"the world ignored Brackenridge’s discovery, and Americans have not treated what Dr. Pauketat calls “Ancient America’s great city on the Mississippi” with reverence. Four-lane roads and highways surround and bisect Cahokia, the sprawl of East St. Louis covers more of the ancient site, and many of the earthen pyramids have been scraped away to use as infill.
Cahokia has since been dignified with a state park and visitors center, but it’s not well known outside of Illinois and Missouri. It hardly attracts the number of visitors you’d expect for America’s version of the pyramids and the ruins of the country’s greatest, ancient city...
The racist and ideologically convenient views held by European colonists of Native Americans as small, simple groups of people influenced interpretations of North American history.
When Americans did notice Cahokia’s ruins, most of them assumed that Indians could not have made them. They theorized that Vikings, Greeks, or Egyptians built the mounds; Thomas Jefferson advised Lewis and Clark to look for white, Welsh-speaking Indians who raised the pyramids. Even later archeologists struggled to imagine an Indian city...
Cahokia is mysterious to historians because North America did not have writing systems, and Cahokia’s population disappeared suddenly and mysteriously in the late 1300s. By the time Europeans found the site, even Native Americans knew little about it.
What we do know is that a village was razed in 1050 to rebuild Cahokia on a grid, with a grand plaza and ceremonial structures built on two hundred huge, earthen pyramids. The population increased so rapidly—Dr. Pauketat writes that walking from the edge of Cahokia’s territory to the city center would have taken two days at its peak—that Cahokia must have drawn thousands of immigrants inspired by its religion, culture, or politics...
Theft is not the only concern; so is respect.
Dr. Keene, for example, has several friends who portrayed American Indians at Plimoth Plantation, a “living museum” in Massachusetts that re-creates rural life in 17th century New England. "Visitors thought they weren't native because they didn't look like a Hollywood Indian," says Keene. "Or people asked them about the Washington football team. The public still leaves with the impression that natives were savage or uncivilized. These experiences are hard on native people.""
https://priceonomics.com/why-do-tourists-visit-ancient-ruins-everywhere/
There is a series of Star Trek where the first officer of the ship is Native, and he talks about how his tribe (and others) relocated to other planets where they could live in peace. And, the first time I watched the show, when I was little, I thought this was a great piece of the future-utopia of the show, that they were finally able to "live the way they wanted to". Except now it's like, wtf, we aren't recognizing them as part of the Earth like everyone else?
And I think it comes back to this perception, of these simple and nomadic people in small groups who didn't make an impact on the world around them and primarily function to teach white people spiritual lessons.
Related: Native rappers reminding America that they still exist
FB: "The Greek government loves to invest in the Parthenon, and Greeks love to visit it. But Indian sites are more likely to remind Americans of the Trail of Tears and treaty violations than appeal to their nationalism."
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