Precious Parcel

LOUISE RED CORN

Louise Red Corn is an award-winning journalist and current staff writer for the Osage News in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Red Corn has reported for the Detroit Free Press, the Lexington Herald- Leader, the Tulsa World and is the former publisher of The Bigheart Times.

When he was a child, Casey Brown spent much time around the ancient earthen mounds his forebears built throughout Wisconsin.

His father was the head of what was then the Winnebago Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources during what Brown, the tribal spokesman as well as a comedian, calls “The Casino Boom Era” of the 1990s, when the tribe reorganized and “the People of the Stinky Water became the People of the Loud Voice, the Ho- Chunk.”

Ritchie Brown was a leader devoted to preserving burial, effigy and other mounds throughout Wisconsin and took his son along as he traversed the state cataloguing and sometimes acquiring mounds. Along the way, he passed on his reverence for the sacred sites.

Among effigy mounds, which are peculiar to Wisconsin and the lands adjacent, the 28 at Lizard Mound State Park are special, said the younger Brown. They are of varying sizes, they were constructed over the course of hundreds of years, they include the unusual figures of two birds looking at each other, and they are not near any water source that still exists.

The huge spread-eagled “lizard” is aligned with the summer and winter solstices, he added.

“When you talk to an archaeologist or anyone in higher learning, they always talk about different eras: the Mound Builders Era, the Late Woodland Era,” Brown said. “That’s not how the Ho-Chunk look at it.

“For us, these mounds aren’t just from one moment in time. They’re an evolving thing, a continuum. We’re just a drop on a timeline.”

Lizard Mound, less than an hour northwest of Milwaukee, became a state park in 1950 but was deeded to Washington County in 1986. It reentered the folds of the Wisconsin State Park System last year, and the state Department of Natural Resources, working with the Ho- Chunk, is dedicated to care and preservation of the site — particularly in confronting invasive plants.

From on high, especially using aerial mapping technology known as lidar (light detection and ranging), the effigy mounds at Lizard Mound are obvious: a head-to-head pair of giant panther-like creatures with long tails, the lizard for which the park is named, two birds facing off, and several conical and linear mounds.

On the ground, the effigy mounds, laboriously formed one basketful of soil at a time between about 750 and 1200 A.D., are less distinct as they stretch out up to 250 feet. But even after more than a thousand years, they still evoke ancient spirituality that attracts Native Americans and others to leave offerings such as corn, tobacco or a red ribbon.

“It’s an incredible site on par with the Great Pyramids and the Colosseum, but it’s here in Wisconsin,” said Amy Rosebrough, a staff archaeologist at the Wisconsin Historical Society and leading expert on effigy mounds.

“When people visit, they’re likely to spot an offering left on a mound; it’s a living memorial where Native people still come to commune with their ancestors.”

Brown agreed. “There are a lot of institutions we revere in the United States, but the mounds have been around much longer,” he said.

He recalled his father often counseling journalists to stop reading about the mounds and instead to visit them. “Just go and take it in,” Brown recalled his father saying. “It’s for you, to see what’s in the sky, what’s on the ground. The actual sense of place is so important.”

According to Richard Kubicek, an archaeologist with the DNR, individuals interred in effigy mounds appear to have been treated differently than those buried in conical or geometric mounds, which are often found at the same site.

While effigy mounds typically are burial sites for one or two people — usually buried near where the heart of the animal would be — the geometric mounds often contain groups of individuals, perhaps “a single kin group or individuals who died during a certain period,” Kubicek said.

The Ho-Chunk Nation’s historic preservation office, led by Bill Quackenbush, is heavily involved in advising the DNR on how to care for the mounds and safeguard their future, said Samantha Lindquist, the DNR’s superintendent over the region.

“If the mounds were covered in non-woody vegetation such as native grasses or sedge, that would be the ideal way to preserve them,” Lindquist said.

So far, the DNR and Ho-Chunk have identified 180 hazardous or diseased trees that need to be carefully removed from the property.

Other plans include redirecting walking paths that hug too close to the mounds, leading to erosion. One path crosses inappropriately between the heads of the two panthers, or water spirits, who face each other.

Brown said the Ho-Chunk Nation appreciates the state’s attention to the mounds. In days of yore, one mound had a Plexiglas panel so folks could observe the remains within, and settlers often plowed mounds under for agricultural purposes.

The past affronts to the mounds mirrored affronts to the Ho-Chunk people, he noted. “We have oral stories that take us back to the Ice Age. That’s still our story. Despite people trying to get rid of the Ho-Chunk, the Ho-Chunk kept walking back.

“The memory of the oppressed is always longer than the memory of the oppressor.”

Lizard Mound State Park, 2121 County Highway A in West Bend, is home to 28 effigy, conical and linear mounds. Hours are 6 a.m.-11 p.m. The 22-acre park is not staffed. It has a 1-mile walking trail and portable toilet, with plans to replace it with a vault toilet. For park information, call 262-626-2116 or check dnr.wi.gov/tiny/1206.