FRANKLIN, N.C. (AP) — An important cultural site is close to being returned to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians after a city council in North Carolina voted unanimously Monday to return the land.

The Noquisiyi Mound in Franklin, North Carolina, was part of a Cherokee mother town hundreds of years before the founding of the United States, and it is a place of deep spiritual significance to the Cherokee people. But for about 200 years it was either in the hands of private owners or the town.

“When you think about the importance of not just our history but those cultural and traditional areas where we practice all the things we believe in, they should be in the hands of the tribe they belong to,” said Michell Hicks, principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. “It’s a decision that we’re very thankful to the town of Franklin for understanding.”

Noquisiyi is the largest unexcavated mound in the Southeast, said Elaine Eisenbraun, executive director of Noquisiyi Intitative, the nonprofit that has managed the site since 2019. Eisenbraun, who worked alongside the town’s mayor for several years on the return, said the next step is for the tribal council to agree to take control, which will initiate the legal process of transferring the title.

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“It’s a big deal for Cherokees to get our piece of our ancestral territory back in general,” said Angelina Jumper, a citizen of the tribe and a Noquisiyi Initiative board member who spoke at Monday’s city council meeting. “But when you talk about a mound site like that, that has so much significance and is still standing as high as it was two or three hundred years ago when it was taken, that kind of just holds a level of gravity that I just have no words for.”

In the 1940s, the town of Franklin raised money to purchase the mound from a private owner. Hicks said the tribe started conversations with the town about transferring ownership in 2012, after a town employee sprayed herbicide on the mound, killing all the grass. In 2019, Franklin and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians created a nonprofit to oversee the site, which today it is situated between two roads and several buildings.

“Talking about Land Back, it’s part of a living people. It’s not like it’s a historical artifact,” said Stacey Guffey, Franklin’s mayor, referencing the global movement to return Indigenous homelands through ownership or co-stewardship. “It’s part of a living culture, and if we can’t honor that then we lose the character of who we are as mountain people.”

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Noquisiyi is part of a series of earthen mounds, many of which still exist, that were the heart of the Cherokee civilization. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians also owns the Cowee Mound a few miles away, and it is establishing a cultural corridor of important sites that stretches from Georgia to the tribe’s reservation, the Qualla Boundary.

Noquisiyi, which translates to “star place,” is an important religious site that has provided protection to generations of Cherokee people, said Jordan Oocumma, the groundskeeper of the mound. He said he is the first enrolled member of the tribe to caretake the mound since the forced removal.

“It’s also 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,” he said. “It feels different from being anywhere else in the world when you’re out there.”

The mound will remain publicly accessible, and the tribe plans to open an interpretive center in a building it owns next to the site.

Kate Barr is a Democrat.

But when voters in North Carolina’s 14th Congressional District open their ballots in the March primary they’ll find an “R” next to her name.

She is literally a RINO or Republican In Name Only.

Barr considers herself a Democrat but said she’s running as a Republican to make a point about gerrymandering.

“Fundamentally… I hate gerrymandering. That is pretty much my core motivation for everything I do in politics,” Barr told Spectrum News 1.

The district, west of Charlotte, is solidly Republican.

The current congressman won by 16 points last election.

Barr said it speaks to just how gerrymandered North Carolina is. State Republican lawmakers recently approved a congressional map that favors Republicans in 11 of the state’s 14 congressional districts.

That’s in a state that only voted for President Donald Trump by three points in 2024 and elected a Democrat for governor.

“When the North Carolina state legislature passed the new congressional maps that further gerrymandered this state it became clear there has to be a political price for this behavior,” Barr said.

This is not the first unusual campaign for Barr.

In 2024 she ran as a Democrat in a district that heavily favored Republicans. The focus again was to draw attention to gerrymandering.

Her motto was “Kate Barr can’t win.”

She did not win, losing by 30 points.

But Barr was encouraged by some of the results she saw and in November launched her campaign for Congress.

This time she decided to run as a Republican.

She’s hoping that gives her an edge because in North Carolina voters not registered with either major party, known as unaffiliated, are the largest voting block in the state, and can participate in the Democrat or Republican primaries.

“Voters understand that the way to have a say is to choose which primary is actually going to elect their leader and vote in that primary,” Barr said. “I can absolutely win in this one… because primary turnout is so low it just doesn’t take that many people showing up and saying we’ve had enough to unseat an incumbent.”

Barr faces former North Carolina Speaker of the House and incumbent Republican congressman Tim Moore. His campaign told Spectrum News 1 that “Kate Barr’s latest stunt is an insult to Republican voters. Folks know a far-left fraud when they see one, and she doesn’t belong in our primary.”

Whether she wins or not, Barr hopes to encourage a fix to gerrymandering, an issue that’s front and center in North Carolina and around the country.

“Gerrymandering is wrong no matter which party is doing it, and we need to put an end to it. Period,” Barr said. “The goal, end result, is to have an independent commission in every state made up of citizens.”

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