Cherokee Lands
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Cherokee Lands

In the Great Smoky Mountains, home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), lands stolen during colonization are being reclaimed. Sacred mounds, some dating back nearly 10,000 years, were centers of Cherokee spiritual and political life. Forests, riversides, and ancestral town sites were lost to private ownership or held by municipalities for centuries. Piece by piece, they are returning.

The tribe purchased Kituwah in 1996 and Cowee Mound in 2007. In January 2026, the Franklin Town Council approved transferring Noquisiyi Mound to the EBCI. Jordan Oocumma, groundskeeper of Noquisiyi, is the first enrolled tribal member to caretake the site since the forced removal. He describes it as a “place where when you need answers, or you want to know something, you can go there and you ask, and it’ll come to you.”

The Eastern Cherokee never left, despite the Trail of Tears that forced an estimated 17,000 Cherokee off their homeland in 1838. Tom Belt, a retired Western Carolina University faculty member, speaks of those who remained in the East: their job, he was told as a child, was “to hold fast to the homelands for the entire Cherokee tribe.” Today, roughly 10,000 tribal members live on the Qualla Boundary in western North Carolina, where the work continues—in classrooms where Cherokee language is taught, on reclaimed lands where ceremonies are held, in the knowledge passed from elders like Amy Walker to the next generation.

Published in National Geographic, December 2020.