Vital earth/vibrant earthworks/living earthworks vocabularies

For thousands of years, mounds, embankments, and other earthworks were dreamed, planned, and built; occupied, used, and maintained; abandoned, reoccupied, and reused; redreamed, rebuilt, and repurposed by Indigenous peoples living and traveling along the rivers and other waterways that connect the eastern half of the North American continent into a vast network – from what is now Louisiana in the south to what is now Ontario in the north. During that long tenure, mounds, embankments, and other earthworks were also studied, contemplated, and discussed by Indigenous intellectuals, by political and spiritual leaders, by builders, users, and ordinary citizens. Not only empirical research but theoretical reflection was necessarily grounded in Indigenous languages and communities, conducted through Indigenous methodologies. For the past 200 years, however, energy devoted to understanding the complexity of these built environments and their multiple potential meanings and uses has been organised by predominantly non-Native archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians, both amateur and professional, and within predominantly non-Native languages, epistemologies, and systems of ethics. In this way, like so much of Indigenous life and culture, earthworks research has been disconnected from the foundations of Indigenous inquiry. The majority of this non-Native research has restricted its investigations to questions about the physical construction of earthworks within specific chronologies (these researchers repeatedly ask not only who built the mounds, but how they were built, when, and whether within briefer or longer periods of time) and to questions about the siting of earthworks within specific geographies (where they were built, but also why they were built in certain ways at certain times and in certain locations). The organisation and control of this work by non-Native researchers and institutions, moreover, has been – and continues to be – bolstered by the colonial dislocations and the often forced relocations of the descendants of the Indigenous peoples who built the mounds. Although the scholarly fields of archaeology, anthropology, and history have begun to expand the scope of their interests and the range of their interlocutors, including an increased attention to consulting with Indigenous communities, relatively little of this research has been devoted to understanding – or imagining – the effects of earthworks on people: those who came together to plan and build individual mounds or embankments or to construct multi-structure complexes and expansive cities; those who lived among earthworks permanently or seasonally; those who visited sites, centres, and cities for trade or special events; those who embarked on sacred 16