AP’s St. Louis What’s currently In the past, St. Louis was known as Mound City because of the more than 100 mounds built by Native Americans there. Only one of them is left after the majority were destroyed by settlers.
The Osage Nation is now one step closer to regaining control of Sugarloaf Mound, the last earthen structure still standing.
Last month, the Osage Nation, the city of St. Louis, and the nonprofit organization Counterpublic revealed that an 86-year-old woman who owns a house on Sugarloaf Mound has consented to sell it and eventually give the land to the tribe.
According to Alderman Cara Spencer, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen intends to adopt a resolution acknowledging the sovereignty of the Osage Nation in January. The location, which is a few miles south of downtown and overlooks the Mississippi River, is eventually intended to become a cultural and informative center.
Reclaiming the places we have occupied for hundreds of years is a first step toward regaining tribal sovereignty, according to Andrea Hunter, director of the Osage Nation Historic Preservation Office in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. And it means a lot to us to be able to restore our heritage by preserving at least one mound on the west bank of the Mississippi River in St. Louis.
However, there is still a sticking issue. The only other house on the mound is owned by a pharmaceutical fraternity, and it is not certain if it will sell.
In the years before colonization, Native Americans constructed thousands of mounds around the United States. While some were utilized for homes or business, all were hallowed ceremonial locations. A lot of them were graveyards. According to Hunter, tribal elites occasionally resided on them.
It is estimated that the mounds in the St. Louis region were constructed between approximately 800 and 1450. There are still a lot of mounds in the neighboring town of Cahokia, Illinois. Experts estimate that up to 20,000 people lived in Cahokia centuries ago.
Sugarloaf Mound and Big Mound were among the most prominent of the human-made structures in what is now St. Louis, said James McAnally, executive director of Counterpublic, a St. Louis nonprofit that works to affect change through art-based projects and helped facilitate the new land acquisition.
According to McAnally, they were constructed on the river expressly to serve as signal mounds. Native Americans on the western side of the Mississippi could send smoke signals visible to those in Cahokia to let them know if people were seen coming down the waterway, Hunter said.
When St. Louis was founded in 1764, mounds were still visible. Visitors even members of European royalty made the trip to the fledgling city just to see them, said Patricia Cleary, a U.S. history professor at California State University, Long Beach, and author of the book Mound City: The Place of the Indigenous Past and Present in St. Louis.
Native Americans were eventually evicted from St. Louis via removal treaties. The mounds were of little benefit to the settlers.
They used them to build up the bank of the Mississippi River and used them as fill for roads and railroads with total disregard for our ancestors’ graves that were in many of those, Hunter said. Some even claim that they were just tossing the bones into the Mississippi River while demolishing Big Mound.
Today, St. Louis landmarks dot locations where mounds once stood, including several places in Forest Park, where mounds were demolished to make way for the World s Fair in 1904. By the early 20th century, only Sugarloaf Mound remained.
In 2009, the Osage Nation purchased the first section of the mound, dismantled a home and began work to stabilize it. But two homes remained in private hands.
One of those homeowners, 86-year-old Joan Heckenberg, has agreed to transfer ownership to the Osage Nation once she either moves or dies.
Heckenberg has lived in the house 81 years, since her grandfather bought it and convinced his skeptical wife to move the family there.
But they fell in love with it, Heckenberg said of her grandparents.
The agreement with Heckenberg leaves just one other private house on the mound, a building owned by Kappa Psi, a national pharmaceutical fraternity. Heckenberg said students haven t lived there for years, and homeless people sometimes stay there.
A spokeswoman for the fraternity said a limited liability company manages the house and that selling it would be up to the LLC. She didn t have the name or contact information for the LLC. McAnally said the fraternity has been approached about selling the home, but so far they haven t taken any action.
Spencer said the mounds are an important and overlooked part of St. Louis, and preserving Sugarloaf is vital.
This is a really special place to the Osage history and to our Native American heritage in this country, which has largely been erased, Spencer said.
By JIM SALTER Associated Press
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