The mound that survived.
The land that came home.

The Noquisiyi mound sits at the center of Franklin, North Carolina, at the confluence of the Little Tennessee River and Cartoogechaye Creek. It has been there for longer than any written record reaches. Cherokee women built it, carrying baskets of soil to that place over generations, raising the ground beneath their council house until it could be seen from the river and the mountains both.

The name means star place. It appears on maps as early as 1544. British colonial records first mention it by name in 1718. In 1730, a Scottish baronet named Alexander Cuming stood on that mound and placed a metal crown on the head of Moytoy of Tellico, declaring him Emperor of the Cherokee Nation.

Moytoy never used that title. But the mound endured.

What was lost, and what remained

When the TVA completed the Tellico Dam in 1979, the waters rose over the Little Tennessee River valley and drowned four Cherokee Overhill towns. Chota, the Mother Town, where the sacred fire had burned since before memory. Tanasi, whose name the state of Tennessee kept after flooding the town itself. Citico, where the medicine lineages had been kept for generations. Tellico, where Moytoy governed.

The Noquisiyi mound was not in the flood zone. It stood on higher ground in Franklin, thirty miles upstream. While the towns went under, the mound remained — the last standing landmark of the Overhill Cherokee world, rising quietly at the center of a small mountain town that had largely forgotten what it was standing next to.

The women who built it carried the soil in baskets. The mound they raised outlasted everything else. That is not an accident. That is what it means to build something that endures.

The return

• 2019Franklin Town Council votes to deed the Noquisiyi mound to the Noquisi Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the region's cultural sites.
• 2024The adjacent 0.56 acre property receives a Cherokee name: Gaduni Kanohesgi, The Franklin Storyteller.
• Jan 2026Franklin Town Council unanimously approves the resolution paving the way for the mound deed to transfer from the Noquisi Initiative to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
• 2026The deed transfers. For the first time in nearly two centuries, the Noquisiyi mound is in Cherokee hands. The land has come home.

The coronation site of Moytoy of Tellico — the place where the British tried to manufacture an emperor in 1730, the place that the novel Emperor of the Cherokee reaches toward across 296 years — is now held by the people it belongs to.

The work that remains

The deed transfer is a beginning, not an ending. The Noquisi Initiative continues its work preserving, protecting, and promoting Cherokee cultural heritage across the original homelands — the Little Tennessee River valley, the Cowee mound, the heritage apple orchards, the cultural corridor that connects these sites into a living landscape rather than a collection of historical markers.

The mound needs stewardship. The surrounding land needs protection. The stories need to be told accurately, consistently, and from inside the lineage — not by outside institutions who mean well but don't know the names.

This is ongoing work. It requires ongoing support.

My ancestor stood on that mound in 1730.
My son and I stood on it in March 2026,
the week before this novel launched.

The land came home. The story is not over.