Muscogee tribe to get their say over park plan
MACON, Ga. — When Tracie Revis climbs the Great Temple Mound, rising nine stories above the Ocmulgee River in the center of present-day Georgia, she walks in the steps of her Muscogean ancestors who were forcibly removed to Oklahoma 200 years ago.
“This is lush, gorgeous land. The rivers are gorgeous here,” Revis said recently as she gazed over the forest canopy to a distant green horizon, broken only by Macon's skyline, just across the water. “We believe that those ancestors are still here, their songs are still here, their words are still here, their tears are still here. And so we speak to them. You know, we still honor those that have passed on.”
If approved by Congress after a three-year federal review wraps up this fall, the mounds in Macon would serve as the gateway to a new Ocmulgee National Park and Preserve, protecting 54 river-miles of floodplain where nearly 900 more sites of cultural or historic significance have been identified.
Efforts to expand an existing historical park at the mounds site are in keeping with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland's “Tribal Homelands Initiative,” which supports fundraising to buy land and requires federal managers to seek out Indigenous knowledge about resources.
“This kind of land acquisition represents the best of what our conservation efforts should look like: collaborative, inclusive, locally led, and in support of the priorities of our country's tribal nations,” Haaland said at last weekend's 30th Annual Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration.
In an era when some culture warriors see government as the enemy, years of coalition-building have eliminated any significant opposition to federal management in the reliably Republican center of a long-red state. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation has been welcomed as an essential partner.
“Our voice, our say has been all over this whole process for a while now,” said Revis, who moved to Georgia this year to advocate to give the National Park Service primary authority over the heart of her people's ancestral land, which once stretched across Georgia, South Carolina, Florida and Alabama.
Muscogean people say their history is fraught with trauma, but also pride at how they're thriving now after surviving the Road to Misery, their phrase for the Trail of Tears. The forced march ordered by Congress removed 80,000 Native Americans from the eastern United States. Many died of illness, starvation or abuse as the federal government broke its promises to care for them in exchange for their lands.
And as soon as the Muscogee, Seminole, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw and other natives were gone from the Deep South, they were replaced by hundreds of thousands of slaves, sold down rivers by their northern owners to clear the land for cotton.