Cahokia and the American Story

The absence of Cahokia from the standard American historical narrative is not an accident and not simply an oversight.

It reflects specific choices made over more than two centuries about which histories would be told, which would be treated as significant, and which would be marginalized or erased.

Those choices were made in a context in which the people whose ancestors built Cahokia were being dispossessed of their lands, killed in wars of conquest, removed from their territories, and confined to reservations — and in which acknowledging their civilizational achievements would have complicated the moral justifications for those processes.

The correction of this omission is not merely a matter of adding a chapter to the history books.