The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians officially regained ownership of the Noquisiyi Mound in Franklin on Thursday after more than 200 years.
On a rainy afternoon Thursday, dozens of people gathered for a deed-signing ceremony beside the sacred Cherokee site. As part of the ceremony, town and tribal officials, along with community members, joined in prayer and traditional performances by Cherokee dancers.
The transfer comes a month after Franklin's town’s council voted to return the land. The vote also helped remove any preservation agreement restrictions and encumbrances attached to the deed.
“If you ask me what’s the economic benefit for the town of Franklin of returning the mound, the honest answer is, I don’t know. And my other answer is, I don’t care, because that was never the point,” Franklin Mayor Stacey Guffey said during the event. “The reason the (Franklin town) council here voted unanimously was to do the right thing: To acknowledge a truth older than our town, older than our state, older than our nation, that sometimes doing the right thing matters more than economics. That sometimes the soul of a place is worth more than the price of a parcel of land.”
Conversations about transferring ownership of the mound began in 2012 after a Franklin town employee sprayed herbicide on the sacred site, causing the grass to die. The incident led to tension with the Eastern Band.
Franklin’s town council voted in 2019 to transfer the sacred Noquisyi Mound to a nonprofit organization, the Noquisi Initiative.
The group is made up of representatives from Franklin, Macon County, the Mainspring Conservation Trust, and the Eastern Band. It was created to serve as a bridge between Cherokee and non-Cherokee communities and to steward the mound.
ECBI Principal Chief Michell Hicks addressed the crowd just before officials signed the agreement returning ownership of the site.
“As we think about this mound, this was an integral part of us. It was our daily lives. We shared it every day with each other. And that was torn away,” Hicks said. “We lost the ownership of this land 207 years ago, according to my research. If you think about the impact and the trauma of boarding schools to our people, those little kids were taken from their home and sent to a boarding school to wash the savage out of those Cherokees and those Navajos and those Crees. The trauma of that doesn't leave in a single generation. It continues and it remains, and it's our responsibility to make sure that we start tying the pieces back together. We have to do that. This is not a land transaction today. You guys are sharing with us part of our history. You're bringing back just the piece of who we were.”
Hicks added he hopes this moment will lead to greater collaborations between the town and the EBCI.
“ The Cherokee people are good people, just like the mountain people are good people,” Hicks said. “We have to find ways to work together better.”
Applause erupted following the signing. The ceremony concluded with a song performed by Cherokee women and traditional dances by Cherokee youth.
Officials told BPR after the event, they hope the site will eventually become an educational space, helping non-Cherokee residents understand what the mound means to the Cherokee people.
Noquisyi Mound
The mount is located in downtown Franklin near the banks of the Little Tennessee River. The sacred mound was part of a Cherokee mother-town hundreds of years before the founding of the United States and remains sacred to the Cherokee people. It was formed by Cherokee women who carried baskets of soil to the site.
The name Noquisiyi, later interpreted as Nikwasi, means “star place.” Its exact age is unknown but Noquisiyi appears on maps as early as 1544 and British colonial records first mention it by name in 1718, according to the Noquisi Initiative.
Since the early 1800s, it has either been owned by private land owners or by the town itself.
