The Highest Peak in Great Smoky Mountains National Park Will Now Be Called by Its Cherokee Name
In 1858, the mountain was named for a Confederate general. Now, it will once again be known as “Kuwohi”
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A 6,643-foot peak in Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been renamed “Kuwohi,” which means “mulberry place” in the Cherokee language.
The Cherokee people have long considered Kuwohi a sacred place. But in 1859, a Swiss-American geographer named Arnold Guyot surveyed the area and dubbed the peak “Clingmans Dome.” Guyot named the mountain after Thomas Clingman, a congressman and senator from North Carolina who later became a brigadier general in the Confederate Army.
The name “Clingmans Dome” persisted for 165 years—until last week. On September 18, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names voted to restore the peak’s Cherokee name, which is pronounced “koo-WHOA-hee.”
Members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians have been lobbying for the change since 2022. They submitted a formal request to the board in January.
“It's long overdue,” Michell Hicks, the principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, tells WLOS’ Rex Hodge.
The National Park Service also supported restoring the peak’s Cherokee name. Staffers have already started updating the park’s signage and website.
“The Cherokee people have had strong connections to Kuwohi and the surrounding area long before the land became a national park,” says Cassius Cash, the park’s superintendent, in a statement. “The National Park Service looks forward to continuing to work with the Cherokee people to share their story and preserve this landscape together.”
More than 650,000 people each year visit Kuwohi while exploring Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The peak is topped with an observation tower that’s accessible via a paved trail.
For three days every year, the park closes Kuwohi so that children attending Cherokee schools can visit the peak and “learn the history of Kuwohi and the Cherokee people from elders, Cherokee language speakers, culture bearers and community members,” according to the statement.
Kuwohi is situated at the border of Tennessee and North Carolina. It’s the highest peak in Tennessee and among the tallest summits east of the Mississippi River. It’s also the highest point within the traditional Cherokee homeland.
“This was where our cultural leaders would go to pray, to seek guidance, just to talk to the Creator, and listen, in order to guide our people,” Lavita Hill, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who’s been working on the renaming initiative, tells WATE’s Melanie Vásquez Russell. “We know that the medicine men would go there as well to gather the mulberries, and the mulberries were used as food and as medicine.”
Kuwohi also provided a hiding place for some Cherokee people during the Trail of Tears, per the Knoxville News Sentinel’s Tyler Whetstone. Between 1830 and 1850, the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of Native Americans—including thousands of Cherokees—off their ancestral lands in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee. Troops rounded up men, women and children, then required them to walk hundreds of miles to present-day Oklahoma. During this harrowing journey, thousands of Native Americans died, including more than 4,000 Cherokees.
Hill and Mary “Missy” Crowe, who is also a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, began working on the Kuwohi name restoration initiative two years ago. They were inspired when the U.S. Board of Geographic Names voted to change the name of Mount Doane in Yellowstone National Park to First People’s Mountain.
“What started as a fun idea transpired into reclaiming our native language on a significant mountain within the park,” Hill tells the Cherokee One Feather’s Scott McKie B.P. “Before my first visit to Kuwohi to meet with a reporter I was nervous, but my sister said, ‘Our ancestors are with you.’ And that gave me the motivation and determination to do the work.”
Other mountains have also been renamed in recent years, including Black Elk Peak (previously Harney Peak) in Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota, Denali (previously Mount McKinley) in Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska, and Mount Blue Sky (previously Mount Evans) in Colorado. In October 2022, hundreds of federal sites removed a racist and misogynist slur referring to Native American women from their names.
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