vol. 5 IKL #4
Greetings,
Earlier this week, I took a small ferry across the nation’s most fabled river, embarking at an obscure little town in western Wisconsin, and disembarking in a vast cornfield bordering the river’s shore, in the northeastern corner of Iowa.
While sailing across the wide water, a fellow ferry passenger asked me if I was headed across to see the Field of Dreams, a baseball diamond cut into a cornfield, made famous by the eponymous movie, starring a young Kevin Costner.
It’s considered “sacred land”, I was informed. And not only that, but the pizza and beer, not to mention the burgers, were great at this little brew pub nearby…
But sadly, no. I wasn’t en route for the Field of Dreams. Had I known, I might have planned better, baseball nut that I am.
Instead, I was headed to another so-called “sacred land”, this one set aside by the National Park Service.
Once I’d driven the few dirt road miles out of the rows of early corn, where plenty of deer were cautiously munching, I headed north, increasing ever-more in elevation with each town I passed, sandstone bluffs rising to my left, and the shockingly wide Mississippi River sinking lower to my right.
Passing by small homes shadowed by the bluffs where they were, wedged between the shore’s flood plain and the railroad tracks, I travelled northward until a small sign directed me west; at last, there was my destination, the Effigy Mounds National Monument, set atop the highest bluff, not far from the conjunction of the southeastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin borders.
The monument is comprised of several dozen earthen mounds constructed in the shapes of birds and bears, dating back to pre-Roman Empire times. They are thought to have been both burial sites as well as functional structures for rites and rituals for the indigenous peoples along the Great River. These particular mounds have been federally preserved because they are among only a handful of mounds known to remain in the United States that were fashioned in the shape of something other than simple earthen bulwarks.
Here, the mounds depict a mamma bear leading a trail of her “marching” cubs through the woods. There are also lone bears and a few eagles, too, scattered throughout the local area.
The monument’s ranger station is situated where there once were about 70 more such effigy mounds; the ranger on duty I spoke with said they were destroyed as generations of farmers who lived there before the Parks Service took it over, plowed, planted, and built over them.
Pre-colonization of this continent, she told me, there had been millions of these mounds all across the continent. There are still thousands of burial mounds left, usually maintained by state and local parks departments.
Millions? I mean, that seems a tad like overstatement.
Yup, she said. Millions. And, she assured me, the choice to build the ranger station where it was at the foot of the bluff had amounted to the place least egregious to build among so many mounds in the region, given that the land’s sacredness had already been disrupted.
I thought about this as I ascended the trail.
What makes land sacred? Is it where we play, such as in the Field of Dreams? Is it where we plant, such as the land the Scandinavian trolls “discovered”, and which I wrote about last week? Is it where we bury our dead?
Why can’t sacred be wherever we are and upon whatever we are doing? After all, why isn’t where we actually live holy and important?
All land is sacred, I believe.
Just because generations raped the land doesn’t mean it has lost its sacredness. The defiled land is no less precious than it was before we cordoned it off as separate from other lands. It just needs to be reconsecrated, reconsidered, re-spected.
Land is land. Only we impose borders upon it, and that is so we can use it to separate not just it, but us, from each other — and from the land.
We are all of the land. We all will return to the land, unless we shoot ourselves into space and die there. But the dust of us in time, falls back to earth.
And, if you enjoyed reading this, you might enjoy some other musings I’ve had over time about the way we disregard our relationship to the land:
Peace,
Whitney