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An important cultural site is close to being returned to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians after a city council in North Carolina voted unanimously Monday to return the land.<\/p>\n
The Noquisiyi Mound in Franklin, North Carolina, was part of a Cherokee mother town hundreds of years before the founding of the United States, and it is a place of deep spiritual significance to the Cherokee people. But for about 200 years it was either in the hands of private owners or the town.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you think about the importance of not just our history but those cultural and traditional areas where we practice all the things we believe in, they should be in the hands of the tribe they belong to,” said Michell Hicks, principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. \u201cIt\u2019s a decision that we\u2019re very thankful to the town of Franklin for understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n
Noquisiyi is the largest unexcavated mound in the Southeast, said Elaine Eisenbraun, executive director of Noquisiyi Intitative, the nonprofit that has managed the site since 2019. Eisenbraun, who worked alongside the town\u2019s mayor for several years on the return, said the next step is for the tribal council to agree to take control, which will initiate the legal process of transferring the title.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a big deal for Cherokees to get our piece of our ancestral territory back in general,\u201d said Angelina Jumper, a citizen of the tribe and a Noquisiyi Initiative board member who spoke at Monday\u2019s city council meeting. \u201cBut when you talk about a mound site like that, that has so much significance and is still standing as high as it was two or three hundred years ago when it was taken, that kind of just holds a level of gravity that I just have no words for.”<\/p>\n
In the 1940s, the town of Franklin raised money to purchase the mound from a private owner. Hicks said the tribe started conversations with the town about transferring ownership in 2012, after a town employee sprayed herbicide on the mound, killing all the grass. In 2019, Franklin and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians created a nonprofit to oversee the site, which today it is situated between two roads and several buildings.<\/p>\n
\u201cTalking about Land Back, it\u2019s part of a living people. It\u2019s not like it\u2019s a historical artifact,\u201d said Stacey Guffey, Franklin\u2019s mayor, referencing the global movement<\/a> to return Indigenous homelands<\/a> through ownership or co-stewardship<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s part of a living culture, and if we can\u2019t honor that then we lose the character of who we are as mountain people.\u201d<\/p>\n Noquisiyi is part of a series of earthen mounds, many of which still exist, that were the heart of the Cherokee civilization. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians also owns the Cowee Mound a few miles away, and it is establishing a cultural corridor of important sites that stretches from Georgia to the tribe\u2019s reservation, the Qualla Boundary. <\/p>\n Noquisiyi, which translates to \u201cstar place,\u201d is an important religious site that has provided protection to generations of Cherokee people, said Jordan Oocumma, the groundskeeper of the mound. He said he is the first enrolled member of the tribe to caretake the mound since the forced removal.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s also a place where when you need answers, or you want to know something, you can go there and you ask, and it\u2019ll come to you,\u201d he said. \u201cIt feels different from being anywhere else in the world when you\u2019re out there.\u201d<\/p>\n The mound will remain publicly accessible, and the tribe plans to open an interpretive center in a building it owns next to the site.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n