ABSTRACT
Then thought I, “This must be the grave of one
Who ranked among the warriors of the
Wilderness—And when he saw his country
Doomed, his tribe oerthrown, and his strong arm
Grown weak before his pale-faced foes
And when he knew his hour was come in which his soul
Must leave the form it once had moved to noble
Deeds, and travel to the hunting-grounds, where erst
His fathers went, he here had dug his grave
And singing wild his death-song to the wind
Sunk down and died!”
—John Rollin Ridge, “An Indian Grave” (1847)
Indian burial mounds provide critical insights into pre-Columbian Indigenous ecologies. Their role as tourist sites, though, remains less well understood despite considerable scholarship on how tourist sites centered on Indigenous history affect prevailing assumptions about American Indians. This chapter examines a burial mound in Florence, Alabama, and its adjacent museum. We show how the mound's treatment as an exotic southern attraction derived from popular nineteenth-century mound-building myths, thereby naturalizing the premise that Indigenous people were removable. Facilitated by its uncertain ties to a recognized modern tribal Nation—Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee—the mound became an ideal site for visitors of all backgrounds to project their racialized fantasies about Indigeneity and for grave robbers to see it as a place to buy arrowheads and other relics. The chapter concludes by showing how the museum's recent programming has helped it begin to address the region's systemic racism by changing public memory.
