IN WHOSE RUINS

A novel reading of American history as an endless chain of ideologically sanctioned extractions from the land.

The original inhabitants of America were presented a moral dilemma by the newcomers who wanted their land: They were both impediment and reproach, objects of admiration and enemies. One of Puglionesi’s players in this vigorous, constantly revealing study is Henry Schoolcraft (1793-1864), who coined the name of the lake in Minnesota where the Mississippi River originates, Itasca, “splicing the Latin words veritas and caput to mean true source.” But Latin wouldn’t do, and so Schoolcraft invented a putatively Ojibwe myth about a “chaste Indian maiden” of that name, a yarn that sometimes turns up in books today. Other stories abounded, all of which the author recounts engagingly. In what is now West Virginia, the owners of property containing ancient Indigenous mounds argued that they couldn’t possibly have been built by the ancestors of the people whose lands they conquered and therefore had to be Celtic or Roman—and therefore rightfully belonging to Europeans. Such mounds were looted for the treasures they supposedly contained, and while the diggers came away disappointed, the excavations gave Joseph Smith an idea for a story about buried tablets, “the spiritual treasure of the book of Mormon.” From the moment Americans landed in the West, they began collecting Native arts even as they ravaged the lands in the quest for minerals—a process that only accelerated in the nuclear age, with its need for uranium. All the while, Puglionesi writes, spiritualists were cooking up tales about Indigenous ghosts, borrowed by speculators and prospectors who claimed that those ghosts were guiding them to the oil fields of Pennsylvania and New York; one claimed that he had “Indian spirits working ‘mechanically’ on his body while white ‘wisdom spirits’ enlightened his soul.” Page after page, Puglionesi finds some strange twist on history used to justify theft and genocide, and it makes for a fascinating tale.

A first-rate work of historical research and storytelling.