Introduction
Archaeologists speculate that the Kituwah site has been inhabited for nearly 10,000 years. Kituwah Mound and the village that surrounded it were once the spiritual center of a nation that sprawled over the eastern United States, equal in size to the present day Virginia. Kituwah Mound is nestled in the Great Smoky Mountains of Western North Carolina near the Tuckasegee river. The field in which it lies is surrounded by tree-covered mountains that were the traditional home of many Cherokee people. Although it has been rendered nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding fields over the past 200 years through farming and plowing, Kituwah Mound was once the center of one of the earliest and largest Cherokee settlements and is sacred land for many Cherokee people today.
The European invasion brought drastic changes to the Cherokee people and opened a tragic chapter in their history marked by devastation, disease, constant fighting, and the eventual ceding of land to European colonizers. British soldiers raided the land at Kituwah and destroyed the council house atop Kituwah mound in 1776. A series of false treaties in the years following pushed the Cherokee farther and farther into the Great Smoky Mountains. Nearly half a century later, approximately 17,000 people were forced to migrate to the Indian Territory in what is commonly known as the Trail of Tears, one of the most massive expulsions in United States history.1“The Story of the Cherokee People: 13,000 Years” Museum of the Cherokee Indian. https://www.cherokeemuseum.org/archives/era/trail-of-tears This removal fractured the Cherokee people, who were dispersed as far away as Mexico. The majority of the population settled in Oklahoma, where many still identify as Kituwah and feel connected to their namesake ancestral lands in present-day North Carolina.2The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma. ukb-nsn.gov The few Cherokee who escaped the expulsion remained in North Carolina, where the Eastern Cherokee reservation now stands.
In 1996, members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians purchased the 309-acre field containing Kituwah Mound in the interest of protecting it against further destruction. While this was a decisive victory for Cherokee people in diaspora across the country, the issues did not resolve then.
A debate ensued within the renewed owners of the land over whether to keep the natural landscape as it is and preserve the inherent sacredness of it by not marring it with further development or building tourist attractions and recreation facilities on it to provide some economic and social profit to the Cherokee people because it was so expensive to purchase and maintain. The preservationists won in 2013 when the EBCI declared Kituwah Mound a “sacred site” that will not be developed in the future.
Outside interests continued to impinge on the Cherokees’ desire to preserve Kituwah Mound as a space apart from the developing world. In 2009, Duke Energy began construction on a new electrical substation on a hill that was visible from Kituwah Mound. The Cherokee organized to lobby Duke Energy to build elsewhere in order to preserve the integrity of their sacred site and not pollute it with industrial eyesores and heavy construction and maintenance traffic. A year later, Duke Energy agreed to relocate the substation and pay $1.7 million in damages to the EBCI.
Through centuries of challenges, the Cherokee people have remained committed to protecting Kituwah Mound and the culture it represents. In recent years, education programs and community involvement in the preservation of Kituwah Mound has increased, and the site will be a part of Cherokee life for generations to come.
