ABSTRACT
In his “Introduction” to the 2003 republication of Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs’s compelling but enigmatic drama The Cherokee Night, first performed in 1932, American Indian studies scholar Jace Weaver notes that, although a primary setting for Riggs’s play, “the high mound outside of Claremore, Oklahoma,” is a “natural” feature of the landscape, “it feels as haunted and strange as an ancient burial ground” (107). Indeed, in this chapter I argue that Riggs exploits the fortuitous naming of this “natural formation of rock and shale,” Claremore Mound, as a vehicle in his Indigenous modernist play for evoking the burial mounds and other earthworks constructed, maintained, and contemplated for thousands of years in the Southeastern homelands of the Cherokee and other American Indian nations removed to Oklahoma in the 1830s. Burial mounds and other Southeastern earthworks can be understood as markers of highly structured civilizations and as locations of great social and spiritual power, but also as portals that enable contact—and sometimes passage—between worlds. In this sense, earthworks can be understood as multimodal forms of Indigenous technology. Although Riggs’s post-Removal characters no longer live among their ancient burials or other earthen structures, the presence of Claremore Mound, which looms behind the play’s “anguished” and “traumatic” story action in all seven scenes, is highly evocative of the ongoing presence of a point of access to the Indigenous past despite the Cherokees’ removal to Oklahoma and other changes. Riggs stages Claremore Mound as a formation that is not actually a mound but simultaneously is a mound, suggesting the multiplicity of roles played by both his contemporary Indigenous characters and the new lands to which they struggle to belong.
