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“Taylor Keen, author of Rediscovering Turtle Island: A First Peoples' Account of the Sacred Geography of America, is the featured author on my website this month. Taylor is an Omaha Tribal member, Cherokee Citizen, and teacher. His book draws on firsthand Indigenous accounts, extensive historical writings, and his own experience to reimagine the ancient and more recent history of this continent's oldest cultures. In his article, linked below, Taylor offers insights into sacred symbolism and mythology in Ancient Indigenous American cultures—knowledge embedded in the complex geometric earthworks these cultures produced. These earthworks mirror the skies and point to the time of the first people on Turtle Island.”

Graham Hancock

When we consider the study of oral tradition and ancient history, we enter a somewhat impressionistic realm. Veiled fragilities; glimpsed wisps of words. But I also suspect that this field of study has begun to gather momentum worldwide, delicate machinery whirring into more durable trajectories. Pondering such matters, I recently noticed Taylor Keen’s “Rediscovering Turtle Island: A First Peoples’ Account of the Sacred Geography of America.” This new book delves into ancient history in North America, borrowing from oral tradition, archaeology, and the mechanisms of historical fiction – so we can wonder how it will enter the global project of excavating deep time from oral literature. An early chapter reveals his methods. Keen provides a “retelling” of a creation story based on a Cherokee body of narratives, then he compares his version to Plato’s Atlantis tale – and he intends for this discussion to shed light on ancient history. He also hopes his book will contribute to “an Indigenous cultural resurgence.” His personal aspiration is “to pick up where Vine Deloria left off” and to advance “a true Indigenous esoteric tradition tied to the original truths of a central humanity found in ancient wisdom across the world.”

Perhaps Keen intends to evoke a bonding protocol derived from the legacy of Vine Deloria, referencing a polarized intellectual worldscape – a “Red Earth” confronting “White Lies.” Deloria’s final years coincided with the rise of what is called “Indigenous archaeology.” He took some steps to quash this development, but I suspect he would approve of the way it ultimately came to affirm his ideological legacy. Indigenous archaeology is a very dynamic and diverse field of discourse, but when Indigenists center their work on grievance narratives and cultural battlefield polarization, they affirm a bonding narrative that Deloria shaped, and which flowered in the midst of the tumult of the 1980s and 1990s. I would emphasize that Indigenous archaeologists have successfully nurtured a growing diversity within the culture of archaeology – a diversity focused on pro-race bonding but centered on community aspirations.

One culmination of this evolution came in 2019 with the elevation of a prominent Indigenist to the presidency of the Society for American Archaeology. Perhaps we should frame the current intellectual geography of “mainstream archaeology” as a cultural spectrum rather than as a selectively pruned stereotype. It is also worthy of mention that Keen’s storytelling is eclectic; his book draws freely from archaeological literature, so “Rediscovering Turtle Island” is not a Deloria-like anti-archaeology manifesto. Instead, Keen lauds Deloria, then he steps through a door opened by practitioners of Indigenous archaeology – he is particularly interested in the work of Paulette Steeves, whose formulations of “PaleoIndigenous” antiquity have attracted widespread interest in Indian Country.

Keen’s major project in “Rediscovering Turtle Island” is to explore the urban world of Cahokia and the thousands of earthworks that appeared long ago across ancient North America. He hopes to unearth cultural meanings that would enrich modern Indigenism. And we can also wonder whether this collection of ideological convergences will appeal to Keen’s peers among contemporary Indigenist culture-makers. To be sure, the project of spinning vanished empires from shadowy evidence would seem a challenge to align with Indigenist decolonizing bonding narratives. “Rediscovering Turtle Island” might well succeed in edging Indigenous America toward that kind of communion in the course of generating cultural momentum, as Keen hopes, for creating “a true Indigenous esoteric tradition.” And we have already seen the authority of Vine Deloria’s legacy in shaping the ideological trajectory of Indigenous archaeology – Keen’s book will surely further advance that intellectual heritage. It is possible that among adherents to racial Indianhood, the growing interface between archaeology and Indian Country will become a project of borrowing from archaeology to promote Indigenous worldbuilding, bending the moral arc of that universe toward a segregated field of study. And this would, in turn, likely colorize the fragile trajectory of the developing analytical study of oral tradition, maybe even steering that world toward the misty shores of a neverland Atlantis.

Roger Echohawk (Pawnee)