Just outside of Ohio’s capital, a wall of earth rises five feet from the smooth ground in a perfect circle, 1,000 feet wide. Standing inside that ring of mounded terra firma today, you can see the Moon rise right where the walls break and an ancient passageway leads to an enormous octagonal arena. Thousands of years ago, the Native Americans who built it would have been standing in that very spot, watching the same celestial scene.
Each stretching 550 feet long, the walls of the Octagon Earthworks form an enclosure large enough to contain four Roman Colosseums. It was built before the year 400 and points unmistakably to the position of the Moon at the peak of its 18.6-year cycle. This rare phenomenon is known as a major lunar standstill, and it’s happening right now. The current standstill began in the summer of 2024 and will last two years before embarking on another lengthy cycle.
The significance and sophistication of the Octagon Earthworks has been compared to that of Stonehenge and the pyramids in Giza. Despite that, the 2,000-year-old site was leased to a country club and used as a golf course for more than 100 years—up until January 1, 2025. After more than a decade of negotiating, the Ohio History Connection (OHC) took over the lease and opened the sacred landmark to the public.
The Octagon is one of an estimated 10,000 Native American mounds once scattered across central Ohio, ranging from burial sites to effigy mounds shaped like animals and other figures. Ohio is home to the world’s largest effigy mound, the Serpent Mound, snaking more than 1,300 feet across 60 acres, just east of Cincinnati.
“This was one of many epicenters of Indigenous population 500 years ago, and it’s not anymore,” says Dr. John Low, director of the Newark Earthworks Center at Ohio State University and a member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians. At the start of the 1800s, there were more than 40 tribes in what is now Ohio, including the Shawnee, Kickapoo, and Miami. By 1842, they had all been forcibly removed under the Indian Removal Act.
Low says that although Indigenous peoples remained in other states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—each still home to 11 to 12 federally recognized tribes today—Ohio’s agricultural potential motivated Europeans of the 19th century to seize every last bit of tribal land. Now, there are no federally recognized tribes in the state. Despite visible markers of long-ago Indigenous cultures, Ohio’s Native American community is one of the smallest in the country, just 1 percent of the state population. Only about 2,000 mounds of the original 10,000 are still standing.
Still, Indigenous Ohioans like those behind the Cincinnati-based Urban Native Collective are leading a momentous charge to save what’s left of the state’s sacred sites. They say their efforts are less about “taking back” their land than preserving sites with “significant historical, spiritual, and archaeological importance”—not just for Indigenous people, but for everyone.
Years before the Octagon opened, the Urban Native Collective participated in a grassroots effort to buy and open Fortified (aka Fort) Hill, the only earthwork that hasn’t been destroyed of six that were once found along the Great Miami River. It was tied up in a local dermatologist’s private estate until 2019, when the doctor died and the site went to auction. The preservationists purchased Fort Hill for $1.5 million, and it’s now managed by a local nonprofit, Arc of Appalachia, as a public nature preserve.
Even though the mound and many others across Ohio are overseen by organizations primarily led by white people, Low says it’s still a win just to free them from the constraints of private ownership. “Access is important for everybody,” he says. Even if people are visiting just to walk their dogs, “it is whatever you want the space to be.” Low says he learned from elders that ancestral land “is not sacred because of what we do or who we are, it’s sacred because it’s sacred.” In addition to improving access, publicization raises awareness, and “elevated awareness helps protect historic places because of their popularity and recognition,” says Neil Thompson, OHC’s public relations manager. The Urban Native Collective notes it can even have positive legal implications.
In 2023, UNESCO granted World Heritage status to the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, which is made up of eight sites across Ohio, including the Newark Earthworks where the Octagon is located. These earthworks were built 2,000 to 4,000 years ago, during what some historians would call the Hopewell era—though the Urban Native Collective advises against using terms like “Hopewell” and “Adena” to describe Indigenous cultures because they come from names of colonizers who “excavated and desecrated” the mounds.
“For Native communities in Ohio, this [UNESCO inscription] affirms our historical presence and contributions to the region, emphasizing the importance of preserving traditions, languages, and histories,” said the Urban Native Collective in a statement. “It also highlights the need for collaboration in safeguarding these sites, fostering awareness among broader audiences about the cultural significance of Native American heritage.”
Thompson says the staff in Newark has noticed that visitors are arriving with “much more prior knowledge” of the earthworks, and that more Native Americans are visiting the sites since the UNESCO inscription. Because the famed Serpent Mound in Adams County, also an OHC site, was built about 1,000 years after the Hopewell era, it is not included in the inscription, but it has been on UNESCO’s Tentative List since 2008.
“A lot of what happens here is based upon the interests and expectations of not just Native people but of the allies—the people who are on the same page as us,” Low says. “There’s some significant percentage of the population of Ohio that wants to do the right thing, and it exerts pressure on institutions to do the right thing.”
According to OHC, more than 940 earthworks in Ohio are known to be on private property, and the number of unknown sites on private property could be 2,000 or more. Looking ahead, campaigns like the Ohio Native Land Initiative strive to preserve and publicize more of these heritage sites across the state while members of its modern-day intertribal Indigenous community, NAICCO Nation, set their sights on a fresh piece of land to make their new home in central Ohio.
