What's in a Name?

In the summer of 2022, Mary Crowe came across an article about renaming one of Yellowstone National Park’s highest mountains to honor Indigenous people. Inspired by the gesture, she shared the story on her Facebook page, adding her own comment: “The Great Smoky Mountains National Park should do the same,” she wrote, hoping to spark a conversation about recognizing Indigenous heritage closer to home.

Scott McKie Brings Plenty, a Cherokee One Feather reporter, noticed her post and reached out with a question: “Which name would you change?” 

Without hesitation, Crowe replied, “Clingmans Dome.”

Lavita Hill also saw the post and chimed in: “Yes. Kuwohi!”

Crowe and Hill, both enrolled members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, or EBCI, began discussing the idea privately, and in July 2022, they brought a resolution to the EBCI Tribal Council to revert the name of the 6,643-foot peak to its original, Kuwohi, meaning place of the mulberry. The resolution passed. Over the following months, the duo asked for support from town councils, county courthouses, and state capitals in NC and TN, eventually submitting an official name change request to the US government.

According to Cherokee tradition, prophets and medicine people ascended the mountain to commune with the creator and spiritual beings. And during the 19th-century Cherokee removal, Kuwohi served as a sanctuary where some sought refuge. Their campaign to restore Kuwohi on maps has aligned with a local movement to reclaim Indigenous identities and histories.

“There are groups that have formed within Cherokee that are researching and identifying places that already had a name, an identifier, that was changed,” Crowe said, often for no reason other than to honor themselves. 

In fact, Crowe and Hill’s mission is part of a broader movement to recognize the history and contributions of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Across Western North Carolina, the US Southeast, and the entire nation, mountains, streams, streets and neighborhoods often bear the names of men with fraught pasts, and some of which are not only insensitive but are often derogatory racial slurs.

Their hope is twofold: to unravel the harm caused by these names and to honor their ancestors and foster a more inclusive and respectful recognition of Western North Carolina’s rich cultural tapestry.  

“As native peoples we were kept from our language and our traditional ways.  We’re in a time now that we see a resurgence of our people wanting to go back to those traditional ways, so we can bring them forward to the present,” Crowe said. “It’s not removing a name, it’s restoring it.”

CLINGMAN’S ORIGINS
“Here in the Great Smokies, we have come together to dedicate these mountains, streams, and forests to the service of the millions of American people,” declared President Franklin D. Roosevelt on September 2, 1940, at Newfound Gap, five miles northeast of Clingmans Dome.

According to the Asheville Citizen,  10,000 people attended the park’s official dedication ceremony under a cloudless sky. Officially established in 1934, the speech was laden with references to the escalating war and emphasized the need to protect America’s landscape, natural history, and freedom from, “dangers far more deadly than were those that the frontiersmen had to face . . . when hostile Indians were lurking on the other side of the gap.”

Among those who watched his speech were irate former landowners of small tract farms whose land had been seized by the US government to form the park’s interior.

The new national park also lay within the boundaries of the once-sprawling Cherokee Nation, which spanned roughly 135,000 square miles across North America, from the Ohio River to present-day Alabama. In 1838 and 1839, the US government forcefully and violently removed the Cherokee from their ancestral homeland. Thousands perished, but roughly 1,000 survived by hiding in the Great Smoky Mountains and other ranges, later to be known as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.  

Kuwohi, once called “Smoky Dome”by American settlers, was renamed Clingmans Dome in 1859 by Princeton geologist Arnold Guyot, who was commissioned to survey the Great Smoky Mountains. Guyot also named a peak after himself. His self-importance and legacy, however, has faced scrutiny; according to a 2021 Princeton Alumni Weekly article, Guyot promoted and taught racist theories.

Generously, Guyot named the highest summit not for himself, but for Thomas Lanier Clingman (1812-1897) who moved to Asheville in 1836 and represented NC in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate, serving as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army in the US Civil War. In a 1998 biography, historian Thomas Jeffrey wrote that 

Clingman, who never owned slaves but supported slavery, was a, “highly controversial figure. Some regarded him as a man of principle, others denounced him as a self-serving opportunist”. Buried in Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery, Clingman is interred near other historical figures including his political rival US Senator, NC governor, and slave holder Zebulon Vance. In recent years, Asheville has taken steps to address its historical legacies; an obelisk in central Pack Square, the Vance Monument, was removed in 2021, and a public elementary school no longer bears his name.

Eliminating Clingman’s name from history, however, isn’t part of Hill’s or Crowes’s objective. “Our point has nothing to do with Thomas Clingman the person, but everything to do with the mountain and the history of the Cherokee people,” Hill said.  

Although Clingman had no children, his multi-generational nephew in Maryland upon learning about the renaming effort in a magazine, contacted then EBCI Principal Chief Richard Sneed to express his support.

Clingman, who goes by Tom, said, “Our family is behind this 100%, but it’s not about us. What Mary and Lavita are doing is to reclaim something that is theirs to heal, restore, and educate.  The mountain’s rightful name should be returned.”

Hill said that the family’s support was “thrilling”. Crowe called their gesture “honorable”.

“We thought his family might say no. He’s a key player in this,” Hill said.

BEYOND THE MOUNTAIN
Tom Clingman’s point-of-view echoed the sentiments shared at a June meeting of public land renaming advocates in the Terry Bellamy Community Room on Eagle Street in Asheville’s historic Black commercial and cultural hub.

The Coalition of Outdoor Renaming and Education, or CORE, is an initiative spearheaded by the Wilderness Society, or TWS, in collaboration with other organizations focused on the renaming of places, especially those with names that are considered racist or derogatory. The coalition addresses the historical context and impact of these names and strives to rename places in a way that honors and reflects the contributions and histories of Black, Indigenous, and people of color.

TWS’s Kimberly Smith hopes to facilitate a national conversation at a local level. Offensive names have been on her radar since middle school in Enka when she was among a small minority of Indigenous students in the Buncombe County school system. Until 1999, her rival, Erwin High School’s women athletics teams were known as the “sq***,” a deeply offensive term for Native American women.

“We want to provide support for people working at the local level on these projects. This is heavy work,” she said. “We want to provide spaces to have conversations to help bring strategy and community support to this work at the regional level. Part of what we’re seeing, especially in the Southeast, is this knee-jerk reaction. If we’re going to start renaming things, we’re going to anticipate some opposition, and we want to make sure that there’s a clear strategy to effectively communicate why renaming matters.”

Formed in 2023, at the first in-person gathering of CORE’s Southeastern group this June, Smith shared the findings from a renaming study conducted by Duke University student Delaney Eisen.

“We are number one in the country of place names with harm,” Smith said, including geographic features bearing racial slurs or the names of figures who killed, expelled or enslaved Native Americans and Black people. A few of them stand out in a word cloud presented on a screen in the room, including “Indian Grave Branch,” “Coon Run,” and “Mount Savage.”

On the other hand, many Native American names were abandoned altogether. Among the 66,000 place names cataloged, only 56 Indigenous names remain, many of which are misspelled or incorrectly used. Of the places named after people, mostly men, fewer than 2 percent recognize Black or Indigenous people.

CORE’s goal is to make sure communities are aware of forthcoming name changes and how to participate through public comment. CORE is also collaborating with the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers to support the Department of the Interior’s initiatives to change offensive place names. Deb Haaland is the US Secretary of the Interior, appointed in March 2021 and the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, focusing on issues such as environmental justice, climate change and Indigenous rights. Under Haaland’s leadership, the aforementioned slur was removed from public land names in 2021.

Restoring and renaming places, however, extend beyond public lands. In 2017, the Asheville non-profit RiverLink led a campaign to label an unnamed urban creek after Osie Bacoate, a Black community leader and civil rights activist. 

Forming at the southwest edge of Asheville’s downtown, Bacoate Branch flows through an urban forest before running underground beneath a 237 unit apartment complex under construction in the booming River Arts District, known as the RAD. Upstream, the creek is within the footprint of Asheville’s historic Southside neighborhood, once a thriving Black community. Its western boundary was a bustling thoroughfare served by a trolley: Clingman Avenue. By the 1920s, Clingman Avenue and Southside were vibrant and predominantly Black, home to tradespeople, drivers, porters, laundresses, railway workers, teachers, and business owners.

The prosperity of Clingman Avenue and the Southside was shattered by the East Riverside Urban Renewal Project in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1949 American Housing Act funded the demolition of “decaying” neighborhoods and the construction of new public housing, but this disproportionately affected Black residents in Southside, including Leonard Jones’s great-grandmother.

Jones, a Buncombe County employee and attendant of the June CORE meeting, advocates for preserving the identities, boundaries, and names of historically Black neighborhoods to honor their legacy and history.  

“We had neighborhood names for decades, but new development is claiming space and carving out new names, but not necessarily speaking to the history of those places,” said Jones, who is a participant on the City of Asheville’s African American Heritage Commission. For example, within the historic boundaries of Southside are trendy new neighborhoods with contemporary names, including the RAD and South Slope.   

City leaders and organizations are supporting initiatives to recognize the past such as the Asheville Black Cultural Heritage Trail and funding public art, including murals of influential African American residents. But in recent years, areas in legacy neighborhoods have boomed, raising concerns about gentrification and the further displacement of Black residents that managed to remain following urban renewal.

“The numbers show that [Blacks] are leaving Asheville,” Jones said. “We don’t want to be erased from the story and just be a ghost in the murals.”

Jones’s connection to Asheville’s Black community is a snapshot into the complex relationships people have to places: to neighborhoods, cities, mountains, entire landscapes. Renaming places, perhaps, serves as a chance to reexamine and acknowledge the fraught past that shapes our present.

LOOKING AHEAD
In his famous 1945 study of place-naming in America, Names on the Land, historian George R. Stewart wrote: “Once, from eastern ocean to western ocean, the land stretched away without names.” His view that Europeans found a landscape full of unidentified places echoed the view in which the vast number of names in America came through the process of exploration and settlement—a notion that Hill and Crowe are attempting to correct. If they succeed in their quest, it’s a reminder that Western North Carolina wasn’t an empty wilderness, but acknowledges the presence of the Cherokee, who, after three centuries of oppression and erasure, managed to survive.

Renaming Clingmans Dome, however, is as complicated as it gets—it’s in two states, in a national park, an international biosphere reserve, and crossed by the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. Changing the name of a place on public land is a complex and time-consuming process that involves thorough research, community engagement, and formal approval from relevant authorities. Broad support strengthens the proposal which is submitted to the Board on Geographic Names, the official naming authority of the US.

The City of Asheville and Buncombe County were the first to pass resolutions in support, followed by backing from the majority of the counties in Western North Carolina, the North Carolina and Tennessee General Assemblies.

Though Kuwohi holds sacred significance to the Cherokee, the highest point in their ancestral homelands remains accessible to all. A motor road leads to a short walk to an observation tower overlooking stands of red spruce, making it one of the most frequented spots in the nation’s most visited national park. Restoring its rightful name offers a profound opportunity to highlight the peak’s historical and cultural importance, creating a space that uplifts the wisdom of generations.

Changing a name is challenging, but making it stick can be even more so. During our interview, Mary Crowe instinctively referred to the mountain by its 1859 name before correcting herself. Overcoming cultural inertia will be tough, particularly among those resistant to change.

“We’re still learning our traditional teachings and knowledge too,” Crowe said. ”We were forced to assimilate. Now it’s time we ask that you allow us to go back and learn without fear.”    

Ahead of the Crowd
Clingmans Dome isn’t the only peak in the country that is under review for a name change. Over the last several years, notable landforms like Mount Denali in Alaska have changed their names to honor native monikers and remove names and terms deemed offensive by the US Board of Geographic Naming. Here are a few of those recent proposals and their outcomes. 

Alaska: 
• Lion Head to Natsede’aayi » under review

Arizona: 
• Negrohead to Blackhead Butte » under review
• Chinde Point to Hózhó Point » approved
• Agassiz Peak to Öo'mawki » under review
• Coon Bluff to Raccoon Bluff » approved

California: 
• Mount Whitney to Tumanguya » under review
• McGlashan Point to China Wall Overlook » under review
• Stonewall Peak to Cush-Pii » under review
• Little Stonewall Peak to Ipuk Spiruk » under review
• Sacramento Mountain to Yohala-mi » under review
• Kit Carson Mountain to Frustum Peak » under review

Colorado:
• Mount Evans to Mount Blue Sky » approved
• Mount Elbert to Mount Daisy » under review
• Redskin Mountain to Mount Jerome » under review
• Pingree Hill to Soule Hill » under review
• Kit Carson Mountain to Tabeguache Ute Peak » under review
• Pikes Peak to Tavá Mountain » under review

Maine: 
• Cadillac Mountain to Wapuwoc Mountain » under review

Montana
• Jeff Davis Peak to Three Eagles Peak » approved

Oregon:
• Chinaman Hat to China Hat or Bath Hat » under review

Pennsylvania / Maryland:
• Negro Mountain to Malcolm Mountain or Mount Nemisis » under review

Virginia:
• Pine Mountain to Piney Mountain » approved

Wyoming
• Mount Woodring to Raven Peak » under review
• Mount Doane to First Peoples Mountain » approved