Kuwohi
Restoring the name to an Indigenous mountain
News broke earlier today that the U.S. Board of Geographic Names unanimously voted to rename the tallest peak in the Smoky Mountains. Well, “rename” is probably not accurate. “Restore” is much more like it. While the mountain was recently known inside the United States as Clingmans Dome, its name in Cherokee is Kuwohi, meaning “the mulberry place.” And it was the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who led the move to get mountain’s name restored.1
Restoring the mountain’s name is a big deal. In my time working with Indigenous communities, one of the constant things I have been told has been the struggle for Tribes to convince nonnatives they are still here. Naming conventions have been a huge part of this erasure. By supplanting Indigenous names, the federal government quite literally wrote Native people out of their own homelands and out of history. In this case, Kuwohi, whose name reflected the Cherokee peoples’ knowledge of the ecosystem and their place in it, was replaced by that of a former brigadier general in the Confederate army. In doing so, the United States retold the history of Cherokee country as one of the antebellum South.
There’s a terrific book about how Native people have been written out of history. It’s by Ojibwe scholar and University of Minnesota professor Jean M. O’Brien. Captivatingly written, it is essential reading to anyone interested in learning American history. Here’s a link:
Getting Kuwohi’s name restored is a big gosh darn deal. This mountain is no backroad or insignificant place. It is the tallest mountain in the busiest national park in the country. If Kuwohi can be restored, we have to ask ourselves what other spaces can have their names restored? How else can we recognize that Native peoples were here long before Euro-American colonization and despite multiple attempts at subjugation, eviction, and extirpation, remain today?
In fact, Kuwohi follows other major landmarks in restoring its name and recognition of Indigenous legacy. In 2015, the Obama administration successfully restored the name Denali to the temporarily entitled Mount McKinley. Last year here in Colorado, advocates of renaming Mount Evans saw a replacement name in Mount Blue Sky, in honor of the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples.
So, what’s next? It turns out that suggesting a new or restored placename is actually not hard at all. You can visit the US Board of Geographic Names and follow the instructions on the page. Will we see more Indigenous placenames restored on the map? I certainly hope so, though I say that with the caveat that I hope so so long as it is what tribes would like to see happen.
I like to think that restoring names such as Kuwohi are but one of many ways we can work towards better education and justice in the United States. But for now, I’m celebrating the victory for the Cherokee people.
Cherokee history
While we’re at it, there’s some great places you can go to learn about Cherokee history. The first place I suggest is visiting the Museum of the Cherokee People in Cherokee, North Carolina. My friend Shana Bushyhead Condill is the executive director and she’s amazing. I got a chance to visit in 2022 and it blew me away. Here’s the website link: https://motcp.org/
If you’re looking for books, here are a few (though non exhaustive) selections that may be of interest to you:
Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835.
Gregory Smithers, The Cherokee Diaspora
Julie Reed, Serving the Nation
Rose Stremlau, Sustaining the Cherokee Family
Tiya Miles, Ties that Bind
Alright, so there’s a quick thought on Kuwohi. Hope you’re having a great day.
JWH
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Here is the original petition. I signed it and so did my mom. That made me really happy.
https://www.kuwohi.org/
Thanks for a very thoughtful explanation of why the name change matters deeply.