Indians and Aliens

Human beings’ disturbing capacity to manufacture history to serve our own ends

- AMY H. STURGIS

IT TOOK JASON Colavito eight years to write The Mound Builder Myth, but the project seems tailor-made for 2020. It starts with multiple waves of a pandemic and ends with conspiracies, white supremacists, and a battle between science and superstition.

At the heart of the book lie the large earthen mounds that cover a vast portion of North America. The earliest of these, Colavito points out, “were standing in their solemn glory five centuries before the Egyptians raised their pyramids.” They were built by Native Americans, but in the 19th century, a legend took hold that a lost white race had constructed them. This manufactured myth didn’t just ignore indigenous American civilizations. It fed into the theft and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people’s lands.

In this century-spanning work of U.S. intellectual history, Colavito describes how a determined few replaced the truth of who built the ancient earthen mounds in North America with a long-lasting “monumental deception” backed by many political leaders, including several U.S. presidents. The lie has now been exposed, but Colavito argues that the “constellation of ideas” that supported it persists today.