The Desecration of Hickory Ground

Guests are Hickory Ground Warrior Wayland Gray, Suzan Shown Harjo of Morning Star Institute, Rob Trepp of Tulsa Indian Art Festival.  The Poarch Band Creek of Indians desecrated a sacred site.  The Poarch Band has a $246 million casino expansion project underway and dug up almost 60 sets of Muscogee ancestors during the ground preparation. Gray and two other Muscogee Nation citizens and a Cherokee Nation AIM member were arrested last February by Poarch police and charged with criminal trespassing when they tried to access the site to conduct a ceremony.   Gray was also accused by Poarch police with making a “terrorist threat”—a charged that was dropped in May after a Grand Jury found no evidence to support it. The trespassing charges against the other three men were dropped in June. But Gray declined an offer to plea bargain. Hickory Ground (Oce Vpofv) is a parcel of sacred land located at Wetumpka, Alabama, which includes a ceremonial ground, burial sites and individual graves belonging to ancestors of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. After Hickory Ground was obtained with federal funds under the pretense of historic preservation, approximately 60 sets of human remains and funerary objects were exhumed in violation of federal law and in violation of lineal descendants' rights under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.  In 2010, the descendant members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma requested their ancestors to be reinterred where they were excavated.In April 2012, the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, exhumed the remains, and reburied them elsewhere, to construct a $246 million casino at Hickory Ground. The initial opening of the Casino occurs on December 17th.  http://www.savehickorygroun