30 miles east of Columbus, Ohio, stand structures like most have never seen before.

How could an architectural design so sophisticated still challenge researchers today?

What did these precise lines and geometric forms point to?

Were they random constructions or something far more extraordinary?

I'm with the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, and we were the very first tribe in 1832 to be removed forcibly from Ohio.

I was selected Chief in 2006.

We arrived on a Saturday, 2007 in a place called Newark Earthworks, and it was the first time I had ever even heard of them.

It was a beautiful sunny day.

It couldn't have been a more glorious day to take a walk and to see something.

It happened to be the day of a golf tournament.

The place was packed.

Packed with golfers, packed with staff, packed with spectators.

We were trying to walk to the wooden viewing station where you can overlook the earthworks here.

The carts were on that same path and they would ask us to step back, which we did.

We didn't want to be in anybody's way.

That happened repeatedly, and each time the drivers of the golf carts became more impatient.

Ultimately, one said, you need to leave.

You don't belong here.

You need to come back another day.

I came from Oklahoma and Missouri, and the place is open to the public only one day a year.

It's this day or never for me.

And so I wanted to go to that viewing platform.

And when I walked up those steps, when I looked out and saw what I saw, it was unbelievable.

At first there was such pride.

There was such honor.

Here are sacred mounds that our ancestors built.

And I knew nothing about them.

So at first there was immense elation.

But then reality also began to set in, and it turned to tears.

Mounds are sacred to Native Americans.

Some of them hold our human remains.

Why is there a golf course here?

How could they have signed a 99 year lease?

How did this happen?

What's the answer?

And so I left walking down those steps.

Actually saying a biblical scripture, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

And I walked down saying to myself, I don't know what one voice can do, but I cannot be silent about this.

Hey Logan.

Hi Chief Glenna.

How are you?

Oh, it's so good to see you.

Good to see you, too.

How are you?

Hey.

It's a beautiful day.

Yes.

You really couldn't ask for better weather?

Well, I'm not talking about the weather.

This is the Octagon, and I'm freely walking on the Octagon.

First time ever.

18 years I've been involved with this.

This used to be a golf course, right?

Yeah.

Up until very recently.

January 1st, 2025, the Ohio History Connection took on full management of the property.

Before that, it was Moundbuilders Country Club.

And that was not open to the public.

It was not.

It was a private country club.

So even people like Chief Glenn, could not walk here freely.

That's correct.

We only had about four days a year where the public could come and enjoy the site and appreciate it for how and truly incredible these monuments are.

The first time I came, it was only one day a year, and I was told I should leave and come back on that one day.

Like I can come from Oklahoma here any day that I want.

It is pretty amazing that we can come here and walk freely on the things that our ancestors built.

These are special places that were meant to be used by Native people.

We can be in this space as long as we like.

Let's go.

Let's go.

So right now we are entering in one of eight gateways into the Octagon.

There are eight of them, but seven of them enter to the outside of the earthwork, and one connects the Octagon to the Observatory Circle.

And each of these entry points have one of these loaf shaped mounds.

And these act as gateways to this 2000 year old earthwork.

Native Americans from all over North America gathered here to build these earthworks one basket full of earth at a time.

And they piled these mounds higher than the surrounding walls, because they act almost as doorways.

People would have used different entrances to enter the earthworks.

Do you know anything about which ones they would have entered, and why?

We actually don't know.

But we know that these entry ways had a purpose.

Each barrier mound gives a person a choice to go right or left and to enter the Octagon.

So if there's a barrier mound and you're confronted with it and you have to turn right or left, what does that mean?

Male and female?

Old?

Young?

Highly revered?

Elder?

Perhaps it had something to do with their jobs?

We don't know.

We don't know which way they would have gone.

So I think we can pick today.

Which way would you like to go, Chief?

Let's go to the left.

As amazing as this place is today, is this actually what it would have looked like 2000 years ago?

Yeah, it is.

What's really amazing about the Newark Earthworks, the Octagon and the Great Circle is that these sites are pretty much 90% intact.

Only portions of the wall have been elongated by the National Guard when they were using this site as a training camp.

But what you see is really what it would have looked like 2000 years ago.

The Octagon by itself, you could put four Roman Colosseums inside it.

So the scale of it is incredible.

Stonehenge would fit inside the little circular area of the Octagon.

Tipped on its side, the Octagon would be taller than the Giza pyramid.

You know, so they're huge.

But how did they manage that?

How many people built this?

That's a really amazing question.

We, we don't know how many people were gathering to be a part of building these earthworks, but we think that many, many groups, maybe hundreds or even thousands of people were coming together to do this.

But they did this voluntarily?

Voluntarily.

From what we know, archaeologically of the Hopewell cultural period, it doesn't seem like there was any sort of hierarchy that instituted different access to resources.

People wanted to be a part of what was going on here.

The way archaeologists look at burials.

Who was buried, where, and how, and like with what, and what their diets were.

It doesn't seem to indicate that there's a lot of institutional difference in power, but there were certainly influential leaders.

The only kind of status that we see shows up in ceremonial sites.

So everybody lives in the same kind of houses.

Everybody does the same kind of work when they're at home gardening, fishing, hunting.

But in the ceremonial context, there are important leaders.

They were highly honored, highly respected.

They were probably the priests, the architects, the astronomers, the geometers who came up with this knowledge.

But at the end of the day, they leave the ceremonial precinct and go home.

They're just like everybody else.

These sites, I suspect, were the result of someone's vision.

Native peoples traditionally have had a strong belief in the power of vision, and they convinced other people of the power of that vision.

There was obviously something very unique going on during the Hopewell episode.

You know, relatively low population densities.

And yet somehow they were able to marshal the labor to build miles and miles of earthen wall to organize these gatherings and provision hundreds or thousands of people.

It's just a genius example of logistics.

It is a true collective community effort.

Everyone has access to the knowledge.

Everyone is able to participate.

Everyone plays a part in the system.

And so Hopewell kind of represents this engineering of this, this collective mind that is essentially the sort of supercomputer of Hopewell culture.

The amount of cooperation to make a perfect octagon is truly incredible.

And even more so, there was a standard unit of measurement that they were using and communicating.

This site has the same layout as High Bank Works down in Chillicothe.

Those two sites are 60 miles away and they're very, very similar.

There's a lot of features that you can see that are almost identical on each of those two sites.

The High Bank Works, it seems to be much more associated with tracking the movements of the sun and moon on the horizon.

This complexity here is duplicated exactly elsewhere 2000 years ago.

They had to be geniuses to do that.

They had to know geometry.

They had to know mathematics.

Yes, they were truly geniuses.

You don't know how, how meaningful it is to hear that, because I'm an old woman, and my entire life, all I've ever heard my ancestors referred to is savages.

And to say that they are geniuses and that you can document that and it can be proven.

Yeah.

These monuments were so well thought out.

They were architects.

They were engineers.

They built these earthwork walls to last, and here they are 2000 years later.

The usual narrative that I've always gotten is that we're wandering half-naked savages.

And this disrupts that.

This the completely flips it over and it shows that, yeah, there's lots of people around the world that have been very sophisticated and very smart and very intelligent and geniuses around the world.

Well, we have some pretty incredible architecture here, too.

Today, we would call these people scientists, mathematicians, astronomers, any ologist that you can think of, that's what they would have been.

We see that carried out in the construction, in the design of these earthworks, through their geometric precision, through the shared units of measure and through their alignments with celestial bodies.

But they're also craftspeople or artisans in these communities, working materials in novel ways.

These Hopewell places are are justly famous for the many examples of Native American artistry that was left here as regalia or personal belongings, or as offerings.

Their work in textiles, in ceramics, metallurgy, that kind of knowledge takes decades to learn how to work those materials.

You know, as long as we've been humans, we've been as smart as we ever were.

And so for me, I don't want to call anyone a genius or a savage or anything like that.

I believe that we all had the same capabilities.

I think the wonderfulness of it is, is how the people here work together as a community to create all of these things.

I like to think about my ancestors as being smart enough to go, I don't really want to move a hoe too much, so I'm going to create a field of trees that will give me nuts every year at a certain time, and that will give us our fats and proteins.

Isn't that pretty smart?

To emphasize the genius of this design and the intention.

I want you to take a look where we came from.

That's the gateway where we entered into this earthwork.

But can see the gateway anymore?

No.

Not at all.

That■s one of the truly incredible things about this earthwork and these loaf shaped or gateway mounds.

They close off the exterior of the earthwork.

So when you're inside these walls, you■re truly inside of them.

They enclose you.

They embrace you.

So I wanted to bring you to another entry point to the earthwork.

We■re on the opposite side at Raccoon Creek.

This would have been the way that people were coming and visiting this earthwork.

The river■s always special to me I look at it and it's almost as though I can see them, because this is the way that they would have traveled.

We are surrounded by water pretty much here.

The confluence of Raccoon Creek and the Licking River come together to really surround the Newark earthworks.

And this is a common theme among Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.

These rivers really linked these sites.

And they also linked people.

The reason the Hopewell were so prolific throughout Ohio is, what's now called Ohio, is blessed with a fantastic water system.

And waters were the highways for native peoples.

All of the big earthworks are located on major waterways.

We know that travel by canoe along these waterways was the most efficient means of travel.

It's probably four times faster than overland travel, and you can carry probably four times as much cargo in a canoe than you can on your back.

This is the first time that I've seen Raccoon Creek.

I'm glad to be here.

This is also my first time seeing Raccoon Creek, and I think it's special that these places not only connect us physically, but spiritually as well.

The fact that it does both is important.

These things are not only the super highways of the time, but they are also the place where water exists and it thrives around us.

So the fact that you can see that reflected in something even 2000 years ago, I think is just one more connection that we have to this place.

This is Observatory Mound.

We call it Observatory Mound because it stands about six feet higher than the surrounding walls.

It's been called Observatory Mound since the early 1800s.

It was actually excavated in 1836 by what was then the Granville Theological and Literary Society.

They call themselves Denison University today.

Caleb Atwater in 1820, had suggested that the Observatory Mound was an archway that had collapsed over time.

So they did this excavation to see if that was the case.

But they weren't doing it to look for loot.

They were doing it to test a hypothesis, which I find extraordinary.

What did they find when they excavated it?

Well, they were expecting to find a bunch of rubble and debris.

What you would expect to see if it was indeed a collapsed archway.

But that's not what they found at all.

They go out and excavate this trench and determine conclusively that it's not a collapsed arch.

It's complete architecture.

It was an intentional structure built to block off a gateway and I don't know of another example in the Hopewell world.

We know that sometimes mounds are built to commemorate important locations.

So perhaps this was an entry point, an important part of the architecture of the site that was closed off or decommissioned at the end of its use life.

Even though that these places are decommissioned for their original use, that doesn't mean that these places weren't still special.

I think that's important, though, because there are so many people who think that the only purpose for mounds was burial, and all mounds are not burial mounds.

So decommission doesn't mean we, we took the human remains out and then we've changed purposes for it instead.

But it means that the original purpose has ended.

But we still mark important places in our history, and they are still sacred to us.

Yeah, these are places that contain memory, that contain significance.

And another really amazing part about the Observatory Circle here, is that's where we get one of the measurements that we kind of compare the dimensions of other sites to, and that's the Observatory Circle diameter.

And we see 20 acre circles down in Chillicothe, We see them down in southeastern Ohio.

We get that measure when we draw a straight line from one side of this circle to the other side.

And that measurement is 1054ft.

Comes from this enclosure right here.

It's kind of a fun thing to think about that they had a standard unit of measurement that lasted throughout the Hopewell time period, But it was communicated over that 400, 500 span of time.

It's amazing.

Truly incredible.

The Octagon Earthworks are one of the most remarkable sites of the Hopewell culture from my perspective.

It's a gigantic octagon connected to a perfect circle by a set of parallel walls.

So here you have two separate geometrical figures, united by a ceremonial passageway and something different is happening in the circular enclosure versus what's happening in the octagon enclosure.

So this is part of the grand design of the Octagon.

This is the avenue that connects the Octagon to Observatory Circle.

And Observatory Circle took on a whole new meaning when two professors from Earlham College in the 1980s came here to disprove the presence of astronomical alignments.

My training is not in archaeology.

I was trained as a theoretical astrophysicist, and my research interest in the Newark Earthworks actually began quite unexpectedly when I began my teaching career to about 50 years ago with my colleague Robert Horn.

We first in our course, studied the evidence for astronomical alignments at Stonehenge.

I was very skeptical because it's very easy to find random alignments that were never intended by the builders.

So I asked my colleague Bob horn if he knew of a prehistoric site close to Richmond, Indiana, where we could be almost certain that there was nothing sophisticated here.

What we wanted to do was bring our students here and teach them how to survey prehistoric structures.

The two things that I most remember was, first of all, a complete surprise that there was an 18 hole golf course embedded in the structure.

It was like entering a war zone, because we had to be conscious of these high velocity projectiles coming by our heads and occasionally the shout of “fore”, to warn us.

Our research proceeded slowly because we were not full-time researchers.

We were full-time teachers.

And so we pursued this research in our discretionary time as a labor of love, actually.

And it took me about two years to recognize that something special had happened here.

When we started surveying the site, the first thing I looked for was solar alignments.

And I couldn't find any.

Even after two years of accumulating survey data, I never fully appreciated what was going on here until I saw my first aerial photograph taken in 1934, of the site before it had been altered in any significant way.

And then everything changed for me because when you look at that photograph, you see how perfect the design of the octagon and the attached circle is.

It looks like it had been laid out by a professional draftsman using professional instruments.

These structures have to be aligned with something.

They didn't just build these things with this kind of precision at random.

And when we couldn't find any alignments at all to the sun, that's when we began to look at the moon.

They actually found that the Octagon is designed with the cyclical nature of the moon in mind.

This pathway aligns perfectly with the northernmost moonrise which doesn't occur every year or every two years, but only happens every 18.6 years.

Before Ray Hively and Robert Horn rediscovered these, these astronomical alignments, the Newark Earthworks were largely neglected.

And they'd written these two papers and then sort of nobody cared.

We were going to let the work speak for itself.

Well, it turns out in the in the academic community that rarely works.

You have to, publicize your work, you have to promote it, you have to travel to conferences.

We didn't, we didn't do that.

And after our first two papers were published, I don't think anyone read them or cared about them until Brad Lepper.

I read them and I got really excited by it, but I didn't understand a lot of it because, like the lunar cycle is, it's very complicated.

The moon is very hard to pay attention to in the first place, because it rises at all times of the day, all different phases.

There are eight points on the horizon that mark changing patterns, points of change in the movements of the moonrise and the moonset.

That's what people have to understand in order to grasp the genius of the Newark Octagon, because there are alignments there that mark all eight of those angles.

It's absolutely astonishing.

I thought most of archaeoastronomy was nonsense because without a historical record, the builders couldn't tell us what they did.

And a site could always be contaminated with just random alignments that are there by chance, and so how do you know the difference?

I never expected to find a symmetrical structure like this where every single detail could be explained by this single objective of lunar alignments.

All of our understanding of Hopewell astronomy begins with their work at the Octagon Earthworks.

It fundamentally changed the whole perspective.

And suddenly people were interested in Newark again.

And then later, they also determined that those same alignments were built into the High Bank Works.

So it's not a coincidence.

And then later still, they find some of these alignments and many of the other earthworks as well.

They are creating these earthworks so that they will align with the rhythms of the cosmos.

They are bringing the movements of the heavens down into these earthworks.

That 18.6 years, it was designed with that cycle.

It shows the length of planning because one cycle probably wouldn■t be enough to build an earthwork such as this.

You think about an 18.6 year cycle of the moon.

Okay.

How many times are you going to see that in your lifetime?

It's going to be a handful, two, three.

If you're really lucky, maybe four.

If you think about laying out a huge earthwork that lines up to the moon that way.

That means that your people have mechanisms in place to share that knowledge between generations.

To map the coming and going of time on such a large scale.

It's just, it's astounding.

I can't puzzle out what the need might have been to need to do that on such a grand level.

We still have constellations and we still celebrate solstices and equinoxes.

That's something that we still do as a community.

So it makes a lot of sense for me that 2000 years ago, these people are building these things in these alignments.

In addition to that 18.6, which proves that they knew astronomy and they knew it because they were nature people.

They were outside, they were paying attention, but they had to know mathematics, geometry.

All of that combined just goes to their genius.

Yes, they were taking so much into consideration when building the earthworks.

And the Newark Earthworks in particular, if they were paying attention to the broader landscape, because this earthwork is just one small section of what was once a 4.5mi■ complex of geometric earthworks interconnected by long parallel walls.

The other amazing section of the earthwork we have here is the Great Circle.

It's about a mile in that direction.

And that■s where you see some of the greatest design work still intact here at the Newark Earthworks.

The Newark Earthworks is the largest collection of geometric earthworks in the Hopewell world.

It spanned 4.5mi■.

7,000,000 cubic feet of earth were used to build all these mounds, and I think it was built in a relatively short period of time, according to a grand design.

The city of Newark occupies most of that space, and we're lucky that we have the Great Circle and the Octagon left, because they give us a real sense of how large it was in the past.

I can't think of the Great Circle without the Octagon.

I try to look at them holistically.

And so when I think about both of these sites, we have a very interesting story because it shows our holism and a complexity that we don't often think about.

Hey, Marti.

Hey, Logan.

How are you?

I'm good.

This is a good day to be here.

Yes, it is.

I mean, this is one of my favorite of the earthworks.

How was the Great Circle connected to the Octagon?

The Newark Earthworks are consisting of four giant, geometric shapes, and each one of them had a different purpose.

And we know that because of the way they were built.

So the people who built these sites showed us the way by building walkways that were bordered by low embankments about three feet tall, and they were as wide as a road that cars drive on today.

From here, we would go straight to Wright Square in the cemetery, and then we could take a pathway that was built between Wright Square and the Octagon.

They had a specific way they wanted us to move around the site.

So it's hard to imagine it, but they would have been able to travel easily between these sites.

Yes.

In some kind of processional ceremony or whatever they're doing here.

They provided guidance and instructions for how we were to move through the site.

We don't know if this was a beginning point or an end point.

We haven't deciphered that yet.

It's okay if we never do.

So how would the Miami people have entered the site?

And what can we learn from that about how the builders might have used it?

Well, based on how we do stomp dancing, which is actually a little bit more traditional of a dance for us, I would say we would enter a place like this counterclockwise.

That's not necessarily how they would have saw it, but I bet it's a lot closer than just going straight in.

Something about stomp dance too, stomp dance is not a quiet dance.

It is a joyful, celebratory, wonderful dance.

And I think that embodies what we see here.

And how it would have been used.

Not solemn and processional, but joyful and fast.

On that note, let's go in.

Yes.

The Great Circle is about 1200 feet across.

That's a dimension that we see in other places.

And the really interesting feature that it has is that there's an interior ditch.

We think in the past that they had lined it with clay so that there was water really surrounding the site.

So you'd be surrounded by water and just one pathway in and out.

The gateway, the entrance way into it, is one of the most monumental places where you can experience the power of earthen monumental architecture.

Walking in towards the undulating mound in the center.

It's a magnificent spatial experience.

It really is amazing just the size of this place now that we're here on the inside.

I mean, how many people do you think could even fit in here?

Thousands could fit here.

But we don't know that that's the intention of the builders.

It might have been more about coming in here with a few people.

Your family, your people in your village, the people that you're meeting up with, and then seeing how small you are as humans in relation to the universe.

It's not just a place to come and do something, it's a really grand place to come and do something.

These sites are places of ceremony, and ceremony can mean different things to different people and different tribes.

I could just see folks dancing in a large circle, in the Great Circle in our community today, and sharing a meal inside of there as well.

So it's to me, it just seems like a large powwow grounds that's protected by the earth around it.

This was not a burial area, but they could have had funerals here.

They could have had births ceremonies, naming ceremonies, weddings, celebrations, also could have been sport.

It could have been a commercial.

Powwows today are surrounded by commerce, food, crafts, items, all sorts of things.

Art.

So that could have been going on here, 2000 years ago too.

Something that I've always found interesting is that the walls are different sizes around, but it's so you have that even horizon.

So the land undulates.

Yes.

And they■ve accommodated for that and measured it so that they had a nice, even horizon.

Yeah.

Bringing in the landscape into it rather than just flattening the landscape and then building the earthwork.

Yes.

It's one of those values that Native people have respect to honor what is there and build on top of it.

They had an intent to be part of the landscape as much as they were to create something on the landscape, but it doesn't look dominating.

It looks embedded.

When I started looking at these earthworks, of course, I was looking at them as an architect.

The more I learned about them, the more I realized that, hey, these are landscape architecture.

They design these things on the ground.

They couldn't see them from the air, but they could imagine them from the air.

Here we are at Eagle Mound.

It's in the center of the circle.

It is three shapes, and it could be talons of a bird.

Could be an arrow.

But whatever it is, it's built to be higher than the rest of the ground, and that's significant.

You know, with Serpent Mound, when you look at Serpent Mound, it's a snake.

You can tell definitely that that's what it represents.

This is very unclear.

Hopewell mounds often tend to be just blobby mounds.

It's like an ink blot test where you can see different things in it.

It doesn't mean Hopewell were creating animal shaped mounds, but it has the name Eagle Mound here at Newark, and it's a nice name.

So it has stuck.

I know at some of the other earthworks, sometimes the mounds and earthworks are used to cover something else.

Do we know if there's anything underneath the ground here?

It■s said that there was an altar here, possibly used to prepare relatives for burial or cremation, and that it was a special place.

There was a longhouse beneath Eagle Mound at the Great Circle, with sets of walls coming off the front corners that formed sort of like the wings of the eagle.

There were no burials there.

There was at the very center of that longhouse, a clay basin shaped sort of like a bathtub.

And many fires had burned in that clay basin.

If it was used for crematory basin, though the remains or whatever, the ashes, everything was cleaned out and removed.

And if they were ancestors, they would have been maybe put in a leather bag or a basket and carried in ceremonial processions to the burial mounds.

And with Hopewell, once those ceremonies are concluded, every place that were were there ceremonies or spiritual things were happening, they took down and covered with mounds.

Newark was built on top of these sites.

We are grateful that the Great Circle and the Octagon and part of the Wright Square was not built on top of because the settlers recognized it was something ancient and special.

Is there a reason that they didn't build here and at the Octagon, compared to some of the other sites?

Well, the preservation efforts really began in 1910, 1900.

They were made parks and open to the public and to be preserved.

That doesn't mean they didn't use the site in different ways.

This was the site of a county fair.

They had big gatherings.

It was used for the Civil War Veterans Association to have a 7000 person reunion here.

General William Tecumseh Sherman, Civil War hero, also Indian fighter, ironically spoke here.

But his stand fell during the speech.

He was okay.

But I think there's a little karma going on there.

And then it was a amusement park.

Idlewilde Park.

They had races around it.

Gift shops.

Ferris wheel.

Merry-go-round.

Tavern.

Hotel.

And apparently, when the Civilian Conservation Corps tore all those down, they weren■t careful about picking up all the nails.

There's just this cloud of historic debris that covers anything that might be underneath it.

So, frustratingly, you won't have that opportunity of seeing into the ground and probably other things that have been lost to time.

So what's changed since then?

I think throughout the 30s and 40s people started getting really interested in its history.

In the 1970s, people got interested in art.

Different museums had a lot of artifacts from this era.

There were collectors and so forth.

So the interest was growing.

But in the 1980s, when two scholars from Indiana determined that the major lunar standstill was observed at the Octagon, interest just exploded in the 1990s.

In the brief, long history of the Octagon.

I think it's always really important to say that in the 1890s, the citizens of Licking County voted overwhelmingly to increase their own taxes to preserve the site.

So it starts with the public deciding this was an important place over 100 years ago.

And like 90% of the people in Newark voted to raise their taxes to get the money to buy it, to save it.

But that's how it gets saved.

Local people just say, let's pony up the money so that that site can be preserved, and we'll find some kind of use for it.

That was in the 1890s.

It became the encampment for the state militia state militia outgrew it.

By 1910 1911, a decision had been made by local leaders that it should become a new country club.

The general community wanted it to be a public park, but the country club wanted it to be this golf course Every member of the New York Board of Trade was a member of the country club, so they voted to make it a golf course rather than a public park.

Fast forward to the 1930s, Newark Board of Trade, they went defunct during the depression.

They were sort of looking around for like, who should hold the deed to this place?

And the Ohio Historical and Archaeological Society decided that, you know, we would be appropriate as an organization to actually hold the deed, but that the golf course would continue.

It was always understood that the public should have access to it.

That's actually in the deed.

As we get in towards like the late 1980s, 1990s, that public access started to erode.

When I first came to the Octagon, that was a jarring experience in that it was state owned land leased by a private country club and I could not go on to it.

Just as a citizen of the United States, as a resident of Ohio, as a Native person, I was excluded from that.

So in the 1990s, the country club wanted to expand the clubhouse.

The country club announced that they were going to tear down their existing structure and build a new structure, like twice as big.

Jeff Gill and I saw it on the front page of The Advocate, and we were horrified.

We■re like, what the hell?

Dick Shiels, history professor at OSU Newark.

He was the one that really got outraged.

He started involving Indigenous people.

He started reaching out.

And the circle of concerned people started growing and growing.

The country club wanted a lease extension.

You know, the lease was going to go on for many, many decades.

Ultimately, the extension,of the lease was approved, and they were going to be able to lease it through 2078.

Behind a closed door meeting, which should not have occurred because they received a great deal of money from the state of Ohio, which doors are supposed to be open.

They renewed the lease without any public discussion.

When the people who were interested in the earthworks found out about it, they created something called Friends of the Mounds.

And what they basically did was share the story of the earthworks and what was happening, how people did not have access to it.

And there started to be negotiations with the property owner, now called Ohio History Connection.

Friends of the Mounds began around 1999, and it began with professors from The Ohio State University and Denison.

And part of the goals was to save the earthworks from from damage.

It was also part of receiving public access because the original contract that Ohio Historical Connections had with the country club was that there would be public access, and there at this point had not been public access.

The next goal of the Friends of the Mounds was that we would look into the possibility of this site being a World Heritage site, and what would that mean?

We're a community group.

We don't hold any political power, but our power was to be able to present and to talk and to educate.

So our protests were in the form of giving a conference.

We had moonrise events, so that we could reach larger audiences about what was happening.

At Ohio State, we began doing annual events called Newark Earthworks Day to bring the public out and to invite people to talk about it.

And that went so far to teaching the public about the sites and to respect them as sacred Indigenous sites, as important to the history of Ohio and to the world.

The big moment, I think, was Dick Shiels.

Dick was the first director of the Newark Earthworks Center, an incredible ally to native people, a great listener, but also a tireless promoter of accessibility to the Octagon, preservation, promotion of the Great Circle.

He and others convinced OSU Newark to take the Newark Earthworks Center on as an academic research center, and it became a lightning rod.

We all worked there to get to that place.

With that in mind, there was a great deal of change at the Ohio Historical Connections, and that was what was needed, was the change.

They had an opportunity to change the directors.

They had an opportunity to change their perspective, their programs.

They started participating in the golf-free days, started having people here to give information.

It suddenly did not become just the Friends of the Mounds or the Newark Earthworks Center.

It was a collaboration of different groups coming together.

We've been working on it since 2005 or so, but after 2007, Chief Glenna Wallace came here and the interest from tribes really grew from that.

I was here and walked these grounds one time, and there was a golfer, who said to us, please don't walk on our grass.

It was all I could do to bite my tongue because I wanted to say, please don't golf on our mounds.

And so I walked away, entirely focused upon these mounds.

And how do we continue to have them to be preserved?

Tribal engagement picked up the idea that, you know, gosh, it really shouldn't be a golf course and a country club It really should be open to the public every day.

So all of that kind of came together to really change the way the leadership at Ohio, now History Connection was thinking.

And that's how we got to World Heritage, was it was a community wide, scholar wide, tribal effort to get the sites recognized forever as World Heritage Sites.

If the Octagon Earthworks had stayed a golf course, we would not have been able to include it in the nomination.

The fact that access was restricted for so much of the year really made it a difficult sell to say this should be a World Heritage site.

So early on, we were negotiating to try to get more public access and that wasn't working out.

Fast forward to today, where we went through a time period where we tried to negotiate out of the lease and couldn't come to an agreement, so took legal action.

That was settled.

Ohio History Connection bought out the remainder of the lease from Moundbuilders Country Club, and so on January 1st of 2025, it became, open to the public every day.

Today is the first day that we have public access to the site after over 100 years of the site being a private golf club.

I think this is a big victory and respectful use of these sacred spaces.

And so to make it available to all, and so that all Native people will be able to visit this site is important.

I find myself at awe that I'm actually sitting here in, in the country club.

Inside legally, no one's throwing anything at me and I can sit here and look and see what I couldn't see before.

To give credit to all groups.

We all had positions.

We all had a goal of focus.

None of us really knew quite how we were going to get there.

But really, the only way we could get there would be together.

I love the Newark Earthworks.

We have World Heritage for eight of the ancestral mounds here in Ohio now, but I have to say, my goal was not to achieve World Heritage.

I had one single goal, that was remove a golf course, and it was Ohio History that made that possible.

I think now that it■s in the possession of the History Connection, to preserve and interpret to the public, once again, I think we■re in a much better place to kind of do justice to the legacy of Hopewell society.

And I think that only opens up more doors with the citizens of Ohio, but also with Indigenous communities.

There would be more engagement, more opportunities of site visitation.

This is now for everyone to come and experience, and we want them to learn about these places, about how the descendants of the builders interpret them, and using that in combination with all the work that came before us and making that really accessible to everyone.

And it's okay if we don't know everything.

It's not possible to know everything about why these places were built and what they meant to the people.

But I do know that together, we're stronger in preserving these places for the future and making sure that people have an Indigenous understanding of them.

So tonight we're here at the great Octagon Earthworks, looking at the lunar alignment.

Every 18.6 years, this happens.

That's why it's so significant with me is because, yes, it shows the manpower and genius that goes behind these earthworks, but also I get to share it with my mom who■s in attendance here tonight.

There've been so many people that I've seen here that I've met years before, and it's been a journey that so many of us have taken together.

We've devoted much of our lives to it.

I've been studying these people and this site for most of my career, more than 30 years.

And to be able to stand where they stood and watch along the alignments and see the same moon that they saw rise where they knew it would rise and where they designed the earthworks to showcase it.

It's really thrilling.

There is an author, Jim Graham, who■s writing a book relating to the Newark Earthworks, who was there for that occasion, and he wrote this description.

The moon would inch over the horizon at 9:44, but it would be another 15 minutes or so before the moon's aura would fill the darkness above the tree line.

We waited and waited.

Slowly the glow grew.

And then we thought we saw a spark.

Then more spark through the thick, distant trees With branches as points of reference, you can see the moon move.

The crowd was almost completely silent.

We were in church, after all.

Soft whispers to guard the precious quiet.

Crickets were louder than people.

Reverence.

Respect for those most deserving of the view.

The Indigenous seated in front like the family closest to the nuptials, or the wake.

People were careful with their phone cameras.

Not a flash happened.

Most just watched the slow rise and growing light.

As the moon rose above the trees, I saw a meteor mark a trail through the north end of the Hopewell alley, like a welcoming smile.

When I first read the draft of this, it made me cry.

I uh I wish I'd been there.

It's a legacy and a message for the present, for anyone who could experience this.

And the message is what any people can do when they are united behind an idea.

It has the power to inspire their imagination, their courage and their curiosity.

It's a source of inspiration to everybody.

I obviously love this place.

It's the first place I came and realized that my ancestor■s heritage was connected to this place.

And if we don't preserve this place, then have we lost all trace of our ancestors?

Someday, I■ll be one of those ancestors.

And I'd want people to, to protect what we fought for as well.

Hopewell Earthworks: Stories Written on the Land is funded in part by the America 250 Ohio Commission.

Production support for Hopewell Earthworks: Stories Written on the Land is powered by the Storytellers Trust.