Pronunciations provided by Gilliam Jackson, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), Snowbird Community and UNC Asheville Adjunct Professor of Cherokee Language
The University of North Carolina at Asheville acknowledges, with respect, that the land we are on today is ancestral land of the Anikituwagi, more commonly known as the Cherokee. We recognize the Cherokee as the native people and original stewards of this land. The stories that come from this land teach how to live, interact and mutually care for all relations.
We, as an institution, understand that there is a need to listen and learn from the people of this land. Now this place we stand upon is known to many as Asheville. To the Anikituwagi, this land is known as Togiyasdi, Where They Race. This town sat in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains and for many centuries was a place of Cherokee life, trade, ceremony and culture.
Togiyasdi was part of the Cherokee Nation, Tsalagi Ayeli, which covered as many as 108,000 square miles of the American Southeast as late as 1730 and consisted of sixty or more towns, each autonomous but joined in ceremony and in times of war.
Thus, the story of the people from Kituwah neither begins or ends with the arrival of Europeans but intertwines and becomes a complex historical legacy that defines both UNC Asheville and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in the present.
For more than 10,000 years, Cherokees and their ancestors lived around the junction of the Swannanoa and French Broad Rivers. Cherokee land east of the French Broad River, including where part of Asheville and the UNCA campus sits today, was taken by the Treaty of Hopewell in 1785. The Cherokees agreed to major land cessions in that treaty after an armed invasion, led by General Griffith Rutherford and more than 4000 troops, in the fall of 1776. The town of Nikwasi was among thirty-six towns decimated in addition to crops, livestock and winter food supplies. Cherokees held onto legal claim of the land west of the French Broad River, now part of Asheville, until 1791.
On a cold November day in 1791 after years of bloody conflict, invasion and colonization, leaders of the Cherokee Nation met on the banks of the river Holston to sign an agreement to cede the west of UNC Asheville’s campus to the very settlers who had been encroaching upon Cherokee lands for the better part of a century. This agreement was neither the beginning nor the end of the Cherokee people’s struggle. For the city, now called Asheville, all associated lands would be open to uncontested settlement. This treaty reinforced a nation-to nation relationship and was negotiated in good faith by forty-one Cherokee leaders and the governor of Tennessee at the time, William Blount, to enforce the boundaries and sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation. Without the cession of land and the brutal years of conflict with Cherokee that preceded it, the Asheville we know of today is unthinkable. The 1791 Agreement designed to end war between the two nations was not unique in that it was one of over four hundred treaties with Native Nations that would not see their terms lived up to by the US government. This broken treaty would culminate in another decade of intermittent war and further theft of native lands.
It was only within the lives of our grandfather’s grandfathers that the forced Cherokee Removal, Ge go wo o dv nv i, from these lands was an attempt by the US government to consign a people to oblivion, resulting in the genocidal march westward. Within the time of our grandfathers, policies were made to disassociate the Cherokee from their language, their faith and their identity as a people; schools being a primary weapon used. That the Anikituwagi persist as survivors, warriors, diplomats, mothers, doctors, aunts, teachers, artists and grandmothers is a testament to their resilience. The Qualla Boundary, the home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, situated a mere fifty miles away, presents a reminder of this region’s history.
The Eastern Band of Cherokee and UNC Asheville recognize this long history and seek to affirm our work together to ensure a strong relationship rooted in relevancy, responsibility, respect and reciprocity. UNC Asheville acknowledges that an act of recognition is not enough to overcome the settler-colonial history that we are all a part of. Therefore, as an institution UNC Asheville commits its efforts and resources to the health and priorities of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, students who attend this university and all the varied Indigenous people who live in and around the lands this university is situated on. As these words are spoken and heard, we renew and reaffirm this campus as Cherokee homelands.