An important cultural site is one step closer to returning to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians after a North Carolina city council voted unanimously Monday to return the land.
Nokeseye Hill in Franklin, North Carolina was part of the Cherokee home town hundreds of years before the founding of the United States, and 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 in the hands of the city.
“When you think about the importance of not only our history, but those cultural and traditional areas where we practice all the things that we believe in, it has to be in the hands of the tribe that they belong to,” said Michael Hicks, principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. “It is a decision for which we are very thankful to the City of Franklin for its understanding.”
Noquisiyi is the largest unexcavated mound in the Southeast, said Elaine Eisenbraun, executive director of Noquisiyi Intitative, a nonprofit that has managed the site since 2019. The next step is for the tribal council to approve control, which will begin the legal process of transferring ownership, said Eisenbraun, who worked alongside the mayor for several years upon returning.
“It’s a big deal for the Cherokees to get back our ancestral piece of land in general,” said Angelina Jumper, a tribal citizen and Noquisiyi Initiative board member who spoke at Monday’s City Council meeting. “But when you talk about a hill site like this, which is of such great importance and is still standing at the same level as it was two or three hundred years ago when it was taken, that kind of holds a level of appeal that I don’t have words to describe.”
In the 1940s, the city of Franklin raised money to purchase the hill from a private owner. The tribe began talks with the town about transferring ownership in 2012, after a town employee sprayed herbicide on the hill, killing all the grass, Hicks said. In 2019, Franklin and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians created a nonprofit organization to oversee the site, which today lies between two roads and several buildings.
“Talking about the Land Back, it’s part of a living people. It doesn’t feel like a historical artifact,” Franklin Mayor Stacey Goffey said, referring to the Land Back. Global movement to Return of indigenous homelands during Joint ownership or management. “It’s part of a living culture, and if we can’t respect that we lose our character as mountain people.”
Noquisiyi is part of a series of earthen mounds, many of which still exist, that were the heart of Cherokee civilization. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians also owns Coy Mound a few miles away, and is creating a cultural corridor of important sites that extends from Georgia to the tribe’s reservation, the Koala Frontier.
Nokisiye, which translates to “place of the star,” is an important religious site that has provided protection for generations of Cherokee people, said Jordan Okoma, a mound ranger. He said he was the first registered member of the tribe to take care of the hill since the forced removal.
“It’s also a place where when you need answers, or want to know something, you can go there and ask, and it will come to you,” he said. “It’s a different feeling than being anywhere else in the world when you’re there.”
The mound will remain accessible to the public, and the tribe plans to open an interpretive center in a building it owns next to the site.