Charlatans are still trying to strip American Indians of their heritage by claiming that some mysterious lost race of white people, giants or aliens built Ohio’s ancient earthworks.

It seems I can no longer give a public program about Ohio’s amazing ancient American Indian mounds without someone in the audience asking me about giants, or the lost tribes of Israel — or even aliens.

I try to address these questions politely and explain that there is no hard evidence that any of these things had anything to do with Ohio’s mounds. Occasionally, if the person asking the question is a true believer, they’ll accuse me of lying and hiding the evidence that would prove me wrong.

Some people actually believe that the Ohio History Connection (along with the Smithsonian Institution) has skeletons of giant humans in our collections that we keep hidden from the public. The first time someone accused me of this I was dumbfounded and asked, "Why on earth would we do that?"

The surprising answer was that the existence of giant humans supposedly would undermine Darwin’s theory of evolution, which the priesthood of science was sworn to protect. I pointed out that if the existence of giant sloths during the ice age didn’t cause any problems for evolutionary theory (Darwin himself excavated one of these skeletons in South America during the period when he was first contemplating how all of life’s diversity came to be), then giant humans wouldn’t present much of a problem either. Sadly, such arguments do nothing to persuade diehard conspiracy theorists that they might be wrong.

Ironically, there actually was a government conspiracy to cover up the truth about who really built Ohio’s mounds. Jason Colavito shares this story in his new book, "The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a ‘Lost White Race.’"

Prior to the Revolutionary War, the fact that the mounds had been built by American Indians was "so well-established that it required neither explanation nor defense." By the time Andrew Jackson became president in 1829, however, that idea had become an inconvenient truth.

In his efforts to remove American Indian tribes from their lands in the Eastern United States, Jackson claimed that the mounds had been built by an "unknown people" who were exterminated by the "existing savage tribes." Therefore, the United States government was perfectly justified in removing those tribes from the lands they had stolen from the supposedly more civilized lost race of Mound Builders.

Colavito writes that during the age of Jacksonian democracy, "truth was malleable and decided not by expertise or authority but by emotion and majoritarian belief." If that sounds familiar, recall Clarence Darrow’s wise words: "History repeats itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history."

Colavito’s book is an attempt to "engage with the dark consequences of false historical narratives," and he makes it clear that those same narratives and dark consequences are still with us today.

Charlatans are still trying to strip American Indians of their heritage by claiming that some mysterious lost race of white people, giants or aliens built Ohio’s ancient earthworks.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is taking land away from tribes such as the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians in California and the Mashpee Wampanoag in Massachusetts.

Bradley Lepper is a curator of archaeology at the Ohio History Connection.

blepper@ohiohistory.org