Many voices — including botanists, archaeologists, and Joy Harjo, the U.S. poet laureate — are calling to create an enormous national park along the Ocmulgee River that runs through the heart of Georgia.
Story by Janisse Ray | Photos by Christopher Ian Smith
And when he grieves for those he loves
He carves out valleys enough to hold everyone’s tears
— “My Man’s Feet,” Joy Harjo
John Wilson wants to create a national park in the middle of Georgia, and he’s not alone.
I knew Wilson back when he was hit by this idea that people called crazy. He told me about it in a meeting 25 years ago. I thought, “zany,” and I promptly slid Wilson’s vision into a mind-folder marked for remarkable and impossible notions.
A woodworker by trade and an artist, Wilson is a lover of maps and a 60-something guy who cares about what’s happening in nature.
He wants to devote a lot of land — thousands of acres of mostly undeveloped and unoccupied land in various kinds of public and private ownership, from willing sellers only — to a new national park. To wildness. To the past. To the future.
Wilson isn’t proposing that we start from full-blown capitalism and return to prehistory. He thinks we should prep for post-capitalism. He knows we'll need water. Oxygen. Trees to store carbon. Plants for medicine and for food. Animals for food, for company. An entire functioning ecosystem.
In 2004, Brian Adams, a Macon, Georgia, attorney with a passion for the outdoors, got taken by Wilson’s vision; and in 2009, the two of them, with plenty of help from the community, co-founded the Ocmulgee National Park and Preserve Initiative (ONPPI). The key to making their dream come true, a consultant told them, was to get Congress to authorize a Special Resource Study. So the group drafted a bill and began to strategize.
Ten years later, in March 2019, something big happened.
President Donald Trump signed into law the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act. It authorized the National Park Service to turn Ocmulgee Mounds National Monument into a National Historical Park — an important change — and quadruple its size. More importantly, The National Park Service (NPS) would implement the sought-after Special Resource Study that would look at the possibility of an even larger park — as much as 50 miles — along the undeveloped corridor of the Ocmulgee River between Macon and Hawkinsville, Georgia.
The National Park Service is conducting a survey of the Ocmulgee River Corridor in central Georgia, which covers around “50 river miles” and thousands of acres of mostly undeveloped and unoccupied land in various kinds of public and private ownership.
Let’s place ourselves geographically. The state of Georgia is a 12-pane window, three across and four down, and quite tilted. A watershed starts in the top left pane.
The Ocmulgee (from the Muscogee word “okimulgee,” meaning “boiling waters”) rises in the upper Piedmont — with the Yellow, Alcovy, and South rivers — and flows through the rocky shoals of that territory. After it passes through Lake Jackson and becomes the Ocmulgee proper, it heads southeasterly, crossing the Fall Line, a geographic division between the Piedmont and Coastal Plains, at Macon.
On the banks of the Ocmulgee River, the Muscogee (Creek) people built a civilization with a history that reaches back at least 17,000 years. They established a number of towns, including one of the largest Mississippian mound complexes in North America, which may have had a population of at least 1,000.
Macon is a power spot. Not only is it located on the banks of Ocmulgee’s boiling waters, it’s also where the Muscogee (Creek) people built a civilization with a history that reaches back at least 17,000 years. They established towns, including one of the largest Mississippian mound complexes in North America, which is estimated to have had a population of at least 1,000 in its heyday. By the 1730s, the town at Ocmulgee was abandoned, although it continued to be a sacred site for the Muscogee (Creek), who returned for ceremony and trade.
Beyond that, you know what happened to the Native people of North America. Crushed, almost destroyed, by European viruses and bacteria, they were pressured off their lands. In 1830, when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, most of the Creeks and Cherokees who remained in Georgia were marched to Oklahoma on a weeping walk, leaving behind life as they had known it for tens, hundreds, thousands of years.
Let's go back to this idea of a national park in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation homeland, in the rich country of central Georgia.
The park movement has been rightfully condemned for the many ways it displaced Native Americans. As Mark David Spence wrote in Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, wilderness areas being preserved actually were landscapes occupied by Indigenous people.
We have to face our long American history of uprooting communities in order to create public land and other federal installations. As Carolyn Finney, author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, wrote in an opinion piece, “A conversation about our public lands would be incomplete without considering the loss experienced by American Indians, the pain of enslaved Africans, Japanese internment and New Mexican disenfranchisement.”
A national park in Georgia could be redemptive, then, preserving land for people from whom it was taken.
It’s important to note, as well, the historically Black neighborhood that borders what is presently Ocmulgee Mounds. Paul Bronson, a Macon-Bibb County commissioner, is very much interested in the jobs that a new national park status would bring to the district he represents. “We have a beautiful park,” he recently told me. “We need to do all we can to preserve the area without infringing on other communities that are nearby, and we need to do it strategically.”
There’s another reason why a national park would be good in central Georgia. By the time the preservation movement hit the United States, in the late 1800s, the South was already settled. Astounding places in the West, like Yellowstone and Glacier and Yosemite, got protected.
But in the late 1800s, the South’s spectacular places were being logged and mined and ditched — not preserved as pristine wildernesses. Part of that was due to economic dependence on Southern agriculture, made successful by slave labor. Part of it was the war, and the thing that caused the war — landowners clinging to slavery. Afterward, the South continued to be commodified, a source of timber and cotton and, later, coal, kaolin, tobacco, soybeans, corn.
The national parks that we do have in Georgia are historical — preserving forts and battlegrounds and the birthplaces of leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Jimmy Carter. We have nothing like the vast expanses of land that we have out West.
Is the South any less beautiful, less ecologically complicated, less rare, less awe-inspiring than the West? Do we need the loudness of geology to understand power? Can we have a quiet geography? Can we understand the quiet muscle of botanics?
“The National Park Service has some ground to make up. We owe the nation some parks in the Southeast,” said botanist Heather Bowman Cutway, professor at Mercer University in Macon and a board member of ONPPI. Cutway, who studies the fringed campion, a rare wildflower that occurs in central Georgia, believes no grand vistas are required. “There are lots of ways places can be special,” she said. “I think Ocmulgee has that specialness.”
Much of the national significance of the Ocmulgee River Corridor can be found in three words — an archaeological landscape. Dominic Day, a research fellow at Mercer University, surveyed the corridor and mapped almost 900 known historic sites. These include ancient mounds and villages, Creek settlements, colonial forts, and African American cemeteries. About 60% of the sites are within 5 miles of the Ocmulgee. Anywhere archaeologists have looked, within the river’s snakeprint, discoveries have been found.
Click to enlarge map
“The sheer number, age, and undisturbed condition of the prehistoric sites, in particular, would make a park like this unique," wrote journalist Heather Duncan. "No national parks outside the desert Southwest preserve archaeological resources across a landscape.”
At the heart of a new national park would be Ocmulgee Mounds, first protected in 1936. If you pull out a map, as John Wilson often does, you can begin to see parcels that could be pieced into a bigger picture, like tiles in a mosaic, including Bond Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, Brown's Mount, and Oaky Woods Wildlife Management Area.
A possible tract would be the prehistoric Lamar Mounds, the site of the only remaining spiral mound in the United States. Swift Creek Mound and Village Site, as well, are up for inclusion. With its exquisite pottery, it defined a culture and time period — "Swift Creek pottery," archaeologists say.
Likely the nature of these disparate tracts would necessitate a multi-agency approach to management. But the brand is important — National Park or National Park and Preserve since as the ONPPI makes clear, the designation of “preserve” would signify that hunting is important culturally and should be included.
Through it all, the Ocmulgee River meanders.
Jim David (pictured above) looks out over the Ocmulgee Mounds. The National Park Service’s Special Resource Study to determine the feasibility of a national park will be in its public comment period until March 26.
When ONPPI reached out to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, its first contact was then-Principal Chief James Floyd, who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Floyd’s people were among those forced at gunpoint to leave Ocmulgee and their entire homeland, which covers parts of 11 states, including Georgia, Alabama, and Florida.
Floyd visited the land in Georgia and decided to join the movement. He began to meet with legislators in Washington, D.C., to quietly push for an NPS Special Resource Study.
I spoke with Floyd recently over the phone about his ancestral homeland, middle Georgia, and why that sacred ground should be protected.
“When I was the chief and began to concentrate on the Southeast,” Chief Floyd said, “elders and traditional people in the tribe would tell me, we’re not supposed to talk about the past and we’re not supposed to go back there.”
An Ocmulgee Indian Celebration, Sept. 21, 2019.
Granted, the Muscogee (Creek) people sometimes returned East for visits or to dance at the autumn Ocmulgee Indian Celebrations sponsored by the Ocmulgee Mounds Association. But Chief Floyd wanted to reclaim his Eastern Woodland Tribe’s homeland in a deeper way. “Part of our tradition is that we really don't revisit the past,” he said, “particularly when it came to the Trail of Tears. We had to pull up and leave the places that we loved, to come to a place that was foreign to us.”
Yet staying connected to the homeland seemed important. “We know if we’re going to keep our heritage and our culture and our history alive, we need to experience it by going back,” he said.
Floyd was already Principal Chief the first time he saw Ocmulgee. He spoke of his return as a kind of baptism that brought back memories before memories.
“When I go there, I like to get out of the car. I breathe the place in. I look at the sky. I let it all wash over me, I take it all in,” he said. “It's pretty profound.” Experiencing the place firsthand strengthened Chief Floyd. He said to himself, “This is who we are and we have to do all we can do to preserve it. Because it will be useful to us in the future.”
“To be able to go back and just touch it and be there is very meaningful to our people,” he said to me.
“I love that you used the word ‘touch,’” I noted. “That’s a verb not many people would use, not in the sense you’re using it.”
“Right,” Floyd replied. “Our whole existence comes from the Earth and from the ground, and so it has a deep meaning to us. It’s very much about being attached.”
A few years after Chief Floyd’s first visit, the botanist Cutway was with some members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation when they toured Brown’s Mount. “It was a beautiful spring day,” she recalled. “Things were green and nice.” She stopped, searching for a way into her story. “Do you know Atamasco lilies?” she asked.
“I do,” I said.
“That day, the Atamasco lilies happened to be in bloom. It was incredible. There were so many they appeared to be tumbling off the cliffs. It was like a fairy tale,” Cutway said. Her voice became huskier and she began talking more slowly, seeking words that would do justice to what she had seen. Her garments of science fell away. “Of course, we did not pick this time, it just happened,” she said, “but it could not have been a more beautiful, more magical, time to go to that place.”
Joy Harjo was named poet laureate of the United States in 2019, becoming the first Native American in that role. In February 2020, a few months after Trump signed the Dingall Act, Harjo went to Ocmulgee Mounds to speak in support of a national park on her ancestral land.
I wrote about it the next day on my blog:
“When you stand on Temple Mound at the monument-now-park, you gaze out across a large, flat creek called Walnut. Less than a quarter-mile away Interstate 16, constructed here in the early 1970s, parallels the Ocmulgee River. Walnut Creek passes beneath an interstate bridge to get to its mama.
U.S. POET LAUREATE JOY HARJO SPOKE AT THE OCMULGEE MOUNDS, her ancestral homeland, IN FEBRUARY 2020. PHOTOGRAPH BY MATIKA WILBUR, COURTESY OF MACON MAGAZINE.
“The creek, floodplain, and river were a conjoined body of water, lapping at interstate embankments and bridge pilings, swirling around leafless willows and river birch, flooding park trails and also boardwalks, only the railings visible above water. Much of the park was closed.
“The water was red as clay, hepatica-colored, saturated with the ferric silt from nasty construction projects upstream. Red earth turns its water red.
“The visitor’s center at Ocmulgee Mounds filled with people, probably 250 of them. The room was rounded to look like a kiva. The audience gathered almost in a circle, about half in chairs and half standing. I was wedged behind a massive display printed with a map of Creek territory, sitting on a window ledge. If I turned and stared out the window, I could see Great Temple Mound, Lesser Temple Mound, Cornfield Mound.
“‘History will always find you,’ said Matt Jennings, a history professor and author, who introduced Harjo. He said a poet laureate embodies the soul of the nation.
“Harjo got up. She was wearing a red, V-necked sweater with black pants and tan cow herder boots. Circular earrings tangled in her long black hair. ‘The Ocmulgee Mounds touch me deeply,’ she said. ‘This is my ancestral home.’
“Harjo said she was 23 the first time she came to Macon. When she returns, she is a ghost. She uses the word ‘ghost,’ she said, because, in the minds of the people who stayed behind, the people forced to leave were essentially dead. They knew they would never see each other again. The Creeks who went to Oklahoma became ghosts to the Creeks who stayed.
“‘The earth, she's a circle,’ Harjo said. She read from her 2019 book of poetry, An American Sunrise. Then she played her flute and sang a poem. When Harjo played, one woman in a long, multicolored skirt wiped her eyes.
“‘We all make our way back home eventually,’ Harjo said. ‘May we all find a way home.’”
For generations, grade-school field trips to Ocmulgee Mounds have been an annual tradition for central Georgia students. Here, students climb the hill to Earth Lodge. Photo courtesy of John Wilson.
What does it take to make a dream come true? It takes time, labor, money, communication, creativity, flexibility, and compromise. More than anything, it takes community. How much, of course, depends on the scope and profundity of the dream. The people of central Georgia have taken on a big dream, and since it’s a national park, all of us are part of its community.
I’d like to plant a seed in the middle of your heart that will become a public land growing in the heart of Georgia — a state that has committed more than its share of atrocities and also a state beginning to make atonement.
Do you love life enough to imagine this place we are trying to make real, to lend your imagination to its creation, to sit for a moment and think of a blackwater river running through red clay down the state of Georgia, with all its layers of trauma and all its layers of love? This river runs through the great Southern swamp forests, cypress and tupelo and gum and magnolia, a black river running alongside black bears, alongside all blackness, through the red of blood into the red of hope.
If we imagine it, we create it. The more of us who imagine it, the easier the creation will be. Our job is the birthing.
I see the sign that says we have arrived. I see the long road in. Can you see it too?
To Learn More
The National Park Service’s Special Resource Study is currently in its public comment period. Until March 26, 2021, you may submit comments on this project. If you only have five minutes, go to this site and enter your comments. You’ll be given the option of printing out what you wrote and mailing it. If you have more than five minutes, consider writing a letter. The address can be found in the link. More information may be found here and on the Ocmulgee National Park and Preserve Initiative Facebook page.
Janisse Ray is an American writer whose subject most often falls into the borderland of nature and culture. She has published five books of nonfiction and a collection of eco-poetry. Ray has won an American Book Award, Pushcart Prize, Southern Bookseller Awards, Southern Environmental Law Center Writing Awards, and Eisenberg Award, among others. Her first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, was a New York Times Notable Book. The author has been inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. She lives on an organic farm near Savannah.
Christopher Ian Smith holds a BFA in fine art photography from California State University, Long Beach and has been a professional photographer for almost two decades. He has spent much of his time based in Southeast Asia working as a photojournalist, travel writer, and managing a documentary center. He is currently based in Macon, Georgia, working as a contract photographer, freelancer, and teaching digital photography at Wesleyan College.
