
07/22/2025
STATEMENT REGARDING THE WITHDRAWL FROM UNESCO
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13 Creeks Magazine condemns the United States’ renewed decision to withdraw from UNESCO, the global institution tasked with safeguarding cultural heritage, education, science, and peace. This decision is an act of terror.
UNESCO recently added the Adena Earthworks in Ohio to its prestigious list of World Heritage Sites, recognizing the significance of Indigenous innovation, resilience, and sacred landscape engineering in the heart of the Ohio Valley. These mounds, built thousands of years ago, reflect a deep understanding of astronomy, seasonal cycles, and sustainable living, wisdom that is increasingly vital in the face of our current climate crisis.
To withdraw from UNESCO at this moment is to turn our backs on that knowledge. It is a deliberate attempt to sever ties with institutions working to protect the very histories that could guide our survival. Designation as a World Heritage Site would and will drive tourism revenue for the state of Ohio. Without such, is to place less economic certainty on Ohioans and to choose ruin over remembrance.
We are further outraged by recent reports that the Ohio History Connection, a state-funded institution charged with protecting Indigenous sites, may have buried culturally significant artifacts in cement as acts of reparation to First Nations. 13 Creeks recognizes that the Adena and moundbuilders were not members or proven ancestors to any of the First Nations consulted. This act, if proven accurate, is not reparation, it is destruction and acts of cultural violence.
At 13 Creeks, we believe anthropology, archaeology, and the humanities are not optional luxuries. They are essential tools for understanding how people before us survived upheaval, displacement, and environmental change along the same creeks we now live. To silence those fields is to silence solutions, safety, and life.
Cultural heritage is not political. It is human, and when we dismantle the institutions that protect it, we dismantle the tools that could save us.
We call on all members of the American Anthropological Association, the Ohio Archaeological Council, educators, scholars, and members of all communities to speak boldly and clearly: We must resist this erasure and we must preserve and protect the legacies of those who lived here long before us.
If we fail to learn from the past, from the very people who endured the last great climate shift in the Ohio Valley, we risk not coming out the other side, as they did.
13 Creeks will continue to amplify the voices of those who protect memory, land, and truth. As long as we have breath in our lungs, we will speak this loudly.