Before Woodland, Ho-Chunk, Menominee or Potawatomi inhabited the area, the Mound People traveled and lived in Racine millennia ago

A sonnet of mounds remains 

to tell with silent green

— the dead on dead,

who gets counted, 

and who gets named

         who owns which plots,

                         who gets seen, 

dug out even amid red echoes 

of autumn the river 

kayaks and canoes still cut through 

with paddles

like tails of beaver.

Nicholas Michael Ravnikar

If you drive or walk or bike past Mound Cemetery (1147 West Boulevard) in Racine, you may or may not realize how important a place it occupies in the long story of the city’s earliest beginnings. 

While the official story presented of the founding of the City of Racine mentions the Indian Removal act and the removal of the Potawatomi to make room for the city’s founding by Gilbert Knapp, the story of our land stretches back for millennia. A land and water acknowledgement for the city, county or any organization in the area might consider adding such details.

In fact, a walk through Mound Cemetery tells the story of a large measure of the history of the land from what we now call Chicago to Milwaukee when the words from which those names derive had an original shape on indigenous tongues.

Mound: Racine’s first people?

The native population known as the Mound People were the first to use the site for burial and ceremony thousands of years ago, as evidenced by 14 mounds throughout the 55-acre site. Even prior to the Mound People, native inhabitants likely lived in and travelled through the area, but the distinctive effigy mounds date back to at least 500 BCE, with some specialists dating evidence back even further.

Since that time, subsequent tribes and bands of other indigenous peoples may have used the mounds as a burial site, according to Burlington Potawatomi storyteller Skip Twardosz. 

Twardosz confirmed that one difficulty with authenticating which particular tribes or bands may have buried their dead or held rituals on the site is that the mounds would need to be exhumed. In other words, no authentication without desecration. 

Of course, doubting indigenous claims of ancestral ritual ties to the land carries with it ethical implications. While we lack death certificates or burial notices, this central notion of written documentation as a standard of evidence serves as a convenient piece of cultural hegemony that threatens to keep native traditions marginalized, especially in our area: by demanding written records as proof, the scientific-academic mindset inherently demotes the legitimacy of pre-literate oral traditions.

“My ancestors would have invented an alphabet, had they known that it would have been needed to document their history in the modern age,”

Skip Twardosz, Potawatomi traditions storyteller

“My ancestors would have invented an alphabet, had they known that it would have been needed to document their history in the modern age,” Twardosz said. “The academic mind doesn’t accept oral traditions as readily as written documentation.” 

Use as Western Cemetery

The site was not turned into a conventional Western Cemetery until more recently. When the city first commissioned the cemetery in 1854, graves of ten to 25 deceased were removed from the city’s other two cemeteries to Mound Cemetery. The earliest death among these was Martha Greer’s in January, 1852.  

After the commissioning, the cemetery chairman, Dr. Philo Hoy, had excavated some of the 125 ceremonial mounds that surrounded the Root River at the time, drawing out both skeletons and pottery. However, according to a pamphlet published by Preservation Racine available  for a $5 donation in the cemetery office, Hoy also played an instrumental role in preserving the 14 mounds that remain, as he conveyed the archeological significance of these sites to his fellow citizens. 

While the 14 remaining mounds have been preserved and one of them marked with an obelisk engraved “Indian Mounds,” I have refrained from posting pictures, which are available elsewhere, as Twardosz mentioned that in many native traditions, photography of the mounds may convey a disrespectful attitude toward spirits of the deceased. 

A Natural History linked to the Past

Elsewhere throughout Racine and our surrounding region, we can find traces of the Mound and the other native people who inhabited the area in the forms of trails and modes of travel. Predominant among these, the Root River serves as a principal source of travel from land in what we now call Milwaukee and Waukesha south toward Lake Michigan. 

These waterways, said Twardosz, amounted to the interstate highway system of the time. Traveled in winter by dog sled. In other seasons, people as early as the Mound would have piloted the Root River from a dugout or birch park canoe by front steerage due to the occasional rapids and rocks that dotted the waterways.

Because larger, more adequate birch grows further to the north than Racine, Twardosz noted that the canoes from this region would more likely have used a dugout technique. In order to construct such a canoe, people would spend weeks burning and chipping away at charred wood in order to both fell and shape a tree. 

They made their paddles from softer woods, carved to mimic the shape of beaver tail. 

In addition to river travel, the Mound and later inhabitants prior to European settlement traveled by trail, some of which can still be found in Hawthorn Hollow in nearby Kenosha County. 

The trails of the region, Twardosz said, would have been first cut by woodland bison and then adopted by native people who followed the narrow paths with what he calls a “perfect gait,” one foot placed before another, to preserve energy. Similar efficient walking patterns can be observed in the trails of animals, particularly in our region’s winter snow.  

Adena, Hopewell, Woodlands and Mississippi people followed, and were presumably descended from the Mound and inhabited the area before the Miami inhabited the Green Bay peninsula. Wisconsin. As those people spread westward across the land, an estimated four to six hundred. Ho Chunk and Menominee people stewarded the water, game and vegetation in Southeast WI and traded what could be carried with Sauk, Fox, Mascouten, Iowa, Santee Sioux, and Illinois people also living through the region. 

This early commerce points to a problem inherent to early European and American treaties with particular tribes and bands. It’s not simply the case that land wasn’t owned in the traditional sense; as a consequence of such a concept of immovable property, many groups of different people shared the land and traveled through it. While Euro-American government entities forged a treaty with one people, it may have done so while infringing on use claims to that land by other unnamed groups. 

French encounters

It’s plausible that all of the preceding groups of people used the mounds for ritual purposes to connect with ancestral lands, just as it is plausible that the Miami, who met the French in the early 1600s on fur trade tours in Green Bay and moved south along the lake’s Western shore. 

The Miam’s word, Meskonsing, meaning “this stream meanders through something red.” was the basis for Catholic Priest Marquette, traveling with trapper Louis Jolie in tow in 1673, for jotting down what became misread as “ouisconsin”

The fur trade that ensued from French exploration that came from the north brought with it mass death from illness claimed 90% of some nations, some of whom may have been buried in the Mound Cemetery mounds or similar sites further north. 

Two such French settlers were the brothers Vieau, Jacques and Louis, who also moved south set up a trading post that came to be known as Jambeau’s in what was then called Skunk Grove, which we know today as the junction Highway H and K on the border between Franksville and Caledonia. 

By the eighteenth Century, Potawatomi, Odowa and Ojibwe had been pushed west from Michigan by Iroquois whose westward expansion served to further the beaver trapping fed the European fashion appetite. These three tribes welcomed the remaining survivors in the southeast into their peoples’ fold. More on the Potawatomi, as well as French voyageurs who followed from a northern route and the shipping ports that were expanded in our area in future posts. 

Transition to the Potawatomi

After staging their own 1812 attack on troops at Fort Dearborn, which was painted as a “massacre” and immortalized as such in monuments. In addition to neglecting the precedent military and settlement pressures exerted on the Potawatomi, similarly less publicized were the Potawatomi’s later efforts the year prior to the Chicago Treaty of 1833, to cultivate favor by siding with American forces against Black Hawk’s rebellion. 

Again, whether warriors from these battles were interned alongside Mound ancestors in any fashion or the extent to which the mounds played a role in any rituals  remains unknown due to the lack of documentation. However, the principle objection to land treaties voiced by the Potawatomi warrior-orator Matea, reinforced the importance of not leaving the graves of their ancestors behind.  

So when we walk through Mound Cemetery and nearby parks along the Root River (originally called “kipi kawi,” which means roughly the same thing), anyone can connect with ancient and pre-settlement history, as well as pay respects to the few ceremonial sites that remain.