Land Acknowledgment & Reflection: State of Tennessee and on behalf of the Sierra Club Tennessee Chapter

September 23, 2026
indigenous peoples day image with moutains and text

Land Acknowledgment & Reflection: State of Tennessee and on behalf of the Sierra Club Tennessee Chapter

To celebrate Native American Day, we pause to recognize the people of this land, its history, and our future together.

Sierra Club Tennessee Chapter acknowledges that the land now known as the State of Tennessee has been inhabited and cared for by Indigenous peoples for over 12,000 years, from the ancient hunting and gathering societies of the Paleoindian and Archaic periods, through the mound-building Woodland and Mississippian cultures whose earthworks still stand today at sites like Pinson Mounds, Old Stone Fort, and Chucalissa near Memphis. By the time of European contact, this land was the homeland of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Yuchi (Euchee), Shawnee, and Muscogee (Creek) peoples, among others, who built towns, farmed river bottomlands, and maintained extensive trade and diplomatic networks across the Southeast, built on stewardship and reciprocity with the land. They were the original kin and caretakers of our mountains, valleys, and hollers we call home today.

As an organization fighting for ecological and social justice, we recognize a hard truth: that work cannot be separated from supporting Indigenous-led movements and community organizing. Environmental justice and Indigenous sovereignty aren't two separate causes running side by side; they're the same cause, and we can't meaningfully do one without the other. As part of taking those steps toward solidarity, we ask that we all pause and acknowledge our history first, so we might untangle those narratives and better understand our future together.

"Our Indigenous people have always lived in harmony with nature. It's this relationship that makes us a vital part of climate solutions. Protecting Indigenous people and knowledge is climate justice."
 - Brianna Fruean, Samoan climate activist

The history of our country was founded on the backs of people of color, through slavery, and through the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous peoples, not the myth of an empty "virgin" continent that was never true. Controlling that narrative has always been one of the most powerful tools of oppression. We (as allies, volunteers, and community members) have to tell the story of Indigenous people, people of color, and European colonization of the US to understand where we are today, to untangle the narrative and ground ourselves in truth, and to avoid repeating these patterns.

"It's not about the past; it's about knowing your history so that you can fight in the present. Otherwise, you don't know who the real enemy is, what the real issue is, because it had been covered by many layers of bad information, of lies, and manipulation."
- Raoul Peck

The genocide of these societies began directly in the Southeast of Appalachia (a name most historians trace to the Apalachee people of the Florida Panhandle, some of whom later joined the Creek Confederacy) when the English colony was founded at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1670. Charleston quickly became the hub of a colonial development built on the deerskin trade and, more destructively, on an extractive relationship with Indigenous peoples that created the Indian slave trade, which captured, exported, and killed tens of thousands of Native people from across the Southeast, sending survivors to plantations in the Caribbean and northern colonies. Carolina traders armed and financed allies and put pressure on Native nations to raid rival ones for captives, a system that radiated instability, warfare, and epidemic disease far into the interior, including the towns of what is now Tennessee, long before any colonial settlement existed there. The state of Tennessee itself takes its name from an Indigenous word: the Cherokee village of Tanasi (also spelled Tanase). The Cherokee Path, a trade corridor running from Charleston into the Appalachian interior, became both a route of commerce and a conduit for that disruption.

This system collapsed into open war in 1715, when the Yamasee, along with Catawba, Creek, and other nations who had suffered under Carolina's slave-raiding and debt-bondage practices, rose up in what became known as the Yamasee War. The war nearly destroyed the South Carolina colony and reshaped the Southeast's political map. The Cherokee, after years of resistance, ultimately entered into an “alliance” with Carolina, a hard decision that ultimately led to more violence. In the war's aftermath, the Yamasee fled south to Spanish Florida, while the Yuchi and other displaced peoples moved west and north, some settling along the Tennessee River valley. The Shawnee, who had maintained a village in the Cumberland region near present-day Nashville, were pushed out entirely by the early 1700s amid this broader upheaval and rising conflict with the Cherokee and Chickasaw. Tennessee and South Carolina's Native histories are, in this sense, entangled: the same Cherokee towns spanned both colonial South Carolina and Tennessee, from the Lower Towns near present-day Keowee, South Carolina, to the Overhill Towns of Chota and Tanasi in East Tennessee.

 

Image:Map of Cherokee land cessions. The Treaty of Sycamore Shoals is represented by the blue area labeled 7. Image courtesy of @tnlibarchives.

The Anglo-Cherokee War of 1760–1761 brought this violence directly into the heart of Cherokee homeland: British regulars and colonial rangers burned and spread mass violence into the town of Estatoe and, a year later, the Cherokee capital of Etchoe, destroying fifteen towns, killing everyone, including elders, women, and children, and only leaving 5,000 Cherokee people homeless and displaced. Tennessee itself came into being through this same process of dispossession and colonial cleansing of Indigenous peoples: after the war for American independence, squatters led by settler-ranger John Sevier waged a decade of raids against the resistant Chickamauga Cherokee, who fought under the leadership of Dragging Canoe from towns near present-day Chattanooga. After the 1785 Treaty of Hopewell and the 1791 Treaty of Holston, in which the Cherokee Nation ceded land under pressure, the State of Tennessee was stolen directly from Cherokee territory and admitted to the Union in 1796, with Sevier as its first governor. He is memorialized today with a statue in the U.S. Capitol.

This intentional genocide and cultural erasure culminated in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, under which the federal government forced the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Nations from their remaining Southeastern homelands to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. Tennessee lay directly along the removal routes: tens of thousands of Cherokee were marched, transported, and ferried through Ross's Landing at present-day Chattanooga, through Nashville and McMinnville, and across the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers on what became known as the Trail of Tears. Thousands died along the way from exposure, disease, and exhaustion. Notably, some Cherokee families evaded removal by hiding in the mountains of western North Carolina, becoming the ancestors of today's Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, a reminder that removal, though devastating, was never total. The colonists' attempt to completely remove indigenous populations from the US was never a success, and those stories of the extension need to be rewritten.

Monument in Chattanooga, TN, by Team Gadugi, The Passage, 2005, brass, glazed ceramic, stainless steel, and water.

Location: Ross's Landing – 100 Riverfront Parkway, Chattanooga, TN 37402 (Google map)

We honor the resilience and continued presence of the descendant nations whose citizens carry these histories forward today, including the Cherokee Nation, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, the Chickasaw Nation, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and the Shawnee Tribe. We recognize that the land we gather on, hike through, and work to protect carries this layered history of homeland, disruption, forced migration, and survival, and we understand caring for this land as inseparable from honoring the people who cared for it long before us and who remain its rightful stewards in memory and in ongoing relationship. This work is already happening elsewhere in the Sierra Club: in California, the Redwood Chapter worked alongside the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council and the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians to advocate for AB 2494, legislation to update California's roughly 85,000-acre state demonstration forest system to include Indigenous tribal co-management. Here in Tennessee, as we fight to defend the Roadless Rule, push back against TVA and extractive industries, and take on the unchecked expansion of data centers, we need to recognize who has been fighting for this land the longest. We also continue building trust, allyship, and fighting alongside Indigenous organizers and communities. 

Tennessee sadly is not home to a federally recognized tribal government today, a direct legacy of removal. But many are trying to change that; supporting Indigenous community here means fostering reciprocal relationships with the descendant nations named above and connecting with the intertribal and community organizations doing that work on the ground. Locally, that includes the Native American Indian Association of Tennessee, a Native-led nonprofit founded in 1980 by and for Native people that has served Tennessee's Native community for more than four decades through education, employment programs, cultural events, and social services; the Tennessee Indigenous Women's Circle, a newly launched nonprofit building community, mentorship, and cultural continuity among Indigenous women across the state; and United South and Eastern Tribes (USET), a coalition of federally recognized tribal nations from across the eastern United States that advocates for tribal sovereignty and is headquartered right here in Nashville.

So we leave you with these questions: How do we find common ground? How do we become kin? Acknowledging our history and moving forward together means working for and with tribal rights, because that, too, is conservation. To work for the future, we have to work together, and the best way to start being an ally is to learn this shared history.

We can start to undo the ties that bind us by learning our stories, learning from them, and then working together. Learn about Indigenous movements happening in your communities and support each other; we need all of us in this together, in solidarity!

A suggested reading to celebrate this day and our collective history is An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, a 2014 non-fiction book by historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz that reframes American history from the perspective of Native Americans. For other books and recommendations, please check out organizations doing the important work of supporting Indigenous peoples and our kin.

Author's note: Native American Day is often confused with Indigenous Peoples' Day in October, but the two have different histories. Native American Day traces back to the early 1900s, when Seneca historian and anthropologist Dr. Arthur C. Parker convinced the Boy Scouts of America to observe an early version of the day between 1912 and 1915; individual states gradually adopted their own versions over the following decades, and by the late 1980s and 1990s, most had settled on the fourth Friday in September, which is where this year's September 25th comes from. Indigenous Peoples' Day has separate, international roots: it was first proposed in 1977 at a United Nations conference in Geneva, and has since spread across US cities and states in October as an alternative to Columbus Day.

Written by: Riley Douglas

Volunteer Engagement Coordinator for the TN chapter

Works Cited

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