Saturday, October 26, 2024

From Confederate general to Cherokee heritage: Why returning the name Kuwohi to the Great Smoky Mountains matters. Really!

Oh what an ideological nonsense! What an arbitrary move!

The myth and worship of the Noble Savage continues!

Why don't we restore the name that the stone age people used? Oh, we do not have this name.

Or how often did indigenous people rename places? Should we not undo that as well? Oh, we lack records for that.

"It’s not every day that the name of a mountain is restored to the one used by Indigenous peoples for centuries. ...

Though known as Kuwohi by the Cherokee people for hundreds of years, explorer Arnold Guyot effectively ignored that history after he surveyed the mountain range in 1859. Guyot named the peak “Clingmans Dome” after his friend Thomas Lanier Clingman, a North Carolina U.S. senator and a Confederate brigadier general during the Civil War. Clingman never set foot on this mountain, but his name remained there for 165 years until now. ...

What is place name repatriation?
The government’s renaming of the mountain to Kuwohi is a significant example of place name repatriation, or the return of an original, Indigenous name to a particular place or landscape. ..."

From Confederate general to Cherokee heritage: Why returning the name Kuwohi to the Great Smoky Mountains matters

Great Smoky Mountains National Park


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