Remembrance and Mourning
Author: Kevin Jones Issue: 2024-08-21
Remembrance and Mourning
by Kevin Jones
I am working with a two-spirit Cherokee on a memorial to the first massacre by the first European settlement in Buncombe County. It was launched from the land we now own. We bought the land from the Davidson family who had lived here 285 years.
I will do a remembrance of those people who looked like me, who massacred the Cherokee band. I have researched their story.
We will do it with Warren Wilson College, which is 25 yards away, as part of their Swannanoa River Revival. They are reintroducing a type of snail darter they have incubated that plays an essential role in cleaning the river; eating bad bugs and bad plants, so that's where the revival comes from. The revival will be at the college, the memorial on our land. There is a good, small, protected meadow for it.
We will also leave behind some kind of marker. We will put it on our land, which is the site of a village where people lived for 5,000 years. Across the river, at the college, that part of the village was excavated and bodies disturbed, by their now-retired archaeologist and students.
The Cherokee want access to the village site on our land that has not been defiled. We are working that out.
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