Samantha Skenandore featured in article "Making the past present: Beloit College faculty, students raise awareness of burial mounds"
Samantha Skenandore spoke to the Beloit Daily News about an initiative to preserve, protect and raise awareness about the Indian mounds located on the Beloit College campus.
Below is an excerpt:
“Since I was a little girl, I was counseled by my elders to not share certain things about our culture, because to do so came at a great risk,” Skenandore said. “The lesson was that if you share our most sacred knowledge, someone can then destroy it. This is very similar to modern legal concepts involving proprietary rights. Yet it is hard to hide an earthen structure that spans more than a hundred feet and even more difficult to hide a grouping of the same. Ho-Chunks have endured generations of efforts to expose the cultural meanings of the mounds generally and specific to certain mound groups. It seems that the Nation continues to observe an unwritten rule to decline the opportunity to share.”
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“These realities certainly bring many challenges and the Nation is known to help property owners adopt custom maintenance plans and best practices,” Skenandore said. “The Nation has worked closely with the Wisconsin State Archaeologist and the Burial Sites Preservation Office to enforce the Wisconsin law on burial sites preservation.”