Could this important Indigenous site be Georgia’s first national park?

Trimmed with sweetgum trees and wrapped in velvety grass, the land gently rose and fell all around me as I strolled. Up ahead, a paved path led to a neat, conical mound that spiked towards the sky. Behind me, a tour group hummed and chattered.

“For me, when I come here, it’s like being at grandma’s house,” said Tracie Revis, who was showing me across the swollen terrain of Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park. “Everything changed when I smelled a root here that we still use in our traditional medicines today. I thought: ‘What would it look like to live back in the homeland?’”

The site – which unfolds in a series of sacred mounds – holds deep-rooted significance as the ancestral homelands of the Indigenous Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the fourth-largest Tribe in the US, of which Tracie is a member. She is also the director of advocacy at the Ocmulgee National Park and Preserve Initiative, an organisation that is working to both expand the footprint of the site and have it designated as America’s newest national park.

Ocmulgee Mounds is a worthy candidate for having its status elevated. Evidence uncovered here suggests that humans have inhabited this land for more than 12,000 years – this expands to 17,000 years in the wider region of Central Georgia. Indeed, the spoils of the largest archaeological dig in American history, which took place here in the 1930s, are still on display at the site’s visitor centre, where Tracie had begun our tour just an hour earlier.

“The dig uncovered 2.5 million artefacts and the site became an archaeological crown jewel,” she had explained as we’d wandered past spear points and pottery, observing the swirling stamps that are particular to the Indigenous Peoples of this region.
The mounds had been constructed somewhere between 900 and 1100 AD, during the Mississippian Period, and have served as everything from burial sites to homes for village leaders. The modern Muscogee Peoples are the descendants of these Mississippian mound builders.

“This was the capital city for us – and one of the largest mound complexes in the state,” Tracie said. “But there were Tribal towns all up and down the Ocmulgee River and they were vibrant, organised civilisations. You have to use your mind’s eye and imagine what was really here.”

We followed the path up to the mound on the horizon – which Tracie explained was a reconstructed Mississippian-era earth lodge – and I ducked through a doorway marked by fat wooden beams. This was where Tribal Council meetings would have been held, Tracie explained. Light escaped from a single smoke hole in the timbered roof and I spied a bold effigy of an eagle that had been sculpted into the ground. Although the structure was created in the 1930s, when the Historical Park was established, the clay floor was the original one that had been built here.

Reckoning with the past

After leaving the earth lodge, Tracie led me up a wooden stairway to the top of a soaring domiciliary mound, which had served as a home for Tribal Chiefs. From this lofty perch the beauty of the land showed itself. A skirt of corn-yellow wildflowers inched towards upland forest and trails beat into an ocean of green. There are 13km of hiking routes within the park, snaking into woodland and wetland alive with herons, egrets and alligators.

But the natural and cultural significance of these lands has not always been appreciated, beginning with the removal of its original inhabitants. European contact occurred as early as the 16th century, when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto forged into what is now Georgia’s interior. Indigenous populations were ravaged by unfamiliar diseases, such as measles and smallpox, and formerly distinct tribes banded together for survival.

Over the centuries that followed, the resulting Muscogee confederacy – whose home territories originally swept across Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and Alabama – was forced westward by colonial settlement. And when President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act was signed into law in 1830, Georgia’s original inhabitants embarked upon the gruelling (and for many, deadly) Trail of Tears, which led them to so-called ‘Indian Territory’: Oklahoma, the modern-day location of the Muscogee Nation.

Physical scars are still evident at the Ocmulgee Mounds site too. In the 1840s, a railroad was built, gouging a great scar across the land and bisecting a burial mound. The train still runs along it to this day.

“We hear it all the time,” Tracie said, gazing at the tracks. “It’s a reminder of the desecration of the land and removal of our Peoples.”

She sees the site’s pending national park status as a chance for Indigenous Peoples to reconnect with their homelands and educate local communities. A Special Resource Study (SRS) currently sits with Congress, and it’s hoped that legislation will land in early 2024, eventually expanding the boundaries of the site further along the Ocmulgee River Corridor and also encompassing the Bond Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. It’ll also be the first time, explained Tracie, that a removed Indigenous Tribe will co-manage a park.

“It’s a beautiful and historical land – and we need to protect it,” Tracie said. “We’re asking to come back and be a part of this… to tell stories from our perspective and to educate and grow this community that was founded on our land. We hope to be an example for how other Tribes and non-Tribal entities can work together in ways that benefit the entire community.”

And that goes beyond the proposed national park site, too. The city of Macon – the closest urban settlement to the mound site – was laid out in the 1820s, and efforts are now being made to honour the region’s Indigenous Peoples here.

“You can’t tell the story of Macon without the story of the Tribes,” Tracie had told me as we parted. And with her words ringing in my ears, I drove into the urban buzz, passing through a downtown area thick with independent shops and live music venues.

The Muscogee Nation Flag, which depicts a wheat sheaf and a plough, now flies above Macon’s City Hall, and there are plans to eventually have street names listed in both English and Muscogee.

There are cultural expressions of the region’s Indigenous heritage, too. I ducked inside the McEachern Art Center, where the walls were papered with striking works by Indigenous artists, such as painter and printmaker Randy Kemp (Muscogee/Choctaw/Euchee). I also toured the original Capricorn Records studio building, best known for being the birthplace of the music genre southern rock. It has nurtured artists such as the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd – although when I visited, it was gearing up for sessions with a series of Muscogee artists.

Telling the right tale

Yet while Macon and the Ocmulgee Mounds site are currently in the spotlight, it’s not the only place where history is being retold and reclaimed in Georgia. I struck south-east and landed in Savannah, the ‘Hostess City of the South’, which unfolds in a matrix of live-oak-studded squares and cobbled streets. Tracie had told me that the Muscogee Peoples once lived in this area too, though whispers of any Indigenous presence are now hard to find.

A pyramid of stones at the centre of Wright Square once marked the burial place of Yamacraw Chief Tomochichi; however, a monument to railroad magnate William Gordon was built on top of the plot back in 1883, desecrating the Chief’s gravesite. Now there’s a hulking granite memorial to the Chief in the corner of the square instead, which guide and historian Vaughnette Goode-Walker pointed out. She was leading me through the city on her Footprints of Savannah Walking Tour, which follows the “forgotten history footpaths of the city”.

“General Oglethorpe [founder of the Georgia colony] laid this out,” she said of the square. “He came in 1733 and he brought enslaved people to help take down the forests that he found here and to help remove the Native Americans who lived along these bluffs. It became the genesis for what we know as urban slavery here in Savannah.

This tour is dedicated to all those ancestors who made that Middle Passage journey and landed on these shores.”

She had begun with a buttery rendition of ‘Oh, Freedom’, a song bound up with the Civil Rights Movement, before leading me across the city, pausing before landmarks such as the Chatham County Courthouse, which squats at the edge of the elegant Historic District.

Most visitors would walk right past this otherwise unremarkable civic building, but Vaughnette explained how enslaved Africans had been sold at this site at monthly auctions. Her tour focuses on the Savannah histories that aren’t etched into plaques or regaled on historical markers, and she laid down a stirring blueprint of the city.

Arrowing south to Georgia’s feathered coast, I found more untold histories intrinsically bound up with the land. A windswept ferry ride from Meridian decanted me onto Sapelo, a remote barrier island hemmed with white sand and cobwebbed in Spanish moss.

The island is now home to fewer than 50 inhabitants. Among these is tour guide Peter Lukken of Explore Sapelo, who met me at the dock. Even having retired to the island, he still considers himself to be a ‘newcomer’ here.

Peter drove us along dirt roads until we spotted piles of discarded shells (known as shell middens) that serve as reminders of Sapelo’s earliest inhabitants. We pushed on past the ruins of an old chocolate plantation made from tabby (a mix of oyster shells, lime and sand) and watched for wild cattle amid the palmettos. But I was eager to discover more about the island’s current inhabitants.

Sapelo is the home of a Gullah Geechee community, descendants of enslaved West Africans who were stolen from their homelands and brought to these shores by planter Thomas Spalding in 1802. I met descendant Nikki Williams in the small enclave of Hog Hammock, a community born after emancipation. Its population has dwindled alongside the growing scarcity of job opportunities, but Nikki told that me the island has remained a cultural stronghold, with enduring skills such as the weaving of sweetgrass baskets and production of cast nets still being practiced.

“We have a master basket weaver here and she’s passing the craft on to more generations. And our Culture Day just returned for the first time since the pandemic, where we have vendors of Gullah Geechee heritage as well as ring shouting (a religious ritual) and traditional foods like smoked mullet. We also offer a tour of the island.”

But still, Sapelo faces challenges: a new zoning ordinance was recently passed, allowing for the building of larger homes and potentially spiking property taxes. Descendants say this poses a threat to the island’s physical and cultural fabric.

“We love that people love our island. We want you to come; we want you to see the culture, the nature, the beauty. But we don’t want you to change it. Our culture is directly tied to our land.”

Nikki’s words stayed with me as I rode the ferry back to the mainland, Sapelo’s shores evaporating into the distance. Endless stories are bound to this slice of land called Georgia. The truth is in the retelling.

More historical sites in Georgia

Wanderer Memory Trail, Jekyll Island
One of the last known slave ships to dock in the US arrived at Jekyll Island in 1858, around 50 years after the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed here. It carried some 400 enslaved Africans in its belly; now their descendants live across Georgia’s barrier islands and beyond. A trail was installed in 2018 to memorialise their plight, with exhibits including historical panels and audio stops laid out along the shoreline. These tell the story of Umwalla, an African child abducted into a life of slavery.

Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site, Cartersville
Run by the Georgia State Parks service, this Indigenous site protects a number of sacred earthen mounds that were home to a community thought to have flourished between 1000 and 1550 AD. Its story is told across information panels and an artefact-packed museum, plus there is also a nature trail that fringes the Etowah River.

Martin Luther King Jr National Historical Park, Atlanta
Martin Luther King Jr – one of the most iconic leaders of the US Civil Rights Movement – was born in Atlanta, where several important sites now honour his story under the banner of a single National Historical Park. These include King’s preserved birth home (currently undergoing renovations) and the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the activist and minister was baptised. You can also visit the King Center, which includes his burial site and many poignant exhibits.

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