It is happening in the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened on the National Mall in Washington in 2004 and which presents Native history and culture from Indigenous perspectives rather than from the framework of the dominant historical narrative.

But it is happening slowly, and the gap between what scholars know about Cahokia and what most Americans know about it remains enormous.

The parking lots of suburban Illinois that cover the outer zones of the city are, in their way, a monument to that gap — to the specific historical choices that decided which stories would be preserved and which would be built over, which histories would be maintained in the landscape and which would be buried under the infrastructure of the American present.

The mounds that survive do not need the parking lots to be removed to speak.

They are speaking already, to anyone who goes to look at them, in the language of earth that is more durable than asphalt and more patient than any human institution.

The city was there.

It is still there, in the ways that matter most.

And the history it represents is waiting, as it has always been, to be fully acknowledged.

— FINAL END —