SCIENCE science.org 27 MAY 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6596 925PHOTO: MICHAEL GOTTSCHALK/PHOTOTHEK/GETTY IMAGES
By Laura StarkT
he phrase “origin story” has a whiff
of fabulation. For avowed storytellers,
untruth is the heart of the joke shared
with a winking audience. But In Whose
Ruins, by Alicia Puglionesi, traces
19th-century origin stories passed off
and then passed on as empirical fact—with
the effect of placing white people as rightful
inheritors of American lands stewarded by
Native communities. There are no individual
evildoers in the book, which follows people,
both white and minoritized, whose actions
range from the harebrained to the heroic.
The culprit of the book is capitalism itself.
The action unfolds in the industrial age of
the American 19th century and extends to
the 21st. The “power” of the subtitle refers
to both political and material power—energy
sources given market value under industrial
capitalism, including hydropower, nuclear
power, and oil. The book visits four modest
places with marvelous landforms, the gravi-
tational centers of the book around which
human desires orbit—and there is much to
covet. It is rare for a work of political pas-
sion to be such a well-told story. The book is
inquisitive and sympathetic, artful not dour,
worried about political overreach but going
for it nonetheless.
One archetypal white American origin
story is the myth of the lost white tribe. In the
19th century, a vaguely documented theory
took hold among white elites and everyday
folks that a tribe of white people inhabited
North America prior to the people we rightly
regard as Indigenous to the land. At stake
was the project of manifest destiny, the idea
that white settlers were the (Christian) God-
given inheritors of the land, a notion that still
has legs today.
Along the Ohio River, an ancient burial
mound bulges above farm fields, a site
that white settlers called the Grave Creek
Mound. Native people recognized this type
of earthwork as a sacred internment site for
their dead. But for settlers, the enormousSCIENCE AND SOCIETYsize of the complex indicated it was built
by people with ingenuity and engineering
skills—traits they refused to believe Native
people possessed. White onlookers were so
invested in their disbelief that they pressed
it into fact, attributing the earthwork to a
lost white tribe.
The myth of this lost tribe wandered
northward into white people’s explanations
for oil wells dug into the Appa-
lachian foothills, apparent when
settlers arrived. Native communi-
ties had dug holes to draw petro-
leum for purposes of ceremony,
fuel, and trade. For very differ-
ent reasons, white speculators
pocked the same ground when
oil was given commodity value in
the late 19th century. They made
shallow use of techniques appro-
priated from Native life—as mere
guides to the oil’s location—without the
corollary commitment to long-term care.
Yet Native scholars and communities
retained the empirical and cultural his-
tories of each of the book’s four sites. A
pile of rocks marked with ancient Native
petroglyphs sat in the brambly back corner
of a Baltimore park until Native organiz-ers and archaeologists reinstalled them to
the site from which they were extracted.
In the early 20th century, well-intended
white preservationists blasted the rock im-
ages from a riverbed to “rescue” them from
the encroaching capitalist state. When the
Conowingo Dam was built, it flooded the
lands and submerged the inscribed rocks,
whose brilliance some white scientists and
citizens had attributed to—guess who?—
America’s lost white tribe.
By the early 20th century, the myth of the
lost white race began to recede, but the anx-
ieties that nourished it sprouted another
theory that justified white dominance over
Native communities. The theory of the “van-
ishing Indian” taught that Native people
would soon be extinct, but not for obvious
reasons of dispossession and extermination.
Puglionesi travels to the Sonoran Desert,
where the theory of the vanishing Indian
drove a white romance with Native
lifeways and an authenticity indus-
try. This commercial market mush-
roomed alongside the Manhattan
Project and postwar nuclear bomb
tests on Native lands and people.
Despite their whiff of falseness,
the theories of the lost white
tribe and vanishing Indian work
a strange magic. They reproduce
white dominance, while the land-
scapes to which the stories refer
appear as evidence of dominance’s end.
For Puglionesi, the end of the world as we
know it is not a tragedy but a hope: “So
many of our stories dance around the hor-
ror of a treasure that is cursed, and the fear
of letting it go. The point is to see that not
as ruin, but as life itself.” j
10.1126/science.abq0953A historian confronts the stories used to sell the American
manifest destiny project
Food for All in Africa:
Sustainable Intensifi cation
for African Farmers
Gordon Conway, Ousmane Badiane,
Katrin Glatzel
Comstock Publishing Associates,- 342 pp.
PODCASTThe reviewer is at the Department of History and
the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235, USA.
Email: [email protected]SCIENCE & FOODBOOKS et al.
The myth of the lost white tribe
Africa’s food producers face distinctive chal-
lenges, ranging from the geopolitical to the
environmental. Meeting the nutritional needs
of the continent requires efforts that recog-
nize these challenges and take advantage of
the region’s assets. This week on the Science
podcast, Ousmane Badiane discusses strate-
gies for combating hunger and outlines how
genetically enhanced crops and homegrown
technologies could help increase the conti-
nent’s food production sustainably.
https://bit.ly/3wftLDo10.1126/science.abq6525Two farmers work a field supported by the farming cooperative
Mitoonini in Kirinyaga, Kenya, in 2017.In Whose Ruins
Alicia Puglionesi
Scribner, 2022. 368 pp.