When Cornell College graduate Natalie Zenk embarked on her senior thesis for her archeology and art history majors last year, not much information was available about the subject of her project: a 21-inch-tall statue that stood out among the artifacts in the college’s Native American art collection.
“We knew nothing about it, other than the fact that Joseph Campbell wrote about it in one of his books that was published in 1974,” said Art History Professor Chris Penn-Goetsch, who had encouraged Zenk to study the piece.
What Zenk uncovered quickly reshaped her project. Not only had the soapstone statue sat, largely unresearched, at Cornell for more than a century — it had originally been taken from the Etowah Indian Mounds, a Mississippian burial site in Georgia, hundreds of miles from Mount Vernon…