The Nikwasi Mound: Archaeology, Preservation, and Politics in the Eastern Cherokee Heartland

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Abstract
[...]I was a post-doctoral research associate with UGA's Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research Program, working on a
collaborative, year-long archaeological research project with the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Eastern Band of Cherokee
Indians to better understand ancestral Cherokee mound and town sites in western North Carolina.1 I was both excited and
intimidated by the prospect of interpreting the rich cultural landscape of the Cherokee heartland for a tour group that included
renowned international scholars. The rolling Georgia piedmont gave way to the southern edge of the Great Smoky Mountains as
we drove north to Cherokee. Since the group was interested in visiting an ancestral Cherokee mound and town site, I proposed
that we make a quick stop to view the Nikwasi Mound. In the years to come, those involved in the preservation and interpretation
of the Nikwasi Mound have a remarkable opportunity to reclaim the site as an active and vital part of the Cherokee cultural
landscape, but doing so will require all involved to push back against interpretations of archaeology and history that separate living
Indigenous peoples from their pasts.6 THE ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY OF THE NIKWASI MOUND Located only thirty miles south
of Cherokee, North Carolina, Nikwasi is a site that members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the Cherokee Nation, and
United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians recognize as an important place.7 Russell Townsend, the Tribal Historic Preservation
More
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In March 2012 the University of Georgia's (UGA) Geography department hosted an international conference about preserving
sacred Indigenous sites. The presenters were an impressive group of geographers, anthropologists, and conservationists from
around the world. The final event of the conference, a driving tour from Athens, Georgia, to Cherokee, North Carolina, was meant
to provide an opportunity for these scholars and activists to learn about sacred Cherokee cultural places firsthand. The tour would
pass through the heart of the eighteenth-century Cherokee Middle Towns and Out Towns, places I had carefully studied as an
archaeologist, so I was asked to point out important Cherokee places along the way. At the time I was a post-doctoral research
associate with UGA's Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research Program, working on a collaborative, year-long archaeological
research project with the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to better understand ancestral
Cherokee mound and town sites in western North Carolina.1
I was both excited and intimidated by the prospect of interpreting the rich cultural landscape of the Cherokee heartland for a tour
group that included renowned international scholars. The group departed Athens before dawn and headed north along US Highway
441, roughly follow-ing the course of the Little Tennessee River. The rolling Georgia piedmont gave way to the southern edge of
the Great Smoky Mountains as we drove north to Cherokee. Since the group was interested in visiting an ancestral Cherokee
mound and town site, I proposed that we make a quick stop to view the Nikwasi Mound. In hindsight, I might have skipped this
side trip, as I was inadvertently bringing the tour group to witness the beginning of a decade-long controversy.
Located in a bend of the Little Tennessee River in the small mountain town of Franklin in Macon County, North Carolina, the
Nikwasi Mound is paradoxically one of the best-preserved and least-understood mound sites in western North Carolina (Figure i).
The mound itself is well preserved, but the area around it has been covered in meters of fill dirt and capped in pavement. In 2012
the best way to visit Nikwasi was to park across the street at Caffe Rei, a French restaurant attached to a gas station on East Main
Street, and then dodge two lanes of speeding cars before arriving at the foot of the mound.2
The Nikwasi Mound: Archaeology, Preservation, and Politics in the Eastern Cherokee Heartland
Steere, Benjamin A. Native South; Lincoln Vol. 15, (2022): 60-77.

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As we pulled into the restaurant parking lot and the mound came into view, I was stunned. I had not visited the mound site in a
few months, and I was unprepared for what I saw. It was early spring, but the grass on the mound was short, parched, and
brown, as if the surface had been scorched by fire. The group and I walked across the street to get a closer view of the mound and
read the historical maker and more recent educational signage installed in a grassy area near the base of the mound. Several
people in the tour group asked if it was "normal" for grass on the mound to look the way it did, and I had no explanation. I dodged
questions about the grass and gave a short talk about the cultural significance of the site. We drove on to Cherokee from there,
but the incident troubled me.
The tour group and I were not the only people concerned about the mound, and within a few days, local newspapers reported that
a manager for the town of Franklin, concerned with the logistics of mowing the mound, had ordered town workers to spray
herbicide on the grass covering the mound. Members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and residents of Franklin
were outraged. Michell Hicks, then Principal Chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, demanded that the town of Franklin
sell the mound parcel to the EBCI so that they could care for it properly. The town did not accept the offer. In an interview given
shortly after the incident, Chief Hicks stated, "I don't know what agents were put on the mound and what has seeped into the
ground and what effects they have had to the artifacts in the ground. None of us do, but it's a matter of coming up with a plan so
it doesn't happen again."3
In the years that followed, the grass grew back, and a steady stream of op-eds about the incident flowed through local papers.
The EBCI and the town of Franklin engaged in halting talks about the future of the mound. In 2014 the town passed a formal
resolution to maintain ownership of the mound and rejected another request to sell the mound to the EBCI. Representatives of the
town of Franklin argued-the herbicide incident notwithstanding-that the town took pride in the mound, had cared for it for
decades, and should continue to do so. Advocates for Cherokee ownership and stewardship of the mound disagreed, arguing that
the herbicide incident was yet another example of non-Cherokee people misunderstanding, mismanaging, and damaging Cherokee
cultural sites, despite ostensible desires to protect and honor their significance.4
In 2019 the Franklin town council voted to transfer ownership of the mound to a nonprofit organization that included EBCI
members, but not before heated debates over the stewardship of the mound played out in municipal council meetings, in local
papers and television news, and on social media. In one of the stranger turns of the debate, some Franklin residents opposed to
the new stewardship plan argued that Nikwasi was not actually constructed by Cherokee ancestors but by an earlier "mound
builder" culture. This argument relied on an unusual combination of archaeological fact and fiction, and while it was an outlier
view, it gained enough traction to warrant coverage by local media.5 At the very least, such theories affirmed the broader view
that the Indigenous people responsible for building the mounds in the first place were no longer via- ble communities who should
or could be responsible for their caretaking in the twenty-first century.
As an archaeologist who lives and works in the Cherokee heartland of western North Carolina-I teach at Western Carolina
University, whose campus is built atop the Cherokee town of Tali Tsisgwayahi, or "Two Sparrows Town"-I have closely followed
debates over the ownership of the Nikwasi Mound for nearly a decade. I have studied and written about dozens of ancestral
Cherokee mound and town sites, and in many ways, Nikwasi's history is the most complex. It is an incredibly powerful symbol of
Cherokee persistence in the face of settler colonialism, and both despite and because of this, it has also come to represent some of
the thorniest issues surrounding historic preservation and cultural resource management in the southeastern United States. In the
years to come, those involved in the preservation and interpretation of the Nikwasi Mound have a remarkable opportunity to
reclaim the site as an active and vital part of the Cherokee cultural landscape, but doing so will require all involved to push back
against interpretations of archaeology and history that separate living Indigenous peoples from their pasts.6
THE ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY OF THE NIKWASI MOUND
Located only thirty miles south of Cherokee, North Carolina, Nikwasi is a site that members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee
Indians, the Cherokee Nation, and United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians recognize as an important place.7 Russell
Townsend, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the EBCI, offered a concise statement about the cultural significance of the
mound in a 2017 interview with the Cherokee One Feather, the focal weekly newspaper for Cherokee, North Carolina:
The Nikwasi Mound is a Mississippian period mound that is likely 800 to 900 years old. It was built by ancestors of modern
Cherokee people, and several ancient Cherokee stories are associated with it. The best-known story is that of the spirit warriors'
who come from inside the mound to protect the community in time of need. It is said that happened in pre-Colonial times as well
as during the American Civil War.
Townsend's description of Nikwasi, with its references to oral history and community, captures not only the mound's archaeological
importance but also its enduring significance to living Cherokee people.
Extensive historical records documenting the eighteenth-century town of Nikwasi speak to its importance in the Cherokee world.
These include maps that place the town's location relative to the Little Tennessee River and other contemporaneous Cherokee
towns and written accounts of military action against the Cherokee Middle Towns. The town survived Col. James Grant's attack in
1761, when the townhouse on top of the mound was used by soldiers as a field hospital. According to records from Grant's

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campaign, Nikwasi had a population of roughly 480 people at the time of the campaign. It was occupied again in 1776 by forces
commanded by Gen. Griffith Rutherford and used as a staging area for military action against the Cherokee Middle and Valley
Towns.8
Despite these repeated attacks, Nikwasi remained in Cherokee possession until 1819. In that year, Gideon Morris, a reverend and
surveyor married to a Cherokee woman named Ha-na or Rebecca, sister of the Cherokee leader Junaluska, claimed a 640-acre
reservation, including the mound, under Article 2 of the Treaty of Washington. However, shortly after the Morrises made their
claim, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a statute ordering that all the recently acquired lands be surveyed and sold,
stripping ownership of the mound from the Morris family. After a long legal battle, Rebecca and Gideon Morris received a cash
payment of three thousand dollars for their reservation, but in 1821 the land, including the mound, was purchased by Jesse
Richardson Siler, a wealthy white Macon County resident. After 1821 the town of Franklin expanded and grew around the mound.
The Siler family used the mound as the base for a gazebo and preserved some of the area, treating the mound site as a kind of
"greenspace" on their farm. This model of preservation, in which the mound and a small buffer of land was set aside as a green
island in the town of Franklin, continued for decades.9
In 1889 James Mooney, best known for his ethnographic fieldwork with the Eastern Cherokee, unsuccessfully sought permission
for archaeologists from the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) to excavate the mound as part of their "Mound exploration"
program of the 1880s. In one of his summary reports for the program, the BAE archaeologist Cyrus Thomas described the Nikwasi
mound as "one of the largest and best preserved in the State and on the site of the Old Nikwasi (Nequassee) settlement.
Unopened."10
"Unopened." Thomas's one-word coda is significant. Unlike most of the large mounds in western North Carolina, Nikwasi had never
been the subject of major antiquarian excavations. The only professional excavation known to have taken place immediately near
the Nikwasi mound is a single 5-x-5-foot test pit excavated by archaeologists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
(UNC) in 1961 to investigate damage to an ancestral Cherokee grave caused by the placement of a drainage ditch north of the
mound. According to UNC's 1998 NAGPRA inventory, the remains and artifacts from this test pit were associated with a
Mississippian period occupation. A 1937 map of the mound drawn by NPS surveyor and historian Hiram Wilburn provides a more
accurate sense of the mound's dimensions prior to development around the base of the mound. Wilburn estimated its overall
dimensions to be 30 meters wide by 50 meters long and 6 meters high and recorded a ramp on the southeast side of the mound.
The size and shape of the mound are at least superficially similar to better-understood Mississippian period platform mounds in the
region. These include the Peachtree and Dillard Mounds, which were, respectively, locations for the named eighteenth-century
Cherokee towns of Hiwassee and Estatoe. These substantial platform mounds are located within fifty miles of Nikwasi, and the
archaeological record at both sites clearly indicate that the mounds were first constructed during the Mississippian Period and used
for centuries by ancestral Cherokee people.11
In the late 1960s archaeologists from UNC carrying out research for the National Science Foundation-funded "Cherokee Project"
amassed a large surface collection of ceramics in the remaining undeveloped fields around the base of the Nikwasi Mound. This
collection contains complicated stamped Middle and Late Qualla phase ceramics made by ancestral Cherokee people from
approximately 1500-1838 CE. This discovery is not surprising, given the historic accounts of the eighteenth-century Cherokee
town centered around the Nikwasi Mound.12
More recent archaeological research also supports the interpretation of Nikwasi as an important ancestral Cherokee site. In 2010
Western Carolina University geologist Blair Tormey completed a non-invasive ground-penetrating radar survey of the mound and
the remaining greenspace around its base. His findings suggest that the lower portion of the mound is buried in at least one to two
meters of floodplain sediment and fill. Tormey's study also revealed evidence for multiple construction stages and a dense cluster
of objects near the surface of the mound that may represent the last townhouse. In July 2016 the cultural resource management
firm TRC Environmental Corporation performed archaeological monitoring of a brownfield cleanup for Mainspring Conversation
Trust on a portion of the Nikwasi town site approximately 150 meters east of the mound. A large trench excavated to remove soil
contaminated with fuel oil revealed that up to four meters of fill dirt had been placed over the original ground surface. It appears
that the site was not graded before it was filled, and it is highly likely that there are intact cultural features beneath the fill dirt and
pavement cap that cover most of the area immediately surrounding the mound. In other words, while the area around the mound
appears to be completely developed, the remains of the last ancestral Cherokee village surrounding the mound, including the
graves of important people buried underneath and surrounding the mound, may still be intact under meters of fill dirt.13
In sum, the fragmentary archaeological record of Nikwasi and a comparison with the better-understood Peachtree and Dillard
mounds support the interpretation of Nikwasi as a platform mound originally constructed as early as 1000 years ago, at the
beginning of the Mississippian period (approximately 1000-1600 CE) and eventually used as the base for a historically recorded
Cherokee townhouse. The size and shape of the Nikwasi Mound is consistent with other Mississippian period platform mounds in
the Southern Appalachian region. The known ceramic collections associated with the mound are quite limited but are also
consistent with a Mississippian period origin for the mound.
ETHNOGRAPHIC AND ETHNOHISTORIC INSIGHTS ABOUT NIKWASI

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Nikwasi looms large in the ethnographic and ethnohistoric record of the eastern Cherokee heartland. The place name "Nikwasi,"
along with the name of another Cherokee mother town, "Kituwah," appears in accounts from the Pardo expedition of 1566-1567.
In a summary of sixteenth-century place names recorded in the Pardo accounts, Booker et al. include Nikwasi and Kituwah in their
list of possible Cherokee-speaking polities present on the landscape during the Pardo expedition, noting that "Quetua was Kittowa
(Kituhwa), an eighteenthcentury town on the Tuckasegee River, and that Nequase was Naquasse (Nikwasi), another eighteenth-
century Cherokee town."14 This early written reference to Nikwasi supports the archaeological record of its antiquity and
importance in the cultural landscape of the region.
Late nineteenth-century ethnography also suggests that Nikwasi is a particularly significant Cherokee cultural site. In a story
recorded in Mooney's Myths cfthe Cherokee, the Cherokee elder Swimmer indicated that Nikwasi, along with Kituwah, was one of
the most important mound sites for Cherokee people. In myth number 111, " The Mounds and the Constant Fire: The Old Sacred
Things," Swimmer relates that Nikwasi was a particularly prominent mound that contained a sacred fire, stating, "Some say this
everlasting fire was only in the larger mounds at Nikwasi, Kituhwa, and a few other towns, and that when the new fire was thus
drawn up for the Green-corn dance it was distributed from them to the other settlements. The fire burns yet at the bottom of
these great mounds, and when the Cherokee soldiers were camped near Kituwah during the Civil War they saw smoke still rising
from the mound."15
According to Swimmer, mounds were constructed at carefully chosen places on the landscape that were sanctified with the graves
of honored leaders. This would have been the case for Nikwasi, and given the comparatively intact state of the mound, it is highly
likely that the material remains of those important individuals are still there. Swimmer also identified Nikwasi as the home of
immortal spirit defenders who came to the aid of Cherokee people in times of need. In myth number 80, "The Spirit Defenders of
Nikwasi," Swimmer recounts a story in which a Cherokee community at Nikwasi is besieged by "a powerful unknown tribe." After
an unsuccessful attempt to fight off the enemy, the people of Nikwasi begin to retreat when "they saw a great company of warriors
coming out of the side of the mound as through an open doorway. Then they knew that their friends were the Nunnehi, the
immortals, although no one had ever heard before that they lived under Nikwasi Mound. The Nunnehi poured out by the hundreds,
armed and painted for the fight." The Nunnehi defeat the attackers and return to the mound, where, according to Swimmer, they
remain to help their Cherokee friends.16 Taken together, these two myths depict Nikwasi as a mound that is an especially old and
a prominent place on the landscape, and one that is uniquely tied to important Cherokee cultural practices and stories.
Today, elders in the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma still mention Nikwasi in important cultural stories and indicate that its name is
associated with the word "star." In his book, Cherokee Stories cfthe Turtle Island Liar's Club, Cherokee Nation scholar Chris Teuton
recorded conversations with elders Hastings Shade, Sequoyah Guess, Sammy Still, and Woody Hansen. Two of these conversations
provide useful context for understanding Nikwasi. According to Hastings Shade, "the elders say that there is another star located
far beyond the Pleiades star system known as the seven-pointed star, Galaqougi Disgosdayi Noquisi. This is where the sons of the
Creator came from to live with the women of Elohi [emphasis added]In a later passage, Shade recounts a Cherokee origin story
that references mound construction by Cherokee ancestors and describes a "star mound," stating:
The star mound that they talk about in North Carolina is where we got our information. It's either in North Carolina or Georgia,
somewhere like that. Tennessee. It's something we really need to find. That's where they got their information. Whenever they
wanted something they went to this Star Mound and that's where the information was and they got it.17
While there is some ambiguity about the location of the "star mound" in Shade's tale, it seems plausible that this may be a
reference to Nikwasi, and his comments speak to Nikwasi's endurance as an important place in Cherokee stories.
CONTROVERSIES SURROUNDING THE PRESERVATION AND OWNERSHIP OF NIKWASI
The archaeological, historical, and ethnographic record of Nikwasi provide overwhelming evidence for its importance to Cherokee
people, yet the preservation of the mound, until very recently, has been defined along very narrow and ethnocentric terms. These
contradictions were laid bare in the 2019 controversy surrounding the future of the mound's preservation.
In the 1930s concerned citizens in Franklin initiated efforts to preserve the Nikwasi Mound, and in 1946 the Macon County
Historical Society launched a successful campaign to purchase and preserve the mound. At that time the mound was conveyed to
the town of Franklin as trustee for the people of Macon County. A state historic marker was erected near the base of the mound in
1939. On November 26,1980, the Nikwasi Mound was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 2008 updated
educational signs were installed. While the mound itself has been protected since 1946, the property surrounding the mound has
been subject to grading, filling, and construction. Today, the mound is surrounded on two sides by two-lane roads and hemmed in
by commercial buildings (Figure 2). Until the 2017 purchase of the adjacent property by the EBCI, there was no formal place to
park and visit the mound, and no place for a visitor center. Compared to other large Mississippian period mound sites in the
Southeast that have been preserved as state historic sites, such as the Etowah Mounds in Cartersville, Georgia, Nikwasi stands out
for having such a small buffer of land around the mound preserved. It is a stark example of what happens when cultural resources
and landscapes are defined in the narrowest possible terms.18

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The 2012 decision to spray herbicide on the mound was a catalyst for vigorous debate about the stewardship of the mound,
bringing to the surface long-simmering frustration about the preservation of the mound. Tribal council members and other
Cherokee leaders publicly expressed their dismay at the state of the mounds preservation, and conflicts between the town of
Franklin and the EBCI were documented in local newspapers. In 2012 the tribal council passed a resolution requesting transference
of the title of the mound tract to the EBCI. The mayor of Franklin formally apologized to the Cherokee community for the
treatment of the mound, but the town refused to transfer ownership to the tribe, citing the mid-twentieth century efforts to
preserve the mound as evidence of good stewardship and asserting that the herbicide incident was an isolated mistake.19
Little changed regarding the stewardship of Nikwasi Mound until, in 2017, the tribe purchased a privately-owned tract of land
adjacent to the mound. In the ensuing years, a newly chartered nonprofit organization called the Nikwasi Initiative, whose board
members included representatives from the town of Franklin, the EBCI, Macon County, and Mainspring Conservation Trust
developed a proposal to take ownership of the mound and preserve it as part of the Nikwasi-Cowee cultural corridor, an
interpretive pathway of preserved and interpreted Cherokee cultural sites along the Little Tennessee River in Macon County. They
made their plan public in 2019 with a formal proposal to the town of Franklin.20
During the early spring and summer of 2019 arguments about the preservation and ownership of Nikwasi played out in town
council meetings, editorials, local news articles, and social media. Some opponents of the mounds transfer questioned whether the
site had been important to the Cherokees prior to the eighteenth century, when historical records first provide a written account of
the Cherokee presence at Nikwasi. These skeptics developed a kind of "Moundbuilder Myth Redux," arguing that "Mississippian"
people, whom they mistakenly disambiguated from contemporary Cherokee people, had built the mound. Therefore, the Eastern
Band of Cherokees had no more right than any other Native American group to claim the mound as part of their cultural legacy.21
The attempt by some in Franklin to separate and differentiate Cherokee people from their Mississippian period ancestors is part of
a much broader trend in standard narratives about Indigenous people in American history. Ojibwe writer David Treuer challenges
this line of reasoning in his book, The Heartbeat cf Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, writing:
Most Indians do not see themselves as merely the first in a long series of arrivals to North America; they see themselves as
indigenous. And the belief in tribal indigeneity is crucial to understanding modern Indian realities. The rhetorical stance that
Indians are merely one group of travelers with no greater stake than any other clashes with Indians' cultural understanding that
we have always been here and that our control over our place in the world-not to mention our control over the narrative and
history of that place- has been deeply and unjustly eroded.22
More broadly, many of the debates and discussions about the future preservation status of the mound missed the fundamentally
important idea that mounds are a living part of the Cherokee cultural landscape. In a recent article published in American Indian
Quarterly, Russell Townsend and colleagues eloquently illustrate this concept, explaining that "the townhouse hearth is living,
providing the fire that sustains the council house and the rest of the community. The spirit of the fire continues to exist in the
hearth even if it is buried." From this perspective, mounds are not just monuments to past cultures: the central fires that once
burned in the hearths of townhouses are still burning. Moreover, for many Cherokee people, mounds are symbols of resilience and
per- sistence, and they continue to serve as active locations for important community events and ritual practices.23
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE OF THE NIKWASI MOUND
Historians and scholars working in Native American and Indigenous Studies offer useful insights for reconsidering Nikwasi not just
as an archaeological or historical site, but as a vital part of the contemporary Cherokee world. After reviewing decades of primary
source material related to Franklin's preservation and promotion of the mound as a historic site and tourist attraction, historian
Nathaniel Holly asserts that the town of Franklin has primarily used the mound as a monument to a "vanishing" Cherokee past, an
elegy for the tragic defeat of Cherokee peoples by British and American forces in the late eighteenth ry, and as symbol of "regional
distinctiveness." A 1946 article in the Franklin Press proclaims, "Any town can have the paved streets, electric lights, factories, and
a dozen other things that tend to make one little town just like all the rest. In the Mound, the community has something
different."24 This
interpretation of the mound, as a "monument to absence," to borrow a concept from historian Andrew Denson, perpetuates what
Indigenous archaeologist Michael Wilcox identifies as a "terminal narrative" about Cherokee people in their ancestral homelands.
Wilcox writes that terminal narratives, which can be found in most standard United States history textbooks, describe Native
Americans as a vanished people who "either succumbed to massive epidemics, had been eliminated through warfare, or had 'lost
our culture' through missionization, acculturation, or forcible assimilation." From this perspective, it can be argued that the town of
Franklin used the mound to commemorate the removal of Cherokee peoples from their ancestral lands as the tragic but necessary
action to clear the way for white settlement.25 But,
of course, Cherokee people are still here, and mound sites still serve as sacred and enduring places on the Cherokee cultural
landscape. In the Cherokee heartland of western North Carolina, ancestral Cherokee mound and village sites remain prominent
central places. The Kituwah Mound, which marks the most important Cherokee mother town, is a place that Cherokee people
actively use. It is used as the site of of Tri-Council meetings for the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes. Enrolled members

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maintain vegetable gardens there, and community members walk and run around the grounds for exercise. Each fall, the Cherokee
Youth Council takes their cohort of future Cherokee leaders there to learn about their people's history, and on Mother's Day people
gather at the mound for a 5k race and fun run to support the Cherokee Choices program, a tribal diabetes prevention initiative.
Perhaps most important, Kituwah is a place where Cherokee people can perform the ritual of "going to water," a ceremony in which
participants bathe in a stream in preparation for important events.26
As the controversy surrounding the ownership Nikwasi shows, these mounds are the focus of complex and competing narratives
and claims of stewardship. Places like the Nikwasi Mound are integral, living parts of the cultural landscape of the Southern
Appalachians. Southeastern archaeologists have long argued that particular Mississippian period platform mounds were key
centers for political activity prior to contact with Europeans. In western North Carolina, mounds like Nikwasi remain as centers of
gravity for political activity. Indeed, in the 2019 Franklin mayoral race, the two candidates publicized their stance on the transfer of
mound ownership as part of their political platform. The "keep the mound candidate" won reelection by a sixty-to-forty margin.27
The controversy over the Nikwasi Mound's preservation offers several important lessons for those interested in cultural heritage
preservation. The first is that the way we talk about the archaeological record ters: we be thoughtful about how we use
chronological and cultural terms, which can be used to drive a wedge between living Indigenous people and their cultural heritage.
In this case, "Mississippian," a term that is most often used by archaeologists to refer to a time period, has been erroneously and
largely uncritically deployed to refer to a ly culture that was somehow not Cherokee. The second is that Nikwasi, far from being a
monument to absence, is an enduring symbol of Indigenous resilience. Over two hundred and fifty years after Grant's attack on
the Cherokee Middle Towns, the mound remains, and under meters of fill dirt, parts of the village are likely still intact. To
paraphrase Swimmer, the fire yet burns in the bottom of that great mound. A successful program of cultural heritage management
at Nikwasi should not only preserve the mound and provide an interpretation of its history that amplifies Cherokee voices; it
should also make the mound more accessible for members of the Cherokee community.28 Cherokee community.28
A recent event at the mound provides a snapshot of the opportunities and challenges surrounding the future of preservation at
Nikwasi. Since 1984, members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the Cherokee Nation, and the United Keetoowah Band of
Cherokee have participated in the Remember the Removal Ride, a multi-week journey in which riders retrace the route of the Trail
of Tears via bicycle, making stops along the way at important cultural sites and landmarks on the trail. In an interview in the
Cherokee One Feather, Micah Swimmer, a Cherokee language instructor at the EBCI's New Kituwah Academy and a 2019 rider,
remarked, "I'm excited that we're going to honor our ancestors with the journey that they made out to Oklahoma, but I'm also
excited that we get to do it with the Cherokee Nation and share this experience with them because it's not only honoring their
ancestors but ours as well." Swimmer concluded, "All of these alumni riders have told us that it's a life-changing experience."29
In the summer of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the South, the annual Remember the Removal Ride was
canceled, and the riders instead completed the "Remember the Remained Ride," a local bicycle tour of important Cherokee cultural
sites within a day's ride of Cherokee, North Carolina. On a Saturday morning in June, the riders rode their bikes through Macon
County to the Nikwasi Mound in Franklin. I, along with Kathi Littlejohn, a renowned Cherokee storyteller, met the riders at the
mound to talk about the cultural significance of Nikwasi. The riders and their support crew met in the parking lot of the building
adjacent to the mound that the EBCI purchased in 2017, and they walked over to the mound, no longer having to dodge traffic or
park at neighboring businesses to access the site.30
Standing six feet apart in the shade of a tree near the mound and wearing face masks, Kathi Littlejohn and the riders and I talked
about the cultural significance of Nikwasi. I discussed the archaeological record of the mound, and Kathi Littlejohn told the story of
the spirit defenders of Nikwasi. Before departing for their next destination, the Cowee Mound a few miles to the north, the riders
took group pictures in front of the mound with an outstretched flag of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
This was a quietly powerful moment, and a positive sign for the future of Nikwasi. Now that the mound is preserved by the
nonprofit Nikwasi Initiative, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians has a greater say in the preservation, maintenance, and
interpretation of the mound. And yet, our experience at the mound highlighted the challenges that lay ahead. The mound is still
surrounded on two sides by busy, two-lane roads, and we sometimes struggled to hear each other over the din of traffic. It is
possible to access the Little Tennessee River from the mound on foot, but doing so requires people to cross at least one street and
walk through a public park. This means that carrying out the important Cherokee ritual of "going to water," which can easily be
done at the Kituwah Mound, is much more difficult at Nikwasi.
As the nonprofit Nikwasi Initiative moves forward with plans to preserve the mound, interpret it for the public, and make the site
more accessible to Cherokee community members, these issues must be dressed. so will make Nikwasi more than a roadside
exhibit and will help to revitalize it as an active part of the Cherokee cultural landscape. Some of these improvements have already
taken place: in the fall of 2020, the Nikwasi Initiative installed a new educational kiosk on the north side of the mound parcel that
included text written in Cherokee language.31
The current preservation plan of the Nikwasi Initiative includes options for additional measures to make the site more accessible
and pedestrian-friendly, but they will be costly and will require commitment and investment from a diverse group of stakeholders,
including individuals who were opposed to the transfer of the mound's ownership to the non-profit. Preserving Nikwasi while also

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treating it as a living place will require not just the construction of green space and pedestrian walkways; it will take a concerted
effort to push back against the broader public's tendency to replay terminal narratives about local tribes and to treat mound sites
as monuments to Cherokee absence rather than endurance.
Sidebar
Benjamin A. Steere is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Western Carolina University in
Cullowhee, North Carolina. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work benefitted from the input and ideas of many good friends and colleagues, including Russell Townsend, Brian Burgess,
Beau Carroll, Johi Griffin, Miranda Panther, Stephen Yerka, Brett Riggs, Jane Eastman, Andrew Denson, Trey Adcock, Paul Webb,
Tasha Benyshek, Ben Laseter, and Juanita Wilson. Chris Rodning, Kathi Littlejohn, Tonya Caroil, Paul Webb, Brian Burgess, Miranda
Panther, and Robbie Ethridge read and commented on early drafts of this essay, and I am very grateful for their insightful
comments. Any errors or shortcomings are entirely my fault. This essay is dedicated to the late T. J. Holland, Cultural Resources
Manager for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who fundamentally changed the way that I think about archaeology.
Footnote
NOTES
i. Fausto Sarmiento and Sarah Hitchner, eds., Indigeneity and the Sacred: Indigenous Revival and the Conservation cf Sacred
Natural Sites in the Americas (New York: Berghahn, 2017), xii-xxii; Benjamin A. Steere, "Platform Mounds and Townhouses in the
Cherokee Heartland: A Collaborative Approach," Southeastern Archaeology 34, no. 3 (2015): 196-219.
2. Barbara R. Duncan and Brett H. Riggs, The Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2003), 152; Benjamin A. Steere, "Archaeological Monitoring of Site Remediation at the Former Duncan Oil Site, 543 East Main
Street, Franklin, Macon County, North Carolina," Report on file, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Tribal Historic Preservation
Office, 2016. Alternate spellings for the place name Nikwasi include variations of "Nequassee" in nineteenth-century and earlier
documents and "Noquisiyi," a more recently updated spelling developed by fluent Cherokee speakers from the EBCI. For the sake
of consistency with previous writing about Nikwasi, I employ the spelling "Nikwasi," the form that is currently used by the
Cherokee One Feather, the community newspaper of the EBCI.
3. Scott McKie Brings Plenty, "Herbicide Put on Nikwasi Mound," Cherokee One Feather, May 9, 2012; Scott McKie Brings Plenty,
"Tribe Wants Apology on Nikwasi Mound," Cherokee One Feather, May 21, 2012.
4. Scott McKie Brings Plenty, "Chief Sneed Ratifies Purchase of Land Adjacent to the Nikwasi Mound," Cherokee One Feather,
August 9, 2017.
5. Lilly Knoepp, "Debunking the Origins of the Nikwasi Mound," Blue Ridge Public Radio, March 29, 2019; Jesse Stone, "Nikwasi
Initiative Wants Deed to Cherokee Mound," Smoky Mountain News, March 6, 2019.
6. Jane M. Eastman, Brett H. Riggs, and Benjamin A. Steere, "Tali Tsisgwayahi: Cherokee Landscape and Campus Archaeology at
Western Carolina University" The SAA Archaeological Record 22, no. 2 (2022): 42-45.
7. Townsend, quoted in McKie Brings Plenty, "Chief Sneed."
8. Roy S. Dickens, "The Route of General Rutherford's Expedition against the North Carolina Cherokees," Southern Indian Studies
19 (1967): 3-24; Duncan and Riggs, Cherokee Heritage, 151-155; Barbara McRae, Franklins Ancient Mound: Myth and History cf
Old Nikwasi, Franklin, North Carolina (Franklin: Teresita Press, 1993).
9. Duncan and Riggs, Cherokee Heritage, 153; Nathaniel Holly, '"Living Memorials to the Past': The Preservation of Nikwasi and the
'Disappearance' of North Carolinas Cherokees," North Carolina Historical Review 92, no. 3 (2015): 318-319; McRae, Franklins
Ancient Mound, 48.
10. McRae, Franklins Ancient Mound, 43; Cyrus Thomas, Catalogue cf Prehistoric Works East cf the Rocky Mountains, Bureau of
American Ethnology Bulletin 12 (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1891), 156.
11. R. P. Stephen Davis, Jr., Patricia M. Lambert, Vincas Steponaitis, Clark Spencer Larsen, and H. Trawick Ward, 'An Abbreviated
NAGPRA Inventory of the North Carolina Archaeological Collection," Chapel Hill: Research Laboratories of The University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill (1998), 25; Daniel Elliot, "Colburns Investigation of the Dillard Mound (aka J. J. Greenwood Mound), Rabun
County, Georgia," LAMAR Institute Research Publication, Report Number 115 (2012); David J. Hally, "The Nature of Mississippian
Regional Systems," in Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History cfthe Southeastern Indians, ed. Thomas J. Pluckhahn, and
Robbie Ethridge (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016), 26-42; Steere, "Platform," 216-219.
12. Davis et al, "An Abbreviated NAGPRA Inventory" 3, 25. Bennie Keel, Cherokee Archaeology: A Study cfthe Southern
Appalachian Summit (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976).

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Details
Subject Indigenous peoples;
History;
Native peoples;
Archaeology;
Herbicides;
Collaboration;
18th century;
Colonialism;
13. Steere, "Archaeological Monitoring"; Blair Tormey, "Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) Survey of Nikwasi Mound, Franklin, NC,"
Cullowhee: Western Carolina University (2010), 25-29.
14. Karen M. Booker, Charles M. Hudson, and Robert L. Rankin, "Place Name Identification and Multilingualism in the Sixteenth-
Century" Ethnohistory 39, no. 4 (1992): 407.
15. James Mooney, "Myths of the Cherokee," Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897-1898, Pt. 1.
Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution (1900), 395-397.
16. Mooney, "Myths of Cherokee," 335-337.
17. Christopher B. Teuton, Cherokee Stories cf the Turtle Island Liars' Club (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016),
24, 59.
18. Duncan and Riggs, Cherokee Heritage, 153; McRae, Franklin's Ancient Mound, 51.
19. McKie Brings Plenty, "Herbicide;" McKie Brings Plenty, "Tribe wants apology."
20. McKie Brings Plenty, "Chief Sneed;" Stone, "Nikwasi Initiative."
21. Knoepp, "Debunking."
22. David Treuer, The Heartbeat cf Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (New York: Riverhead, 2019), 28.
23. Russell Townsend, Johi D. Griffin, and Kathryn Sampeck, "Archaeology, Historical Ruptures, and Ani- Kitu Hwagi Memory and
Knowledge," American Indian Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2020): 256.
24. Holly, "Living Memorials," 329.
25. Andrew Denson, Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest Over Southern Memory (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2017), 3-7; Michael Wilcox, The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology cf Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology cf
Contact (Berkley: University of California Press, 2009), 45.
26. "Cherokee Choices Diabetes Prevention Education Program," Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, accessed May 21, 2022,
https://phhs.ebci-nsn .gov/cherokee-choices/; "Cherokee Youth Council," Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, accessed May 21,
2022,<https://cherokeepreservation.org/what-we -do/cultural-preservation/lifelong-leadership-development/cherokee-youth -
council/>; Lisa Lefler, Under the Rattlesnake: Cherokee Health and Resiliency, with a foreword by Susan Leading Fox (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2009).
27. Christopher B. Rodning, Center Places and Cherokee Towns: Archaeological Perspectives on Native American Architecture and
Landscape in the Southern Appalachians (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015); Lilly Knoepp, "Franklin Mayoral Election
Centers on Nikwasi Mound," Blue Ridge Public Radio, October 29, 2019.
28. Swimmer, quoted in Mooney, "Myths," 396.
29. Scott McKie Brings Plenty, "Remember the Removal Riders Embark on 35th Anniversary Journey" Cherokee One Feather, May
31, 2019.
30. Scott McKie Brings Plenty, "Remember the Remained Riders to Tour Area Cherokee Sites," Cherokee One Feather, June 11,
2020.
31. "Nikwasi Initative," Nikwasi Iniative, accessed May 21, 2022, https://www .nikwasi-initiative.org/.
Copyright University of Nebraska Press 2022

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Cultural groups;
Newspapers;
Towns
Location United States--US; Georgia; North Carolina; Little Tennessee River
Company / organization Name:
NAICS:
Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians
921150
Title The Nikwasi Mound: Archaeology, Preservation, and Politics in the Eastern Cherokee Heartland
Author Steere, Benjamin A
Publication title Native South; Lincoln
Volume 15
Pages 60-77
Publication year 2022
Publication date 2022
Publisher University of Nebraska Press
Place of publication Lincoln
Country of publication United States, Lincoln
Publication subject History--History Of North And South America, Native American Studies
ISSN 19432569
e-ISSN 21524025
Source type Scholarly Journal
Language of publication English
Document type Feature
ProQuest document ID 2916713406
Document URL https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/nikwasi-mound-archaeology-preservation-
politics/docview/2916713406/se-2?accountid=14968
Copyright Copyright University of Nebraska Press 2022
Last updated 2024-01-20
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