The highest peak of the Great Smoky Mountains, formerly known as Clingmans Dome, has officially returned to its Cherokee name: Kuwohi (pronounced koo-WHOA-hee).
The decision comes after the US Board of Geographic Names voted in favor of a request put forward by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
“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,” Cassius Cash, Superintendent of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, said in a statement.
“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,” said Cash.
With an elevation of 2,025 meters (6,643 feet), Kuwohi is the highest point of the Great Smoky Mountains, located in Tennessee and North Carolina, southeastern US.
Kuwohi, or ᎫᏬᎯ, translates into English as “Mulberry place.” Located close to the heart of ancestral Cherokee land, the mountain holds a huge cultural and spiritual significance to the region’s Native people.
It was also a place where some Cherokee people took refuge during the Trail of Tears between 1830 and 1850, an act of forced displacement by the US Government in which 60,000 people were violently removed from their homeland. Thousands upon thousands died.
While the mountain has always been known as Kuwohi to the Cherokee People, it became known as Clingmans Dome in 1859 after a survey by geographer Arnold Guyot, who named it after Thomas L. Clingman, an active politician who “explored” the area in the 1850s. Clingman later became a general in the Confederate army during the American Civil War and was a supporter of slavery. Guyot also held enormously unpleasant and erroneous views. As an academic at Princeton University, he promoted racist ideas about the superiority of Europeans over other races.
Lavita Hill and Mary Crowe, members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, launched a movement to restore the title of Kuwohi after Mount Doane in Yellowstone National Park was renamed First Peoples Mountain in June 2022.
It was far from the first instance of geographical renaming in the US, though. In 2003, Piestewa Peak in Arizona was stripped of its name Squaw Peak (a derogatory slur for Indigenous women) and renamed after Lori Piestewa, a Hopi soldier and the first Native American woman killed in combat while serving in the US military.
There are also ongoing efforts to change the name of “Devils Tower” in northeastern Wyoming. The story goes that a colonial expedition in the 19th century documented that the local Native people call the rock something along the lines of “bad god’s tower,” leading to the name “Devils Tower”. However, this is likely to be a misinterpretation as no other evidence suggests Native Americans associated it with “bad gods” or devil-like figures.
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