For the second year running, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that would return 76 culturally significant acres in Tennessee to Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians ownership.

Cherokee leaders are hoping to establish a lucrative business on a portion of the 300-plus acres of Interstate 40 frontage the tribe purchased in Tennessee earlier this year while also advancing plans for an adventure park on the Qualla Boundary, but first Tribal Council must sign off on the venture. 

Editor’s note: This column first appeared in a July 2004 edition of The Smoky Mountain News.

“To myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery; in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up; and though I can look with happy admiration at the lowland flowers, and woods, and open skies, the happiness is tranquil and cold, like that of examining detached wildflowers in a conservatory, or reading a pleasant book; and if the scenery be resolutely level, insisting upon the declaration of its own flatness in all the detail of it … it appears to me a prison, and I can not long endure it.”

— John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1850)

Following a 383-2 vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to pass legislation transferring the property to the tribe, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is one step closer to gaining ownership of 76 ancestrally important acres in Tennessee. 

A recent hearing on a congressional bill that would transfer 76 acres in Tennessee to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians has spurred hope that a long-fought battle to bring that acreage into permanent trust could soon come to an end.