The Secret Meaning of the Word, Mound-builder

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner

A republic perishes when its citizens no longer remember their past or else are brainwashed into remembering a false description of the past. 

During the past forty years, a secret war has been raging in the Lower Southeastern United States over the contents of history books, state historical markers and museum exhibits. You won’t read about it in newspapers because wet-behind-the-ear reporters were either members of one side or else duped into presenting only the views of one side.

Always victorious, until 2012, was a shadowy alliance of occultists in the federal bureaucracy, academia and the media, who were determined to replace the ancient, complex history of the region with mythology. On the other side were millions of disunited Native Southerners, who would read newspapers or visit new museum exhibits and say, “What the <expletive deleted>! Government bureaucrats, academicians and cub reporters were telling them things that they knew were untrue, but they didn’t know how to confront the fake history. Year by year, the people of an early era, who know the true history, are dying off, leaving only the younger generations, who only know the lies.

The first attack of the occult was very early in the Reagan Administration, when the US Forest Service installed a “Native American History Museum” in the visitor’s center on top of Brasstown Bald Mountain. A Caucasian manikin was placed on three feet tall pedestal at the entrance to the museum and labeled “Cherokee.” A stooped over Middle Eastern troll was placed under a five feet high glass cabinet and labeled, “Mound-builder.”

By the seventh year of the Reagan Administration occultists in the US Dept. of Interior released an official map of “Southeastern Native American tribes” which showed that the Cherokees had always occupied Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, western Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. The Seminole had always occupied all of Florida. The Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creeks, Uchee, Alabama, Catawba, Shawnee and Cusabo were not even mentioned. It was the only time I ever heard my grandmother cuss, when she saw that map in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

My grandmother and mother cussed again in 1991, when the final version of that map was adopted by Congress. Due to pressure from Alabama’s and Georgia’s powerful US Senators, Howard Hefflin and Herman Talmedge, much of eastern & southern Alabama and the southwestern corner of Georgia were reserved for the Creeks. Otherwise most of the Creek Territory and all of the other major indigenous tribes were still erased from history. Actually, the Creeks did not live in the regions where they were shown to have always been until the 1600’s.

The statements made by news reporters on Native American history in Tennessee and North Carolina are better suited for presentation on the Comedy Central TV channel. For example, the Knoxville News Sentinel newspaper recently had an article on the Hernando de Soto Expedition (1539-1543). An extensive part of the article discussed “the first meeting of the Cherokees and the Spanish in 1540 at the great Cherokee metropolis of Chote on the Little Tennessee River.” The words, Chote and Cherokee, are never mentioned in the De Soto Chronicles. Chote is an Itza Maya word. The first map to show the Cherokees living Tennessee was published in 1715. There was no village name Chote on the Little Tennessee River until around 1754. Its maximum size was a population of around 500 people. That is NOT a metropolis.

In 2019, we noticed a stark change in the article on the Cherokees in the New Georgia Encyclopedia. Gone was the accurate article by the late and highly respected History professor at Emory University in Atlanta, John C. Goff. In its place, was absolute hogwash by an unknown part-time, adjunct instructor at the University of West Virginia. It states that the Cherokees lived in Georgia for hundreds of years and built the mounds in northern Georgia. As the readers have probably already guessed, the replacement of the original article was preceded by a generous “donation” to the secretive owners of the New Georgia Encyclopedia by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

The “key word” used in much of the propaganda, seeking to change our history in the Southeast is “mound-builder.” The newly published Native American Encyclopedia of Georgia traces its political history. If you would like to purchase this new book, go to the publisher’s (Lulu Publishing) website: Native American Encyclopedia of Georgia.

mound-builders (SE) – Although obviously meaning anybody, anywhere in the world, who built earthen mounds, the term has special connotation in the Southern Highlands. The political use of the term first appeared in 1827 in the Cherokee Phoenix Newspaper. Georgia state officials were pressuring the federal government to honor an agreement in 1805 in which Georgia agreed to cede what is now most of Alabama and Mississippi, if the federal government agreed to remove all Native American tribes to Alabama or points farther west.  The problem was that the federal government and Georgia had signed treaties with both the Cherokees and the Creeks, stating that they could keep their land forever, unless voluntarily sold or ceded.

The Cherokee leadership began claiming that the Creeks had never lived north of the Etowah River and that all the mounds in the Southern Piedmont and Appalachians had been built by a mysterious people, who lived in the region for 200 years and then left for unknown parts. *  The statement was patently false because both British and French maps showed prominent Creek tribes such as the Tuskegee and Tallasee living on the Little Tennessee River in North Carolina and Tennessee at least as late as 1700.

Nevertheless, in 1976 the US Forest Service placed the same statement in its museum atop Georgia’s Brasstown Bald Mountain.  A stooped over troll like figure with a humped back,  Middle Eastern facial features and wearing crude animal skins was placed in a five feet high cabinet and labeled a “mound builder.” [See photograph above.] A tall, standing, Caucasian manikin was placed on a 36-inch pedestal at the entrance to the museum, spray-painted a slight tan, dressed in traditional Creek clothing and labeled a Cherokee.

Of course, the general public did not know that Creek men never go bald, traditionally wore their hair in a bun and also wore mustaches! The stooped over troll looked like the Italian and Middle Eastern actors, who have traditionally played Indians on Hollywood movies. Thus, they thought if the US Government paid for this museum, it must be factual history.

The fake history exhibit was finally removed in 2012, after many years of complaints from Georgia’s citizens and history teachers.  However, the motivation for US Forest Service bureaucrats to do this came from their sudden 2012 claim by the USFS that the Cherokees built the mounds and stone ruins in Georgia, while the exhibit said that “mysterious mound builders” constructed these ruins.

In the 21st century those who believe that the Cherokees have occupied the Southern Appalachians and Piedmont since the Ice Age periodically pressure archaeologists, museum curators, government officials, Chamber of Commerce officers and textbook authors to replace the words Creek Indians or Creek’s ancestors with the word “mound-builders”. 

In the spring of 2006, a delegation of Eastern Cherokee bureaucrats and Western Carolina University professors appeared at the Etowah Mound Museum in Cartersville, GA and demanded that all references to the Creek Indians be removed from the museum.  The signs were to be replaced by either the words Cherokee or “mound builder.” However, all archaeological evidence and the preponderance of Creek, Itza Maya and Peruvian place names throughout Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina and western North Carolina, negate their claims that an unknown people built the mounds of the region.  Even the Oconaluftee River, which flows through the Eastern Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina is a Creek word, which means, Oconee People-Massacred.

Post Script

*Most of the Cherokee history, printed in the Cherokee Phoenix between 1827 and 1832, is fictional and directly conflicts with The History of Cherokee People, written by Cherokee Principal Chief Charles Hicks in 1826. In his introduction, Hicks stated that John Ross and members of the National Committee (including Major Ridge and Elias Boudinot) knew virtually nothing about the history of the Cherokees. In the research for the Native American Encyclopedia of Georgia, I discovered that most, if not all, of the front page articles in the Cherokee Phoenix were actually written by the Rev. Samuel Worcester from Vermont! Boudinot merely adapted his drafts to the available space. Throughout the publishing history of the Phoenix, you can tell when Worcester and Boudinot are telling a lie. They made up the names of non-existent Cherokees with English names, who could not read or write English, and thus signed affidavits confirming the truth of the article with X’s.

Unfortunately, 20th century white academicians and even Cherokee scholars, used the statements made in the Cherokee Phoenix as factual history. That became the starting point for academicians and North Carolina archaeologists going farther and farther out into lala land. Thus, today we are faced with an even more difficult task of confronting university departments and groups of archaeologists trying to protect their contrived history.

Furthermore, the so-called Sequoyah Syllabary used today, was literally created by Samuel Worcester. It is doubtful that Sequoyah could have understood Worcester’s symbols. Worcester continued to modify his syllabary until 1855. When I was a consultant to the Qualla Housing Authority on the Eastern Cherokee Reservation in 1976, no one could read the Sequoyah Syllabary. It was never used in North Carolina. The State of North Carolina was paying two Cherokee teachers from Oklahoma to instruct teachers at Cherokee High School so they could teach the new generation of North Carolina Cherokees the writing system. Basically, what I am telling you is that virtually everything that tourists are told today is caca de toro.