Macon Magazine

LEFT VetOtaquia et offi cabor maio ipsunto tatiunt ea et volore doluptat. Serovit ellupta tectiosam inctur? Nus eos doloreseque dusae si sequat et qui aruntiae ABOVE The sun rises above the Ocmulgee Mounds in Macon. O n a sunny March afternoon, around fi fty Atlanta residents pile into a park shelter in an odd-shaped greenspace touching the Chattahoochee River, just off the tony neighborhood of Buckhead. A visitor driving by might miss it easily – the 32-acre site is hidden behind a large fence and is hardly mentioned on ATL must-see lists or tourism maps. But Standing Peachtree, or Pakanahuili – its proper name in the Muscogee language – is undoubtably one of the most important sites in Georgia's history. There's not enough space here to savor the fi ner details, but for just one example – The South's version of Broadway is Peachtree Street, an iconic avenue whose name derives from Standing Peachtree, with many, many other pieces of Georgia ephemera that follow. Much of the audience were people who lived in the surrounding neighborhood. For most of them, the event, part of the Phoenix Flies series by the Atlanta Preservation Center, was the fi rst time they had ever met a Muscogee (Creek) citizen. The road to progress, much like traffi c on the winding, beaten path of Peachtree Street, can be slow. Pakanahuili was once a thriving village for the Muscogee – in fact, there's thousands of years of evidence of Indigenous settlement. A fort created there in 1814 was the fi rst non-Indigenous settlement in metro Atlanta, a sign of what was to come. A series of unfair and coerced treaties forced the Muscogee Nation off their lands in Georgia starting in 1821. It took over 200 years before representatives of the Nation were invited back in 2023, at another Phoenix Flies event. Six months ago, a Muscogee Nation fl ag was raised on the spot, following the lead of Macon, who had proudly placed the fl ag in front of our city hall 18 months prior. Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and Muscogee Chief David Hill were in attendance, and RaeLynn Butler, Secretary of Culture and Humanities for the Muscogee Nation, was there to mark the occasion. This spring, she came back, patiently educating in the park shelter through a PowerPoint with maps, stories, and Muscogee words. It wasn't her fi rst trip back to the homelands of her people, and it won't be her last. Secretary Butler has been fi ghting for Muscogee cultural preservation for decades – and she has a lot of fi ght left. What brought you to a career in historic preservation – and now an elevated role in the Muscogee Nation's government? After high school, I started college at Haskell Indian Nations University. It's a tribal college and it's one of 32. It's about 1,000 students each semester, but hundreds of tribes represented at the school. It's a 100% Native institution. While I was attending school, there was a threat to the campus. What's unique about Haskell too, is that it used to be an Indian boarding school. There's a cemetery on campus because kids never made it home. And it was a military-style boarding school, just like Carlisle [Indian Industrial School]. There's a lot of history there. There were some wetlands south of the campus. The local city of Lawrence was proposing with the Kansas Department of Transportation to develop the wetlands and build a highway through them. It was very sad. We considered those wetlands to be a sacred place, and that the diff erent environmental reporting through NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act], through the National Preservation Act, just neglected to care about our campus, or the history, or the cultural resources that were there. That was a big fi ght. Students decades before me had taken on that fi ght. As a new freshman, I learned about the wetlands preservation organization and quickly became involved and started to understand who the Army Corps of Engineers was and how they permit projects like this. I was very aware. I was motivated to study science; environmental science was my background. I wanted to go to graduate school because I felt like I needed to have a voice in order to represent our people. When we went to meetings with the local city or April/May 2025 | maconmagazine.com 67

• Cover