Destroying the Big Mound: St. Louis 1869, 1929, 2010

The indigenous monument known as the Big Mound of St. Louis was destroyed in 1869. This destruction, its carefully detailed documentation, and subsequent attempts at memorialization have been mired in settler colonialist ideology. In 1929, commemoration efforts were made under the sponsorship of the Colonial Dames of America, an association dedicated to honoring the memory of the very agents involved in the destruction and dispossession of the indigenous populations that built the mound. At some point around 2010, the marker was displaced by the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) in connection with the construction of the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge, which opened in 2014. While MoDOT contacted and attempted to give some agency to the Osage tribe of Oklahoma as representatives of former indigenous populations, these efforts disavowed links to the violent processes waged against these populations, and failed to acknowledge the role of the United States in their displacement and dispossession. At a broader level, my research points to the settler colonial entanglements of the discipline of historic preservation in the United States, and calls for the acknowledgement and recognition of these problematic connections. I argue that successive efforts to commemorate the monument, as well as other indigenous sites, have operated as a set of settler colonial technologies that contributed to several erasures, eliding the multiple claims of indigenous populations for land restitution and recognition of past wrongs, and constructing an image of these monuments as empty, abandoned ruins through their physical and conceptual un-making.