cherokee nation – Jefe's House

Kuwohi was Clingmans Dome, Now it’s Kuwohi, Not Clingmans Dome

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Those are my peeps! The Eastern Band of Cherokee. Happy to see this, having grown up in the region and my family and I having traveled to the Smokies many times.

GATLINBURG, Tenn. (AP) — The highest peak at Great Smoky Mountains National Park is officially reverting to its Cherokee name more than 150 years after a surveyor named it for a Confederate general.

The U.S. Board of Geographic Names voted on Wednesday in favor of a request from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to officially change the name Clingmans Dome to Kuwohi, according to a news release from the park. The Cherokee name for the mountain translates to “mulberry place.”

“The Great Smoky National Park team was proud to support this effort to officially restore the mountain and to recognize its importance to the Cherokee People,” Superintendent Cassius Cash said in the release. “The Cherokee People have had strong connections to Kuwohi and the surrounding area, long before the land became a national park. The National Park Service looks forward to continuing to work with the Cherokee People to share their story and preserve this landscape together.” CONT’D @apnews.com>>.

Land Acknowledgement

I wasn’t surprised, and was very happy that the Fulbright Association asked all of the speakers at the annual conference in Denver, Colorado to open their talks with a land acknowledgement. There’s my first slide and here are my opening remarks:

When I was 21, I learned that my great-grandmother on my biological father’s side was a full-blooded Cherokee [which I first discussed publicly and proudly in my autobiographical theatrical performance The Golden Horseshoe: A Lecture on Tragedy in 2004]. I was always interested in history, so I knew something about the Cherokee but my learning of this hidden part of my heritage made me more passionate to learn as much as I could about my newly found ancestry. I was born and raised in southwestern Virginia but I was living in New York City at the time. When I would go up to friends and say, “I just found out I’m part Cherokee,” they would vaguely say, “Oh, so like, are you from Oklahoma? Are you an Okie?”

I’d say, “No, genius. The Cherokee out west were marched there at gunpoint from the East Coast. It was called the Trail of Tears. Thousands died on the march. A small group managed to stay behind by rapidly assimilating in order to keep their homes. That meant adopting Christianity and dressing like white people. They’re called the Eastern Band of Cherokee and their descendants, my ancestors, are still there today.”

So I feel the need, the joy, the honor, of saying, as clumsy it as it might come out, that this land we’re on today in Denver used to belong to the Arapaho people and Cheyenne people, and it had been theirs for a very long time. The trouble started when the European side of my ancestry showed up looking for gold in the 1850s and everything quickly went to hell for these nations.

You’ll never guess what ultimately happened: they were forcibly relocated out of Colorado. Another Trail of Tears.

I ask that you ponder that and take a little time sometime to learn, as I’m always learning, more of that history, and maybe even more of the First Nations history of wherever in the US you call home.

Smoky Mountains and Carolina Mud

Smoky Mountains and Carolina mud
were red like the Cherokee in Ocanaluftee.
Last summer Mama told me I show Indian blood.

Some grandmother with the last name Wood
married into my totemless Virginia clan.
To my English eyes they could do no good
but give secrets of tobacco and corn.

While summer rain turned soft soil to mud,
this news turned my whims to Indian.
I forced open a book, a child to a bud,
skimmed pages on Tsalagi history as told by whites.

My clan never asked her about the stream
of Cherokee tears I read about.
They never even asked her Cherokee name
or whether she believed in Christ Jehovah.

Last summer I drove to the reservation.
A red man in a chief costume took tips to pose for snapshots.
A fat guide spoke of the Cherokee nation
and took us on a walk through a recreated village.

Si-yu, he said, meant hello.
DeSoto showed us to make mud huts
he said, on his way past fourhundredfifty years ago.

The tour concluded at a square snack bar.
where he said, wa-do means thank you.
I wrote that down, and walked to the car
waved at the man, and drove away.

English as that grandmother, American as me,
no stories to hear, no spirits to see.
I mourned, driving home, through Carolina mud,
what good does it do, to show Indian blood.

Trail of Tears

Tsali was the Cherokee Jesus.
White colonels glad to march
a people west, Pontius Pilates
with spotless hands rounded
red families into holding camps
to be disptached on the trail of tears.

So pillaged Tsali’s wife that her tears
ran Tsali’s blood till he cried Jesus
Christ and killed her captor at the camps.
Took his family on a desert march
to the savage hills by erosion rounded.
Beelzebub struck a deal with Pilates.

Hungry Cherokees coerced by Pilates
hunted down Tsali through their tears.
In exchange, freedom; a number rounded
up from thirty silver pieces for Jesus.
Judases formed red posse, went out on the march
for Tsali and his fugitive disciples’ camps.

Word of the bargain reached Tsali’s camps.
Knocked down once, yes, by white devil Pilates,
now red betrayers, no; he began his march
downward to the white chiefs’ court of tears,
turned himself in and cried your Jesus
is a devil who has our sharp red wits rounded;

My people and our peace you have rounded
into westward walking prison camps.
Do not blaspheme our holy Jesus
came shouts from the many Pilates
who, not sated on Tsali’s red tears
had hungry Cherokee humiliators march

Tsali and his apostles on a final march
to a green Carolina field rounded
by pine and weeds watered on tears.
Same red brothers who had smoked his camps
now shot Tsali dead for Pilates
and their shameful, silent Jesus.

Rebels now contained so the march west from camps
started; red feet rounded bends as homeward-riding Pilates
choked back tears and knew Tsali was the Cherokee Jesus.