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Some mysteries from Indigenous history have never been solved. Join us as we count down the most compelling unsolved mysteries throughout Native American history! Our countdown includes the Poverty Point Earthworks, the Great Serpent Mound, the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, the Cahokia Mounds, and more! What other Indigenous mysteries fascinate you? Let us know in the comments below!
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00:00It wasn't until young adulthood that I learned my mother had been executed.
00:07Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at unexplained phenomena and unresolved cases
00:12throughout the history of indigenous cultures in the modern-day United States.
00:17He is buried in a secret place that no one will ever know. That's what I hope.
00:2310. Poverty Point Earthworks
00:26Some 400 acres of northeastern Louisiana's Macon Ridge are adorned with a sophisticated system of ridges and mounds.
00:35We don't know what was in the minds of the people who built the mounds,
00:41but what we can say something about is their potential impact on the people.
00:47Named for a 19th-century plantation, Poverty Point is believed to have been constructed by a hunter-gatherer community
00:54between 1700 and 1100 BCE.
00:58Agricultural advancements typically led to such complex engineering,
01:02and wouldn't produce anything more complex for over 2,000 years.
01:06Anything that even comes close to paralleling the size of infrastructure here
01:10would have been built by communities who had already harnessed formal agriculture.
01:16Never mind the impracticality of the project with contemporary tools and animal husbandry.
01:21Why go through the trouble?
01:23Was this site ceremonial? Residential? A trading hub?
01:26Maybe it was all that and more before it was abandoned for some reason.
01:31The Poverty Point Earthworks now serve as a protected monument of Louisiana
01:35and to the brilliance of earlier occupants.
01:38And they transformed Poverty Point into a rich landscape, both visually and culturally.
01:43Great Serpent Mound.
01:45A grassy effigy of a snake spans over 1,300 feet long on the Ohio Brush Creek,
01:52and is dated to around 300 BCE.
01:54We're about halfway up the neck of the serpent.
01:57The head is over there and the body's down there.
01:59It wasn't until 2014 CE when the Adena people could be formally credited
02:05with the creation of the Great Serpent Mound.
02:07The exact reason for its creation, however, is still elusive.
02:11It looks like a mix between a snake and a fish.
02:14Exactly. Many of these spiritual, mythological beings are mixtures of features drawn from other animals.
02:22The chances are that it was some sort of sacred response to a connected meteor crater.
02:27Either way, something inspired the Adena to build what is still the largest serpent effigy in the world,
02:33and the Fort Ancient People to renovate it well over 1,000 years later.
02:38They did a good enough job for the Great Serpent Mound to be a stunning National Historic Landmark today.
02:44So what's your theory?
02:45Is it a calendar?
02:46Or an observatory?
02:48Or maybe just a piece of art?
02:49The Bighorn Medicine Wheel.
02:51A cairn-anchored circle of stones in Wyoming's Bighorn National Park aligns with the summer solstice.
02:58This historical remnant is named for its bicycle wheel shape.
03:02What this medicine wheel doesn't align with is a specific Native American culture.
03:07We don't even know if it was constructed between the 13th and 18th century,
03:11or if that was a renovation period for a solar calendar built thousands of years earlier.
03:17But since it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970,
03:21the area has been modified for security and tourism.
03:25It also accommodates ceremonies for the many tribes that have appropriated the Bighorn Medicine Wheel as sacred.
03:31It connects them as it's always been meant to connect the earth and the sky,
03:35even if we can't identify the people who first stood between.
03:39Visitors are also asked to respect the sacred nature of the site by leaving rocks and prayer offerings undisturbed.
03:46Origin and Abandonment of the Cahokia Mounds
03:49Just outside of Collinsville, Illinois,
03:52one stood North America's most complex urban center prior to colonization.
03:57These are the ruins of Cahokia,
04:00the largest and most important ancient American city north of Mexico.
04:04We know that the Mississippians completed the six-square-mile city around 1050 CE,
04:10but not what they called it.
04:12Nor do we know how they could have engineered something so massive with such precision.
04:17For centuries, the mounds hosted royalty, trade, politics, and festivities.
04:22It's estimated that Cahokian builders carried nearly 15 million loads of dirt to build Monk's Mound.
04:29Then, after 1350, they were abandoned,
04:33with theories ranging from ecological concerns to internal or external conflicts.
04:38It appears that over a span of 50 to 100 years, things just started trickling away.
04:43But we don't know why.
04:44The site would be named for the Cahokia tribe that later occupied it.
04:48A similar and similarly perplexing fate would befall the likes of Moundsville in modern-day Alabama.
04:54But the Cahokia mounds stand out for the foggy rise and fall of such a mighty place.
05:00The way that is told about Cahokia enables people to see that indigenous peoples did not just mysteriously disappear
05:08back into the earth from which they came, but in fact moved on for intentional and conscious reasons.
05:13The Ancestral Puebloian Exodus
05:15The myth that the Ancestral Puebloian people vanished from Mesa Verde is long disputed,
05:22but underscores compelling questions.
05:24For decades, archaeologists have been trying to decipher why these people abruptly abandoned their homes,
05:30and what became of them.
05:31We know that they abandoned their complex cliff dwellings in modern-day Montezuma County, Colorado,
05:37amid the great drought of the late 1200s.
05:39This seemingly hurried migration was in fact meticulously planned.
05:44However, there is evidence of catastrophic social conflict following a population boom.
05:50Stored food and pottery hint that they had planned to return, but they never did.
05:55Folklore even posits some sort of spiritual calling.
05:59The Puebloians were relatively quick to integrate with neighboring tribes in various directions,
06:04never to return with the rain to Mesa Verde.
06:07Could this bizarre communal collapse reflect the pattern of any civilization's downfall?
06:12Certainly the oral traditions of Puebloan descendants frame the migration as a cautionary tale.
06:18It's a place where the ancestors are here no matter where you go.
06:24Even though you can't see them, you sense they are here.
06:28Crow Creek Massacre
06:29In 1978, Missouri River erosion near South Dakota's Fort Randall Dam revealed a mass grave.
06:37It was later determined that almost 500 Arakara ancestors were killed in an assault on a village around 1325.
06:44This village sits on the east side of the Francis Cays Reservoir,
06:48around 10 miles north of the present-day city of Chamberlain, South Dakota.
06:52Over half of the population was wiped out, regardless of gender and age.
06:56There was even evidence of mutilation.
06:58So, this kind of begs a lot of questions about what was going on to prompt this kind of violence
07:06and warfare in this area.
07:08The perpetrators and their motivations for such a brutal attack were never determined.
07:13But evidence of malnutrition indicates desperation over resources.
07:16The fact is that this tragedy warranted a solemn reburial ceremony at the Crow Creek Reservation over 650 years later.
07:25And designation as a National Historic Landmark should ensure further respect for the site of a dark and murky tragedy.
07:32Something happened, maybe some kind of political conflict, or there may have been pressure from failing climate,
07:41deteriorating climate conditions.
07:43But that's beyond the scope of the materials that I've got on hand right now.
07:481770s smallpox epidemic.
07:51Imported diseases critically devastated the New World during colonization.
07:55But the smallpox outbreak from 1775 to 83 was unexpected and largely unexplained.
08:03As the Revolutionary War reshaped society and politics along the eastern seaboard,
08:09a very different cataclysm had shaken the entire North American continent.
08:15The most popular theory is that the virus came from a Spanish expedition around that time.
08:20Strong evidence also points to Russian explorers or a spread from Mexico.
08:25In any case, the epidemic was so severe that General George Washington launched an unauthorized
08:31and reckless inoculation program to save the American Revolution.
08:35And he has to keep it secret from the British.
08:38Because the British learned that one-third of the American army is not effective
08:44because they're recovering from their inoculations.
08:47Meanwhile, at least 30% of the indigenous population across the Pacific Northwest was lost.
08:54With so many Native American deaths going unreported, in addition to the origins of the outbreak,
08:59it's a mystery how many more people died than the official toll of over 130,000.
09:05By the time these Anglo-Americans arrived in the pristine American West, it in fact was not pristine at all.
09:16The disappearance of Henry Barry Lowry.
09:18Few folklore figures unite American communities like the North Carolina outlaw Henry Barry Lowry.
09:25Henry Barry Lowry's great-grandmother, a woman named Sally Kersey,
09:30was probably a Tuscarora Indian who was born at Indian Woods.
09:35While the Confederate Army conscripted members of the mixed-race Lumbee tribe,
09:39he formed an interracial gang in 1865 in the service of the Union.
09:44I mean, as people might know, North Carolina was the last to secede from the Union.
09:49And so there was a lot of division within the state.
09:52They were venerated by Native Americans and farmers alike,
09:55even as their bloody criminal exploits persisted long after the American Civil War.
10:00The so-called Lowry War ultimately ended with a successful $28,000 heist in 1872,
10:07then Lowry's disappearance.
10:10One of his comrades later claimed that he accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun,
10:15but many believe this report was fabricated to allow his escape.
10:19To this day, no one knows the true fate of the Robin Hood of Robeson County.
10:24But no one can ever question that he served his people.
10:29The Grave of Sitting Bull.
10:31It became common to hide the final resting place of Native American leaders,
10:36following the attempted desecration of Tecumseh's body in battle.
10:40Over a century after Sitting Bull was killed during a chaotic arrest in 1890,
10:45the question is, of which resting place is his final?
10:48And what people fail to understand is Sitting Bull is not a lone grave.
10:53By 1953, his grave at Fort Yates, North Dakota was in such poor condition
10:58that his descendants had it secretly moved to Moebridge, South Dakota.
11:03However, it's believed that they discovered multiple sets of bones due to grave reuse.
11:08With all the unanswered questions, all the supposants in the story,
11:12is that the only way you probably prove that, in fact,
11:17the bones are buried in Moebridge, South Dakota,
11:19is you're going to have to dig them up.
11:20Moreover, Sitting Bull's remains were allegedly destroyed with quicklime.
11:25Any investigation was compromised by the grave's immediate encasement in concrete.
11:30Thus, monuments were erected at both grave sites in Sitting Bull's honor.
11:35Give your whole life for your people.
11:38You understand what my great-grandfather, what he lived for and what he died for.
11:51Before we continue, check out this single from Sound Mojo's album Balance,
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11:59Check out the full track and album below.
12:01Fortune calls, rise and ruin, night and noon, all are prisoners of the name.
12:15Murder of Anna Mae Aquash.
12:18Born to the Meekomac people of Canada,
12:21Anna Mae Aquash was one of the American Indian movement's strongest voices.
12:26Anna Mae was kind of like the big sister.
12:29She taught us how to not take no for an answer.
12:33Then, in early 1976, she was found shot dead in South Dakota.
12:38It wasn't until the 2000s when two AIM members were convicted of murdering her
12:43on the false belief that she was an FBI informant.
12:46But some accounts suggest that this was ordered by AIM leadership.
12:50That's when I realized that there was way, way, way more to this.
12:55The FBI's secrecy and flimsy initial investigation fueled rumors of their involvement.
13:00The enduring ambiguities of Aquash's death certainly speak to her outrage
13:04at the violence within and disregard for her community.
13:08She would become a symbol in the missing and murdered indigenous women movement,
13:12so that the fates of Native Americans today are not lost to history.
13:16We want justice. The community wants justice.
13:19What are some other compelling mysteries in indigenous culture?
13:22Share some stories in the comments below.
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