Jennifer Colten

The American Bottom

The American Bottom encompasses the 175 square miles of Illinois lowlands along the east side of the Mississippi River across from St. Louis.

This is a place where floodplains, wetlands, industries of extraction, company towns, farming communities, and Native American sacred mounds reside in long-standing and uneasy relationship to one another.

The American Bottom is a landscape that can be quite literally hard to see. This is a place that appears at first banal, with an unrelenting flatness, yet it is also a land filled with centuries of cultural unraveling and environmental destruction.

The region has been crucial to the evolution of the country, yet it is often seen as peripheral. Like much of the Midwest, the region is frequently considered a “drive right through it” landscape rather than a reflection of the nation’s social, racial, and ecological legacies.

And yet, there is resilience and beauty as well—a parallel reality that reflects the human and ecological paradoxes of our time.

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Significant & Insignificant Mounds

The American Bottom region and its historical relationship to the Native American Mississippian culture is still widely under-recognized. Here, the people who built the interconnected series of Mounds that straddled both sides of the Mississippi River advanced thriving communities, including the Cahokia Mounds complex—the largest pre-Columbian trade network north of Mexico ~ (700- 1400 AD).

This landscape was once filled with hundreds of Native American mounds. Yet today the vast majority of the sites have been erased—bulldozed and replaced with shopping centers, parking lots, or the earth used as backfill along the banks of the Mississippi River. The infrastructures, chemical processing, and extractive mining in the American Bottom have been crucial not just to the evolution of the wider St. Louis region but were also central to the development and economies across the United States.

This near-complete dismantling of Native American sacred space underlies nearly everything in this landscape. In contrast to the open sense of promise depicted in the myths and ideals of 19^th century Westward Expansion photographs, Significant & Insignificant Mounds aims to challenge embedded perceptions of ownership and belonging—raising questions about how value is measured in our contemporary experience of uncertainties.

To work with landscape is to embrace and to challenge a long history of representation. To work specifically with photography is to consciously choose a medium so ubiquitous that its imagery is often either overused or easily dismissed. Significant & Insignificant Mounds attempts to reckon with the region’s uncanny adjacencies where ancient Mississippian mound sites reside in proximity to the more recent mounds of 20^th and 21^st century industrialization and extraction.

The value judgments suggested in this project's title are not intended to present a simple binary. Each of these mounds is, on its own terms, both significant and insignificant. They are all markers to a way of being, and a way of seeing the world.

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The American Bottom

Significant & Insignificant Mounds

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