In Whose Ruins

February 14, 2022
Historian Puglionesi (Common Phantoms) examines how “Americans extracted literal power from the landscape and symbolic power from history” in this thought-provoking study of four geographical sites whose exploitation by white settlers helped create a mythology legitimizing their dominion over the country and its Indigenous inhabitants. In the early 19th century, Virginia’s Grave Creek Mound archaeological site emerged not only as a tourist attraction but as a justification for Indian removal; the size and sophistication of the structure was supposedly beyond the capabilities of modern Native Americans and thus the work of a “lost race” whose rightful heirs were European settlers. Puglionesi also compares the decline of northwestern Pennsylvania’s oil boomtowns in the 20th century to the displacement of Haudenosaunee tribes and details how, in the debate over the construction of a hydroelectric dam in northern Maryland in the 1920s, locals began to view ancient petroglyphs carved onto rocks above the Susquehanna River as “a warning about their own future.” Puglionesi writes lucidly and packs the narrative full of intriguing minutiae, though the thrust of her argument occasionally gets lost. Still, this is a stimulating look at the erasure and endurance of Native American culture. Illus. Agent: Veronica Goldstein, Fletcher & Co.

Starred review from February 1, 2022
A novel reading of American history as an endless chain of ideologically sanctioned extractions from the land. The original inhabitants of America were presented a moral dilemma by the newcomers who wanted their land: They were both impediment and reproach, objects of admiration and enemies. One of Puglionesi's players in this vigorous, constantly revealing study is Henry Schoolcraft (1793-1864), who coined the name of the lake in Minnesota where the Mississippi River originates, Itasca, "splicing the Latin words veritas and caput to mean true source." But Latin wouldn't do, and so Schoolcraft invented a putatively Ojibwe myth about a "chaste Indian maiden" of that name, a yarn that sometimes turns up in books today. Other stories abounded, all of which the author recounts engagingly. In what is now West Virginia, the owners of property containing ancient Indigenous mounds argued that they couldn't possibly have been built by the ancestors of the people whose lands they conquered and therefore had to be Celtic or Roman--and therefore rightfully belonging to Europeans. Such mounds were looted for the treasures they supposedly contained, and while the diggers came away disappointed, the excavations gave Joseph Smith an idea for a story about buried tablets, "the spiritual treasure of the book of Mormon." From the moment Americans landed in the West, they began collecting Native arts even as they ravaged the lands in the quest for minerals--a process that only accelerated in the nuclear age, with its need for uranium. All the while, Puglionesi writes, spiritualists were cooking up tales about Indigenous ghosts, borrowed by speculators and prospectors who claimed that those ghosts were guiding them to the oil fields of Pennsylvania and New York; one claimed that he had "Indian spirits working 'mechanically' on his body while white 'wisdom spirits' enlightened his soul." Page after page, Puglionesi finds some strange twist on history used to justify theft and genocide, and it makes for a fascinating tale. A first-rate work of historical research and storytelling.

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Starred review from March 1, 2022
The ravages of Manifest Destiny constitute much of America's story. This narrative history from poet, professor, and scholar Puglionesi delves into how white settlers found resources on Native land and overtook it for capitalistic gain, focusing on four geographic areas. The author first discusses how whites overtook the Indigenous peoples of Virginia by spinning a myth that a ""lost [white] race"" built burial mounds filled with treasure; local tribes surely killed this race, the settlers' tale went. The dispossession of Native peoples from their relationship to their land becomes a theme that Puglionesi explores through the remaining three sections of the book. In Pennsylvania, tribal people used the oil found on their land in careful ways, until white people again propagated the lost-race myth and overtook the oil-rich fields. Damming rivers for power required the removal of ancient petroglyphs from the Susquehanna River, obliterating the ways that Native people had coexisted with the river. The book's final section moves to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and others were falling in love with local Native culture while creating the atom bomb and testing it on Native land. Dense with research, Puglionesi's book ought to be widely studied.

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