The Marching Bears of Iowa

by Lori Erickson

Nov 23, 2023

This is an excerpt from the introduction of Lori Erickson’s new book Every Step is Home: A Spiritual Geography from Appalachia to Alaska (Westminster John Knox Press, 2023). This segment is reprinted with the permission of the author and the press. In this selection, Erickson writes of the Effigy Mounds of northeast Iowa, and how she attempted to connect with their spiritual resonances. Underneath our Thanksgiving mythology and industrial agriculture, lie treasures that are often ignored. Erickson attempts to probe the mystery and message of these sacred Indigenous landmarks.

Listen to my podcast interview with Lori Erickson (and Monica Leo) about Every Step is Home. From Mary Swander’s Buggy Land Episode #53:

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Not far from where I grew up in northeastern Iowa, ten bears march across a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. They’ve been marching there for at least eight centuries, in rain and snow and sunshine, through seasons of drought and rain, silent witnesses to an ever-changing world around them. Unconcerned by the occasional airplane flying overhead and the barges passing by on the river below, the bears continue their steady, mysterious march.

As a travel writer who specializes in holy places, I’m embarrassed to say that for most of my life I’ve ignored this spiritual treasure in my own backyard. I visited Effigy Mounds National Monument mainly for hiking, largely oblivious to its more than two hundred prehistoric Indigenous mounds, thirty-one of which are in the shape of bears or birds. And I’d never even visited its most significant site—the Marching Bear Group that stretches for nearly a quarter mile across the top of a bluff.

In my defense, it’s easy to overlook earthen mounds like these, which are among the many thousands built by the native peoples of North America before Europeans arrived on the continent. Through the past centuries the great majority have been plowed and bulldozed, and even those that remain require some effort and imagination to appreciate. Without a trained eye, a prehistoric mound, even a bear-shaped one, can look like just another small hill covered by grass.

But once I discovered those Marching Bears, once I’d walked and sat and prayed among them, I’ve come to realize that they carry a powerful spiritual message, one with multiple layers of meaning. In reflecting on them, I realize that this sacred site is from a culture that’s not mine, and that I’m only a visitor there. But the sign at the entrance to the monument invites the public to experience Effigy Mounds as a sacred place, and I’m not one to refuse such an invitation.

One message from those bears is that the spiritual path calls for subtlety and discernment. Just as it’s easy to overlook these mounds, it’s easy to miss the sacred that threads through all of life. The Marching Bears appear quite different from overhead—the raptors that glide on the breezes above them, in other words, have the best view. So maybe the lesson here is that the sacred requires us to shift perspective, to get out of our ordinary plane of existence and find a new vantage point.

Here at the monument, the largest earthen structure is the Great Bear Mound, a huge creature lying on its side. If this bear stood up it would be seventy feet in height—a formidable animal indeed to encounter on an afternoon walk. There are less showy mounds here too; some are circular, others are in the form of rounded rectangles, and a third type is a combination of the two, so that the mound looks like a necklace of huge beads. The mounds rise to a height of two to eight feet above the forest floor, their shapes delineated by grass that’s allowed to grow to a greater height than the surrounding turf.

All of these earthen works were created between 850 and 1,400 years ago by hunter-gatherers who lived off the rich resources of this fertile river valley. They harvested fish and mussels from the Mississippi, hunted deer and elk, and foraged for berries, wild rice, acorns, and other foods in the wetlands and forests of the region. In the midst of it all they found time to carry countless baskets of earth to form mounds, laboriously shaping some of them into animal forms.

Because these people left no written records, we can only guess why the mounds were built or how they were used. Many of the mounds contain human remains, but they likely had ceremonial uses as well. Perhaps mound-building marked celestial events or delineated boundaries between groups. Maybe it was a way to connect with ancestors, mark the arrival of a season, or affirm clan identities.

Sometime around 850 years ago the building stopped. The shift coincided with a change to a more settled agricultural existence, with people living in larger villages instead of small groups. Then in the late 1600s, European fur traders began arriving in the area, followed in the 1840s by an influx of settlers, who logged and plowed the land containing the mounds, oblivious to their significance. Surveys in the 1800s and early 1900s list more than ten thousand mounds in northeastern Iowa alone; within a century, fewer than a thousand were left. Thankfully, the ones at Effigy Mounds were preserved in a national monument in 1949.

President Harry Truman created the monument because of its archaeological significance, and throughout the 1950s and ’60s, excavations were done on many of the mounds. In the 1970s Indigenous rights groups started speaking out against the practice of excavating native burials, which led to many changes in how archaeologists treat prehistoric sites. Especially after a criminal case in 2016 involving an Effigy Mounds superintendent who kept Indigenous remains in his own possession, today the U.S. National Park Service works hard to maintain good relations with twenty tribes affiliated with Effigy Mounds National Monument. Among them are the Ho-Chunk, Otoe-Missouria, Winnebago, Sac and Fox, Santee Sioux, and the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. Ceremonies are occasionally held there, and prayer bundles, ties, and flags can be seen throughout the park.

Having grown up less than an hour away from Effigy Mounds, I’ve visited the monument many times through the years, but it wasn’t until I discovered the Marching Bear Group that I began to better understand why tribal nations value it so highly as a spiritual landmark. These mounds are located in a part of the park that gets less use than the trails near the visitor center. On top of a high bluff, a row of ten bear-shaped effigies runs through a corridor of green grass bordered by trees. Though the individual bears are about twenty feet shorter than the Great Bear Mound, if they got up and started marching past me the line would stretch beyond my line of sight, an ursine parade of massive power.

I have a lot of questions about these bears. What did they mean to the people who built them? What rituals were done here? Why are there so many bear effigies in one spot? Why are they all facing the same direction? I’ll never know the answers to these questions, but on a summer day it’s pleasant to speculate on them, giving me something to think about as I soak up the sun, the view, and the fresh air.

As I settle deeper into the silence, the quiet holiness of the site laps at the edges of my consciousness. I’ve been to sacred sites around the world, from ornate cathedrals and temples filled with devotees to sacred mountains with their tops wreathed in clouds. The sense of holiness at Effigy Mounds is subtler, perhaps more in keeping with midwestern sensibilities, but there’s an undeniable sense of the sacred here, fully as palpable as at any of those other landmarks. I get the sense of being part of a long line of pilgrims who have traveled here for renewal and inspiration.

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