“Of Golf Courses and World Heritage Sites“

with Dr. Barbara Mann

Thursday,  July 25, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time  

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In 2023, UNESCO announced that the “Newark Earthworks,” a major collection of Tsalagi (“Cherokee”) sacred mounds dating back at least 2,000 years, sitting southeast of Columbus, Ohio, is now a World Heritage Site. This was a stunning development, given that the Moundbuilders Golf Club has sat atop these mounds since 1911.

The Native American Alliance of Ohio had fought for over forty years to protect the mounds, as golfers chunked up and sent pieces of them flying with every swing of their clubs. The mounds were built by women, bringing basket loads of soil from their home sites and mounding it up to solar and earth coordinates, so as to enable the Breathmen to read the equinoxes, solstices, and standstills of the moon.

The Mounds’ establishment as a World Heritage Site finally helped Ohio Indians kick the golfers off the mounds. The full significance of this new status becomes clear only once the Indigenous significance of the mounds, their shapes, locales in relations to one another and the landscape, and their mediation of Breath/sky and Blood/earth is understood.

“Of Golf Courses & World Heritage Sites” goes into the details of the mounds, their Indigenous meaning, their desecration, and finally (finally!) their recognition as a treasure from antiquity. 

Barbara Alice Mann, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Humanities, Jesup Scott Honors College, of the University of Toledo, in Toledo, Ohio, USA. Including encyclopedias and bibliographies, she  has produced seventeen books and over 500 articles. Her latest work is The Woman Who Married the Bear (Oxford University Press, August, 2023) co-authored with Finnish scholar Dr. Kaarina Kailo. Mann’s most recent monographs include President by Massacre: Indian-Killing for Political Gain; Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America; The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Settler Advance; Daughters of Mother Earth; and Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (Lang, 2000, 2004, 2006).

A Bear Clan, Ohio Seneca, community recognition, Barbara is the co-director of the Native American Alliance of Ohio. She lives in her Ohio homeland on the tail (western tip) of Lake Erie where she works for the rights of the people indigenous to Ohio, living in Ohio. (“Erie” is Seneca for “panther.” The Lake is a “water panther,” an important spiritual potency.)

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