This 1963 book from Alabama is a curious work of Christian mythmaking. It appropriates elements of the Native American past and enlists them in a half-finished poem, in blank verse, which in turn is bookended by facts about the creation of Mound State Park. There’s a striking photo of Gov. John Patterson, flanked by two unwell-looking legislators, signing the park bill into law. Behind his chair, a Confederate battle flag holds pride of place between the state and national flags. (Those were dark times in the “Heart of Dixie.”)

The park (now called Moundville Archaeological Park) preserves and interprets an important Indian mound complex that flourished between the 11th and 14th centuries, then lingered on until it was deserted in the 16th century. This civilization, known to archaeologists as the Mississippian, left no written documents or oral traditions, only artifacts in the ground. So the Moundville site makes a perfect blank slate for Ms. Wilson to exercise her imagination on.

Mostly she appropriates Aztec myths, including the one about an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its claws. (This reviewer is unaware of any cactus species that is native to Alabama — certainly not one that an eagle could comfortably perch on.) This is not her only geographical error: In tracing the route of North America’s natives from the Bering Strait to Alabama, she has them boldly travel by canoe from the Ohio valley to the Black Warrior valley where Moundville lies. That makes for extraordinary rowing, considering that Appalachian ridges and mountains separate the Ohio-Mississippi drainage from the Black Warrior.

The core of the narrative involves a god-man called “Quetzacoatyl” (a garbling, perhaps deliberate, of the Aztec god name Quetzalcoatl). This mysterious stranger arrives just in time to prevent the commendably religious but misguided Indians from performing a human sacrifice. The Moundville folk love him for that, and they celebrate him as their “Fair God” — referring, in a naively racist touch, to his light-colored skin. In time, for no apparent reason, the people disobey Quetzacoatyl and return to Aztec-style rites. Choosing freely among primitivist clichés, the poet gives her Indians a taste for virgin sacrifice.

Distraught, the “Fair God” leads the faithful remnant to a place called, somewhat anachronistically, “the Southwest.” He also announces that he is going across the eastern ocean where he has some important business.

Here the reader is to understand that the “Fair God” is none other than Jesus Christ. In case the connection is not clear, a short book-within-a-book documents the use of Moundville for an annual Easter pageant. So you see, even though the Bible makes no mention of the New World, God sent his only begotten son there — before he went on to the eastern Mediterranean to be born in a manger, preach to multitudes, die on a cross, and rise from the dead. This seems to be taking American exceptionalism a bit too far. Besides, it was not clear to me why the Fair God would find it necessary to cross the ocean in order to be born of a virgin. Possibly I misunderstood the poet’s intention; she may have imagined Christ nipping across the Atlantic after his birth at Bethlehem, perhaps between the visit to the Temple and the wedding at Cana.

Ms. Wilson’s poem has its appealing moments, but much of the work consists only of sketched ideas in fragmentary prose. She must have envisioned a much longer work. The book has some interesting illustrations to accompany the half-baked poem. Predictably the Indians, usually depicted at some distance in silhouette, have one feather atop each head. (Twentieth-century southerners were profoundly ignorant of southeastern Indians’ traditional style of masculine dress, with its bright-colored turbans, long shirts, and deerskin leggings. Depictions of the region’s Indians are often still influenced more by Hollywood than by history.)

The section “Easter Comes to Moundville” is interesting as a document of the annual Easter pageant that continued at Moundville until the late 1980s. The consensus among park officials was that the pageant was an inappropriate use of the site, but it took time to make this case without seeming to attack Christianity as well. I don’t know how the pageant finally ended, but I suspect that it happened when the number of people interested in respecting native civilization exceeded the number who preferred to appropriate its relics for the sake of evangelism.