Early Indigenous Literatures

Chippiannock Cemetery and Sauk Memory Lands

           Chippiannock cemetery represents a multi-fold act of Indigenous erasure. In the first act, the physical space of Sauk memory lands and Sauk graveyards are transformed into a “settlerscape” through dispossession.[1] After physical removal, settlers further coopt these lands and endow them with their own meaning. However, this meaning remains intimately tied with Indigenous dispossession. Chippiannock is no ordinary cemetery; it was not a product of simple necessity—rather, it was created in the 1850s by settlers who specifically appropriated what they understood to be the Sauk language term for “City of the Dead.” In other words, once the Sauk had been forcibly removed and their perceived “threat” to settler life was extinguished, settlers sought their discursive preservation. This process allowed, as already discussed in other areas of this exhibit, settlers to cast Sauk people as “prefatory” to the progress of settler civilization, relegating Indigenous bodies and beliefs to the past.[2]

            Chippiannock cemetery also makes it harder to “see” Sauk people. It distorts not only the centrality of dispossession to its own creation, but also Sauk resistance to this dispossession. For example, the cemetery has a mural of Black Hawk, which selectively quotes the Life in ways that remove any mention of Sauk removal and the repeated instances in the text where graveyards are a specific point of contention for Black Hawk (see gallery).

            Equally interesting (and culturally distorting) is the confusing etymology of “Chippiannock.” According to local news articles,[3] the cemetery’s website,[4] and academic and trade publications alike,[5] the term means “City (or village) of the Dead” in the Sauk language and was suggested by Susan Goldsmith (the daughter of George Davenport, a land speculator in what is now Iowa who helped negotiate a treaty to remove Sauk and Fox Natives from their post-Illinois removal lands). Yet, no citation is ever provided for this linguistic history—or at least, no citation that does not reference another undocumented source.

Nevertheless, consulting the Sauk and Fox Nation’s official concise dictionary seems to reveal the inaccuracies of this settler narrative. In this more authoritative account, “chîpayahkyêni” is the term for graveyard or cemetery, whereas “chîpayiwânakwi”—the closer, if still disjointed, phonetic analog to “Chippiannock”—is the term for a singular grave.[6]  The settler narrative, then, even in its self-gratifying attempts to discursively preserve the “vanished” Sauk, continues to misrepresent Sauk people and knowledge.

 
 
[1]Ezra D. Miller, “‘But It Is Nothing Except Woods’: Anabaptists, Ambitions, and a Northern Indiana Settlerscape, 1830-1841,” in Ryan D. Harker and Janeen Bertische Johnson, eds., Rooted and Grounded: Essays on Land and Christian Discipleship (New York, 2016).
[2] Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, 2010).
[5] Anne Beiser Allen, “Romance on the Frontier: Margaret Davenport and Susan Goldsmith,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 105, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 308, n. 55; Minda Powers-Douglas, Chippiannock Cemetery (Charleston, S.C., 2010), 13.
[6] See, Gorden Whittaker, comp., A Concise Dictionary of the Sauk Language (Stroud, Okla., 2005), 35. Available at: https://www.sacandfoxnation-nsn.gov/departments/language/.

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