Remapping a Cherokee-centric world requires us to strip back over four centuries of colonial violence, lies, and historical fictions. In the eighteenth century, for example, Anglo-American colonizers coveted control of Cherokee lands and waterways. As the most powerful Native polity in the Southeast, the Cherokees stood between settler societies along the Atlantic seaboard and those in the Ohio River Valley. When the United States emerged from the ashes of revolutionary war, political leaders set to work devising ways to dispossess sovereign peoples like the Cherokees. That work continued into the nineteenth century, culminating with the tragic era of dispossession and removal in the 1830s, including the notorious Trail of Tears.
Building a website like Cherokee Riverkeepers begins not with settler colonial sources but with Cherokee language and storytelling. Juanita Wilson, an Eastern Band citizen, told me that as a child, she “loved to watch the waters closely for signs of life.” Today, Wilson organizes Honoring Long Man, an initiative that aims to reconnect Cherokees to ancestral rivers through prayer and an annual cleanup effort. Digital mapping has the potential to complement such initiatives and to reanchor Cherokee names in their appropriate riparian context. Once situated, these names come to life with Cherokee stories—an oral archive that gives meaning to ancient town sites, a stand of river cane, or a series of rapids.
There are so many stories to relearn and remap. For instance, what do you know about the history of Chattanooga? Indigenous people called it Atla’nuwa, but by the eighteenth century the name had changed; the Cherokees referred to it as Tsatanu’gi. In the years after the American Revolution, Cherokees sought refuge from violent settlers at Tsatanu’gi. It’s unclear what these words mean, and elders have long speculated that they’re probably not of Cherokee origin. Still, the fact that these place names survived after settlers worked for centuries to destroy Native languages—after Cherokee people were sent on flatboats from the Tennessee (or “Tanasi”) River in Chattanooga to the Trail of Tears—provides an insight into the vibrant multiethnic and multilinguistic communities that Cherokees nurtured in this region.
Cherokee Riverkeepers contains scores of other stories about culturally significant riparian places. Along the Hiwassee River, near Murphy, North Carolina, is a spot known to Cherokees as Tlanus’yǐ, which translates to “the Leach Place.” At this location, Cherokee oral tradition recounts stories of a “Great Leach” residing in a subterranean river. The name, understood in this context, combines scientific insights and navigational information—the water there bubbles unpredictably and requires great care to pass—and popular lore about the underworld home of Tlanus’yǐ.