Continued from Alt-history Part 1: The mound builder myth and ethnic cleansing.

The myth lives on

The mound builder myth justified the ethnic cleansing of the 1800s. It was seemingly put to rest in 1894 just as Native Americans were contained on reservations.

But the myth wasn’t dead. It festered in white corners of America. Thru the 1950s, one could find the “Lost Race of the Mound Builders” in county histories. Now the stories have returned, finding new life with the Nazis, neo-Nazis, alt-right, and other white supremacists.

In the early twentieth century, the various theories received a serious academic label, hyperdiffusionism, but a racist agenda was at their roots. Cultural achievements, such as pyramids, astronomical calendars, and evidence of complex civilizations in the New World were invariably attributed to Old World sources; almost never the reverse.

In 1937, German Nazi Edmund Kiss suggested that the incredible ruins at Tiwanaku, Bolivia were actually built by Europeans. He was associated with the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society (also called the Ahnenerbe), a pseudo-academic organization founded by Heinrich Himmler to investigate and construct the history of the Aryan race. They explored, for example, the use of the swastika in various past cultures. They later expanded their research to include infamous medical experiments on live humans.

The ancient ruins at Tiwanaku, Bolivia. Evo Morales, the first indigenous head of state in the Americas in 500 years, held his inauguration here.

As America turns brown, history turns white

The modern phase of the mound builder myth began in earnest in 1976 with the publication of Barry Fell’s America, B.C., which purported to show evidence of pre-Columbian druids in Vermont, Phoenicians in Iowa, and Celts across North and South America. While Fell was a professor at Harvard, his field was marine biology, not archaeology, epigraphy, or linguistics. This is typical of diffusionist authors; most were either amateurs or academics working outside their field of expertise.

The timing of Fell’s book mirrored patterns from the nineteenth century. It came on the heels of the Civil Rights movement and a reform of immigration laws which removed racial criteria for legal immigration and US citizenship. Native Americans were also organizing and demanding justice. In the few years before Fell’s book, the American Indian Movement marched on Washington, occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington DC, bombed the visitor center at Mt. Rushmore (at 4am), occupied Alcatraz Island for a year and half, and most famously occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee for ten weeks. The FBI considered them domestic terrorists. It’s not obvious that Fell was racially motivated, but it is clear that his book became immensely popular just as people of color were immigrating to the US, speaking out, and voting in unprecedented numbers. As America was becoming more brown, some white Americans were seeking a history that was more white.

Perhaps inspired by Fell, the nineteenth century fad of fraudulent artifacts re-emerged in 1982 with the “discovery” of thousands of artifacts in Burrows Cave in southern Illinois, the heart of Mound Builder territory. The immediate dismissal of these artifacts as hoaxes only led credence to charges of a government cover-up.

In the late 1980s, Frank Joseph, formerly known as American neo-Nazi leader Frank Collin, wrote The Lost Colonies of Ancient America and edited Ancient American, a fringe magazine promoting a variety of mound builder-type theories.  The magazine acknowledges that it is “not a scholarly journal” because it is too “revolutionary”. It boasts:

Each issue presents such otherwise neglected and even suppressed factual evidence demonstrating the lasting impact made on the Americas by Scandinavian Norsemen, Pharaonic Egyptians, Bronze Age Mediterraneans, Semitic Phoenicians, West Africans, Dynastic Chinese, seafaring Polynesians, and many other culture- bearers. All contributed to the birth and development of numerous and sophisticated civilizations which flourished throughout the American Continents in pre-Columbian times. It is the magazine’s purpose to show readers just how, when, and why these once powerful societies arose to great heights of cultural splendor and fell into deep obscurity as dramatic object lessons for our time.

At one point the magazine listed the “Ho-Chunk Nation, Dept. of Heritage Preservation” as advisors. The tribe had indeed “advised” Collin of his blatant biases with regard to their history. Upon learning how they were acknowledged, the Ho-Chunk demanded their name removed from the journal.

The Kennewick Man controversy

A reconstruction of Kennewick Man. His diet was determined to be mostly marine mammals, probably sea lions from nearby Celilo Falls.

The discovery of “Kennewick Man” in 1996 in central Washington created another public flashpoint. When scientists took the body for study, the Yakama, Umatilla, and other nations in the region viewed it in the context of a nearly two-hundred-year attempt to re-write the history of North America, complete with grave robbing, skull stealing, and the dismissal of Native perspectives. When one scientist reported that Kennewick Man’s skull had more “Caucasoid” than Native American features (although he was confusingly referring to the Ainu of Japan), the New York Times reported that “white supremacist groups are among these who used Kennewick Man to claim that Caucasians came to American well before Native Americans.” The more conservative Wall Street Journal seemed to offer support for the notion, saying: “Scientific evidence that American Indian ancestors may not have been the first inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere is a ticklish subject, not only for Indians but also, apparently, for the Clinton administration, exquisitely attuned, as always, to the nuances of multiculturalism.” Dead for nine thousand years, Kennewick Man was in the center of political-cultural war spanning nearly three centuries. In the end, DNA analysis showed that Kennewick Man was Native American and related to the very tribes in that region. After a long court battle, he was returned to them and re-buried at an undisclosed location in February, 2017.

Attacking John Wesley Howell

Smoot here echoes the title of a popular book from 1833. The Amazon description illustrates the conspiracy theory: “The book chronicles how our own archaeological history was silenced by powerful forces within the scientific, political and religious communities.”

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was a watershed moment in racial politics in the US. Not only was he the first African American president, he was the first candidate to win the office with a coalition of women and people of color. In response, white supremacists organized like never before. This included embracing fringe archaeology whole-heartedly. Hyperdiffusionist interpretations were most popularly described in S. Edgar Smoot’s Lost Civilizations of North America, a 2010 DVD set advertised as “featured on the Glenn Beck FOX NEWS TV show.” The video bemoans the destruction of ancient earthworks as part of a conspiracy engineered by John Wesley Powell in 1894 to cover up the “true history of the Mound Builders”. (See this for a thorough debunking of Lost Civilizations.)

Beck’s promotion of the video betrayed pathetic ignorance and a lack of basic historical knowledge. Unfamiliar with John Wesley Powell, well-known as the first white man to pass through the Grand Canyon, Beck referred to him as “John Wesley Howell” several times before realizing he was incorrect. Both the DVD and webpages supporting it often show a few pictures of artifacts with inscriptions suggesting European ancestry, long discredited as hoaxes, and claim, “This is one of tens of thousands of artifacts found in North America”, implying a vast coverup. Beck embraced it and his followers ate it up. The marriage between hyperdiffusionists and the right wing of the Republican party was a perfect fit. They had other bedfellows as well. Mormons, whose religion emanates from the mound builder myth, and fundamentalist Christians seeking to “take back America” were attracted to its story. Beck provided the politicizing glue to bind these groups together. On Fox News, he concluded his endorsement by turning the concept of “erasure” on its head, claiming that modern scientists are seeking to “erase” the Mound Builders from history.

The alt-right rediscover “the long lost White America”

White supremacists joined the growing alt-history coalition in earnest the same year with the publication of White Apocalypse, a fiction novel about a massive cover-up of the “truth” about the Mound Builders. Its author is Kyle Bristow, praised by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. The book’s description on Amazon reads:

In White Apocalypse, a rogue anthropologist teams up with a proponent of the Solutrean Hypothesis and a fiery lawyer in order to reveal to the world the shocking truth that carries immense cultural, political, and racial significance: 17,000 years ago, white people immigrated to North and South America from Europe, and when the Amerindians arrived by crossing the Bering Strait roughly 12,000 years ago, the latter subsequently and systematically murdered the former. The powers that be will do everything that they can to prevent this controversial theory from being espoused by the trio, and during this action-packed, semi-fictional thriller, the epic adventure will take the advocates of historical revisionism from the forests of southeastern Michigan to a federal courtroom in Ohio, from the busy streets of Washington, D.C. to an Amerindian reservation in Virginia!

Before the first page, Bristow dedicates the book to “the real Native Americans”, meaning white people. The story “revolves around a series of violent revenge fantasies against Jewish professors, Latino and Native American activists, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

The Solutrean hypothesis refers to an obscure and widely-discredited variant of the mound builder myth—that people from southern France migrated to North America. They created a sophisticated civilization before being wiped out by “Indians”. In popular context, especially on-line, the term “Solutrean” is now embedded in the neo-Nazi lexicon, probably to the dismay of archaeologists, who maintain the Solutreans were probably dark-skinned immigrants from north Africa. (At the National Park Service’s Bering Land Bridge National Preserve website, they discuss theories such as the Solutrean hypothesis, which they describe as a “radical theory”.)

References to this alt-history are commonplace in the white supremacist echo-chamber today. They embrace the Ahnenerbe’s search for Aryan roots in the Americas, praising Nazi Germany, “No one nation has put such an effort before or since into re-discovering and documenting our prehistoric past. If this was Himmler’s only true contribution to history, then he should be considered a hero of our people.” A simple on-line search finds dozens of pseudo-archaeological books with titles like Lost Race of the Giants and Forgotten Worlds, and articles such as “The Lost White Tribes of Peru” and “Finding Identity and a Home in Future White America” with exhortations like this: “As long as diversity, multiculturalism and political correctness remain the focus of everything we say and do, then we will neither re-discover that long lost White America or even hope to create a new white ethnostate to save our oppressed millions.”

Delusion and justification

Aside from the tiny Viking outpost discovered in 1960 at L’Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland, which dates to about the year 1000, there remains no evidence of European contact, let alone societal influence, in the Americas before the fifteen century. The mound builder myth of the 1800s, and the present Solutrean version of it embraced by white supremacists, is at once an attempt to erase, replace, and demonize Native Americans and their history. It fits alongside past biblical justifications for slavery in the South.

Anthony Aveni, a professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University, observed with frustration, “I think there is, beneath all this dialogue about diffusionism, a will to believe in bizarre ideas…. It’s a belief that we can wish into existence the universe we desire and deserve.”

James Baldwin was more specific. He observed that white Americans have “this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history.”

Recent on-line commentary illustrates just how important this alternative history is to its proponents. Here is an example from a five-star Amazon review of Bristow’s novel:

“It will shake long held beliefs about who is really the native American and white guilt. If indeed Europeans were here first, then in fact we were the victims of genocide not the native American Indian. The very fact that our ‘establishment’ has deliberately hid the truth from us regarding these archeological digs, is itself evidence of a cover-up. Kyle is a bright man and a truth-teller. Any white person who is feeling even the inkling of white guilt should read this book. It will completely change your attitude about who and what is guilty of white genocide.”

Another comment from an on-line forum celebrated the Solutrean hypothesis:

“Just sick and tired of being called invaders of the Continent we discovered and were probably wiped out by the Olmecs or the Pre Clovis. Paybacks a biatch!”

To such twisted notions, Baldwin observes almost with compassion, “To be white [is] to be forced to digest a delusion called white supremacy.” When a white person looks at a person of color, Baldwin says, “what they see is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history known all over the world. What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility.”

In the case of Native Americans, they see the ethnic cleansing, demonization, and genocides of the past, as well as the concentration camps of the present which have evolved into isolated bantustans of abject poverty. If they look more closely, they see that life expectancy at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is less than that of Haiti and most of sub-Saharan Africa. And so they come up with an alternative history that erases the past and replaces it; a past that explains that whites have what they have today because they deserve it, and Natives have what they have because they deserve that.