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From YouTube: Buncombe County Board of Commissioners' Regular Meeting (November 15, 2022)

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Regular meeting of the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners on November 15, 2022. To review the full agenda visit buncombecounty.org/commissioners.

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We also acknowledge our nation's history of colonialism that has inflicted discrimination, deprivation, violence and genocide upon indigenous people and whereas the area currently known as Buncombe County North Carolina rests on land that was first inhabited by the Cherokee who flourished here for thousands of years, as well as the Catawba people and whereas the traditional territory of the Cherokee covered more than one hundred thousand square miles of what today is Western North, Carolina, Eastern, Tennessee, Northern, Georgia and upstate South Carolina, and whereas, in the early 18th century, the estimated population of the Cherokee People was 36 000, but by 1770 was only about 7 000 due to force relocation, consolidation of towns and smallpox outbreaks, and whereas white settlers began arriving in what would become Buncombe County in the 1760s and took Land from the Cherokee that was not seated nor paid for and whereas, following a massacre led by Griffith Rutherford leader of the Salisbury District militia, virtually no indigenous inhabitants were left in the present day, Buncombe County region and whereas the Cherokee people endure to this day, having survived catastrophic disease loss of their ancestral lands, forced relocation to a reservation, long-term mismanagement at the reservation family separations through the removal of children to boarding schools and termination, and whereas the Buncombe County Register of Deeds collaborated with Cherokee counterparts to collect information for the website, known as a long as as long as the grass shall grow featuring the history of Cherokee land sessions that created Buncombe County and whereas more than 8 000 members of the Eastern band of the Cherokee now live in the koala boundary just to our West and whereas we recognize and honor the generous contributions of the Eastern band of the Cherokee to our economy, culture and community, and whereas the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners supports renaming the Great Smoky Mountain National, Parks, klingman's Dome to its Cherokee named kawohi.