FEATURE
“Braiding Knowledge: A New Model for Interpretation at Caddo Mounds State Historic Site” by Rachel Galan and Maggie Leysath, introduced by Christina Cid
The Summer Sunflowers in Snake Woman's Garden are a draw for pollinators and visitors. Photo by Texas Historical Commission.
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION:
Caddo Mounds State Historic Site draws me back, again and again. Not just for the earthen mounds that rise from the east Texas landscape or the deep history they hold. I return because of the extraordinary women who continue to shape how we understand this place: Lauren Toho-Morrow Haupt (Caddo/Muskoke/Seminole), Jackie Bullard (Caddo), and Rachel Galan, along with many others. These knowledge holders and scholars deepen my understanding of what it means to center Indigenous voices, to listen deeply, and to walk with humility.
In “Braiding Knowledge: A New Model for Interpretation at Caddo Mounds State Historic Site,” Rachel Galan and Maggie Leysath describe how they reimagined their interpretive work on ancestral Caddo homelands after an EF-3 tornado raced through the site in 2019. The storm became a catalyst for healing and reflection. Drawing inspiration from Robin Wall Kimmerer and the National Science Foundation Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science, Rachel developed a new framework that adopted the metaphor of "braiding." The framework weaves three distinct strands together in interpretive and land-conservation programs: Indigenous ways of knowing, Western science, and the arts.
Since the article’s first publication, the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma and the Texas Historical Commission signed a groundbreaking Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to guide cultural resource planning at Caddo Mounds and other Caddo sites across Texas. As reported by Yo Hasinai News (aorcutt8, 2025), “The agreement formally recognizes the Caddo Nation's deep historical and cultural ties to Texas and ensures the Nation has a direct role in decision-making regarding the protection of ancestral lands, sacred sites, cultural resources, and ceremonial items.”
This MOU is an important step in transforming words into action. It takes the collaborative framework described in “Braiding Knowledge” and formalizes it in government-to-government relationships, creating commitments that honor past wrongs and forge partnerships for the future. It demonstrates that missteps become opportunities for growth when approached with deep listening and commitment.
Whether you work at a national park, historic site, or museum, “Braiding Knowledge” offers practical wisdom for building authentic relationships with descendant communities. It shows us that the most profound interpretation happens not when we speak, but when we create space for the voices that matter most: the voices of those whose ancestors walked these grounds, whose stories pulse through these places, and whose continued presence reminds us that this history is not past, but living.
Texas Monthly's video "The Story: Back to the Roots" offers a powerful glimpse of this work in action, capturing Caddo people strengthening their ancestral connections at Caddo Mounds and bringing the principles in “Braiding Knowledge” to life.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
Braiding Knowledge: A New Model for Interpretation at Caddo Mounds State Historic Site
By Rachel Galan and Maggie Leysath
Shahó, Endings, and Beginnings
The challenge of working in interpretation in the midst of traumatic events catalyzed for Rachel and Maggie in the violent tangle left on April 13th, 2019, by an EF3 tornado. On the day Whirlwind Woman crossed our path, people from numerous communities were gathered for Caddo Culture Day. For decades, this popular event brought together Caddo culture keepers, visitors, and volunteers to celebrate the Caddo people in their ancestral home.
Perhaps you have experiences or can imagine the snag of interpretation in the midst of personal trauma. That April, traumatic life-changing events necessitated years of interpretive work to find meaning personally and within the story of place. Caddo language revitalizationist, Alaina Tahlate, gifted us with the word shahó, the Caddo word for the tornado experience. Having this shared language for our experience was the first step in understanding the events that started on April 13th. The devastation of that day has unique resonance through the lives of all who attended Caddo Culture Day, a resonance that vibrates through family, friends, and community. Opportunities to process and share our stories through the arts have played an important part in our meaning-making and healing journeys.
The tornado destroyed most modern Caddo Mounds State Historic Site (CMSHC) structures, literally clearing the slate and requiring a rebuilding and reimagining of not just the physical structures, but the foundation for all that we do. What follows is how that reimagining and rebuilding of Caddo Mounds initiatives has been a healing journey for two educators/interpreters drawn to a place, entwined by the events of April 13th, and constantly grappling with the paradox of doing our jobs on ancient and sacred ancestral Caddo land.
Rachel Galan
Maggie Leysath
Fire kindled in the grass house's central hearth draws community inside during a winter program at Caddo Mounds. Photo by Texas Historical Commission.
Rebuilding is an opportunity to do better. After the tornado, a year’s worth of healing and reckoning, followed by the COVID years, our relationship to place grew in importance. Rachel and Maggie looked to metaphor in interpreting the ways in which the 397 acres, now CMSHS, has nourished and healed inhabitants throughout time. The overarching metaphor for the initiatives born of shahó is braiding with a fundamental desire for reciprocity. Braiding is a metaphor used to establish a particular relationship. In braiding, each strand remains an individual entity, but all strands come together to form the whole, as discussed in Gloria Snively and Wanosts'a7 Lorna Williams’s edited collection Knowing Home: Braiding Indigenous Science with Western Science. Reciprocity is defined in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass For Young Adults as “a mutual exchange or dependence that benefits both, each, and all but also includes mutual responsibilities.” Working with the lens of reciprocity prompts us to look for ways to learn and engage in our responsibilities to place and people.
New Caddo Mounds State Historic Site initiatives braid the strands of Indigenous ways of knowing, Western-based science, and the arts. The first initiatives emerging from this act of braiding focus on co-stewardship for land conservation and the interpretive programs that take this learning to families through Creative STEM experiences. These Creative STEM experiences are being developed in partnership with the High Desert Museum’s National Science Foundation funding under Grant #2115488.
The Caddo Grass House Build Trainees. Photo by Texas Historical Commission.
Land Conservation, Co-Stewardship and Moral Communities
As part of the Heritage and the Human Spirit research project, CMSHS with the University of Missouri—St. Louis’s Dr. Theresa Coble, faculty mentors, doctoral students, and Caddo citizen Lauren Haupt are carefully studying published works and stakeholder interviews to examine the concept of becoming naturalized or indigenous to place as described by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, as well as being “of” or “from” a place as described by Dr. Martin Shaw in his essay “Small Gods.”
Early on in the process, this work inspired a rethinking of how we approach land conservation at CMSHS, primarily: how we can alter our approach to land conservation to focus on building a co-stewardship relationship with the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma. More than simply partnership, co-stewardship at CMSHS requires the building and nurturing of a moral community that prioritizes Caddo-centered land conservation. In her book, Yakama Rising: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Activism, and Healing, Michelle M. Jacob discusses moral community as the result of institutions who protect Indigenous peoples’ right to learn about their culture and language. This moral community recognizes the inherent worth of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in fostering land health and nurturing the culturally significant plants and animals critical to the revitalization and preservation of Caddo cultural practices. It must include Caddo citizens and the tribal government, Texas Historical Commission (THC) leadership, site staff and volunteers, and community partners.
Co-stewardship and the building of a moral community are constructed on knowledge of history and the importance of land conservation initiatives for the Caddo. Lauren Haupt describes the ancient relationship contemporary Caddo have to their ancestral lands:
“At the height of their civilization, circa 1100 CE, a group of Caddo known as the Hasinai were the most highly advanced society within the boundaries of present-day Texas. It is unknown why the Caddo transitioned from this site around 1300 CE, but it was planned, as evidenced by the final layers of clay capping the mounds.
The main Caddo Homeland lies south of the Arkansas River in the valleys and tributaries of the Ouachita, Red, Sabine, and Neches rivers where the historically documented Caddo speakers lived until the 19th century. This area, sometimes referred to as the Southern Caddo Area, has abundant and unmistakable archeological evidence that indicates ancestral Caddo lived there since at least 800 CE and probably for 3000-4000 years or longer.
In other words, within the main Caddo Homeland, the cultural continuity is unbroken from prehistory to early history and the link to today's Caddo Nation of Oklahoma is unquestioned.”
The Creative STEM Team in Oregon for project training with the High Desert Museum. Photo by Texas Historical Commission.
Within the land at CMSHS is an ancient burial mound holding generations of Caddo political and spiritual leaders. Forced removal means that the seat of the Caddo community is almost 400 miles away from CMSHS in Binger, Oklahoma.
Lauren also shares the importance of braided land conservation initiatives at CMSHS:
“The land conservation initiative at Caddo Mounds is significant as it represents a symbolic step towards reconciliation between the Caddo People and those who have benefited from our historic experiences of violence and dispossession. This is our homeland, the place where our ancestors have thrived since time immemorial. This land is sacred to us, it is our holy land, and it holds innumerable generations of our families.
Our culture, as Caddo, has co-evolved as we have co-evolved with this land. It holds our land’s sacred medicines and foods, our connections to beyond-human kin, and our stories which are inextricably tied into this place. Our identity, as Caddo, originates from these lands. In our creation histories, we came from deep within this land and emerged as its keepers and protectors, we cherished and respected the bounty that was gifted to us from our Creator.
It is our priority and duty to ensure that these lands are respected and protected for generations of Caddo yet to come. Despite centuries of genocide and ethnocide, we continue returning to our homelands to ensure it is properly tended to. By supporting an integrative system of holistic land stewardship, we are strengthening not only Caddo connections to the land but also educating non-Caddo on the many ways that we must tend to our Ina Wadut, Mother Earth, in accordance with respect and reciprocity.”
Lauren’s emphasis on the importance of integrative and holistic land stewardship is a theme threaded through research and emergent land and climate initiatives.
Co-stewardship values multiple/transdisciplinary scientific methodologies and approaches. According to the 2015 Forest Service Research and Development Tribal Engagement Roadmap, Integrating TEK with Western science was identified as a tribal priority in a survey that represented more than thirty tribal nations. According to Dr. Sonya Atalay, provost professor of anthropology at University of Massachusetts Amherst and director of the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science:
“Combining Indigenous and mainstream Western sciences involves the ‘plural coexistence’ of two very different knowledge systems, a process the Mi’kmaq peoples call ‘two-eyed seeing’ and which we refer to as ‘braiding knowledges.' We have evidence of Indigenous science’s potential for better understanding and adapting to long-term environmental shifts, changes in biodiversity and the appropriate and respectful consideration for and preservation of cultural heritage.”
This view of land conservation already holds two of the strands for the emerging braided approach to CMSHS initiatives.
The Caddo Grass House Build Trainees. Photo by Texas Historical Commission.
Caddo Citizen Diana Parton Smith helps with the first propagation of rivercane at CMSHS. Rivercane is a plant of cultural significance for the Caddo people. Photo by Texas Historical Commission.
Caddo citizen and Grass House Trainee Katelyn De Anne Polly looking for trees in the National Forest to harvest for the frame of the grass house. Photo by Texas Historical Commission.
The arts is the third strand in braiding that we recognize as important and already at the heart of Caddo culture. By braiding the multiple/transdisciplinary scientific methodologies/approaches of TEK with an existing Texas A&M Forest Service’s Western science-based Forest Stewardship Plan for CMSHS, and the arts, we will create holistic strategies adapted to this Caddo ancestral landscape. A collaborative process to reconcile land conservation strategies gives space for sharing and blending of diverse perspectives. It will acknowledge and support the Caddo Nation’s connections to their homeland, and allow us to advance our shared goals of caring for this cultural landscape, and promoting sustainability, adaptability, and reconciliation at CMSHS.
The first steps in creating this braided co-stewardship plan are finding funding for the development of a TEK-based land conservation plan and the development of a braided land conservation plan that incorporates the new TEK plan with an existing Texas A&M Forest Stewardship Plan. Funding will support Caddo consultants and co-stewards Jackie Bullard and Lauren Haupt in developing this braided plan. Lauren and Jackie’s involvement exemplifies braiding by highlighting the threads of the traditional knowledge taught to Jackie by her father about living in relationship with the land in Arkansas and her practice as an artist and storyteller with Lauren’s graduate research interests in her studies at the University of New Mexico and her cultural upbringing in Oklahoma. This braided plan will be used to seek further land conservation funding. Currently, the THC has funded time for Jackie to engage in place-based research. This research is critical to the development of a CMSHS TEK-based land conservation plan and will enrich Jackie’s ancestral knowledge and culminate in public programming based on that work.
Conclusion
Perhaps Rachel and Maggie’s time at the center of the paradox of our work at CMSHS and the lessons of shahó are critical to begin the work of unraveling practiced paradigms in the work of State Historic Sites with Indigenous communities and begin the work of braiding new possibilities into existence. This braid holds strands of healing, reconciliation, and new opportunities in the fields of education and interpretation.
Further Exploration: The Crisis Response and Trauma Toolkit for Cultural Workers
In September 2020, the Friends of the Texas Historical Commission was awarded an Institute of museum and Library Services (IMLS) CARES Act Grant for Museums and Libraries. For two years, Rachel, Maggie and other shahó survivors embarked on a process of harnessing our tornado experience to develop tools for cultural workers.
The Texas Historical Commission’s Crisis & Trauma Response Toolkit for Cultural Workers provides information about what trauma is, what impacts it can have in settings involving cultural organizations, and how these organizations can respond. Each chapter includes an educational video and a brief narrative synopsis of the content, a list of key terms, a discussion guide to foster conversation within the organization, a list of suggested training for staff, recommendations for working with impacted communities, and a reflection piece, written by a trauma survivor. Developing this resource gave us access to experts in the field of trauma and time together as a group to explore areas of healing that include therapeutic art practices, ecotherapy, storytelling, memorialization, and insight into historical trauma.
Out of this process, survivors designed both a physical and a virtual Sha-hó Memorial. Additionally, Rachel and Maggie developed site programming based on the work developing the Toolkit.
Shahó survivors locating where they were when the tornado hit. Photo by Texas Historical Commission.
