The Ground We Walk On | Wisconsin once home to tens of thousands of burial mounds

By Frank Vaisvilas

Marquette University history professor Bryan Rindfleish put it best when he said there’s a sacredness to the ground we walk on in Wisconsin when you realize that everywhere you step holds thousands of years of Native American history underneath.

He said Increase Lapham, the prominent civil engineer who helped transform Milwaukee from a small village into a booming city, realized that, as well.  In the mid-1800s, as developers flattened hundreds of ancient Indigenous mounds all over the city, Lapham saved at least two mounds with his design of Forest Home Cemetery, researchers recently learned.

But, as Rindfleish points out, that didn’t stop Lapham or the cemetery owners at the time from burying people along the edges of the mounds.

About 20,000 mounds, effigy and conical, were built in Wisconsin.  Only about 4,000 remain today, partly because of development over the last 200 years. They also were destroyed by amateur archeologists and ordinary Wisconsin residents.

It was not uncommon for Wisconsin families to have Sunday picnics on top of these mounds and then spend the rest of the afternoon digging for artifacts and even human remains to keep in their private collections, or to sell to museums or universities.

Early non-Native settlers in Wisconsin had theorized in the 1800s that the mounds were built by some “lost race” or even the Vikings because they couldn’t accept that Native Americans, whom they were removing from their lands at the time, would be capable of creating such massive and impressive earthworks.

Later researchers determined that the effigy mound systems closely resemble the clan systems and spirit animals still used by many local Indigenous tribes today, such as the Thunderbird and Water Panther.

Conical burial mounds started being built in Wisconsin around 500 B.C.  Effigy mounds depicting people, animals or spirits were built from about 700 A.D. to around 1100.

There is still some debate about which tribe, exactly, built the mounds, especially those in southeast Wisconsin.

The Ho-Chunk Nation has taken the lead today in protecting remaining mounds from development, and its historians and elders claim their ancestors built the mounds, especially in central and southwestern Wisconsin.

The Potawatomi claim southeast Wisconsin as their ancestral homeland, but Menominee tribal historians claim their tribe’s ancestral territory included all of what is now known as Wisconsin, as well as parts of Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota. Menominee historians say the Menominee were here before any other tribe and any other people dating back at least 10,000 years. 

This debate between tribal historians tends to heat up when there’s any push or movement for a new casino in Kenosha and whether it will be owned and operated by the Menominee Nation, currently among the most impoverished of tribes.

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Ancient Indigenous mounds found in Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee

Experts believed there was only one surviving ancient Indigenous mound in Milwaukee. Now, two rediscovered mounds bring that number to three.

READ MORE

https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/news/local/wisconsin/2024/11/14/ancient-indigenous-mounds-found-at-milwaukees-forest-home-cemetery/76221371007/