BRYSON CITY
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is protesting Duke Energy's construction of an electrical station near the site the tribe considers its birthplace.
Duke Energy is clearing a site overlooking the ancestral home that the Cherokee call Kituwah, which archaeologists say was occupied at least 9,000 years ago. The Swain County site includes a mound 170 feet wide and 5 feet high in a field along the Tuckasegee River and surrounded by mountains. Cherokee tradition says that the mound once was the foundation of buildings that held the sacred flame that the tribe tended year-round.
Tests of the mound found successive layers of council houses built within it, said Brett Riggs, an archaeologist at tUNC Chapel Hill who has researched the site.
Kituwah was "the very touchstone of Cherokee life," Riggs said.
But a half-mile away and across the river, Duke Energy in December started clearing a site for a station that can raise or lower voltage in transmission lines. The station will rise 40 feet at its tallest point, and Duke Energy said that it is needed to meet the area's growing power needs.
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