralized authority and gently or vigorously giving it the shove. Regardless, what is really striking about the site is that long after its abandonment as a place of residence and seat of government, people from the surrounding lands of what is now central Alabama and Mississippi kept coming back to the place. They returned in order, primarily, to bury their dead, perhaps with an additional ritual aspect present as well.
Long after the last chieftancy had disappeared, locked away below a future archeological layer of ash, local peoples kept the human landscape of the place alive, through the bearing and burial of their cherished dead. It continued to mean something, to pass on that meaning to the people who came and went with the flow of the seasons.
Nʋnih Waiya too became in time a place not unlike Moundville, standing off at the edge of the Pearl River bottomlands, away from the Choctaw historical heartland, its original builders effectively lost to time, in their details anyway. It was no more a place of residence, but something more like a place of pilgrimage, a site of memory at a distance, a place to go for prayer perhaps, for annual rites. Perhaps it was this distancing, this act of occlusion, that gave the place its power as much as anything else.
Maybe we in the contemporary South—with analogues everywhere, our particularities are ours but the issues of belonging, indigeneity, relationship, and so on are universal—are in a similar position. A lot is lost, forever lost, and there is no bringing it back, not in its fully realized form as it once was. The sins of our fathers cannot be dislodged, not really. But neither are they final or unalterable. And what was lost can remain present, in a way, as a site of memory and presence, an influence from afar as it were. Acts of return and recovery can shape not just the place to which one returns—and it might well be somewhere you’ve never actually been, that didn’t even fully exist until you traced your way back to it—but also the home waiting at the other end of the journey, and the self that makes the passage.