'Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South'

Title of a show at the Chicago Art Institute,

up through January 30, that's been drawing rave reviews from all who've seen it.

The show poses a challenge to the established dogma

that the American landscape was a primeval vista when the first Europeans landed.

Rather, it demonstrates that what is now the United States was once, millenia ago,

home to highly advanced cultures and cities comparable to those of Mesopotamia and the Aztec, Inca, and Mayan empires.

This is history which has yet to become part of common knowledge,

and thus hasn't begun to penetrate American textbooks.

The show moves to the St. Louis Art Museum after Chicago and then on,

this summer, to Washington, D.C.'s American Museum of Natural History, where I plan on seeing it.

The carved stone head just above was made in what is now Kentucky, between 200 B.C. and 400 A.D.