In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, I return to my ancestral grounds of East Tennessee to explore the hidden consciousness of a river — and by extension, of every city built upon the bones of older worlds. This podcast essay traces the evolution of what was, for sometime, considered Stephen Holston’s River, and before that, the Cherokee Nvsgi (NUH-skee in the eastern band dialect)—meaning “the curved one”— and on through centuries of renaming, remapping, and reengineering, until it became the domesticated Tennessee River of the modern TVA era.

What begins as personal memoir — campfires on the Holston, my great-uncle John Alan Maxwell’s illustrations of Cherokee hunters and frontiersmen — unfolds into a meditation on how naming, mapping, and building alter not only landscapes but collective consciousness. The essay reveals that every act of development, from colonial cartography to contemporary megaprojects, is also an act of translation: an attempt to redefine what a place remembers about itself.

In a new novel I am working on, I imagine, beneath Knoxville’s polished surface, a River Serpent stirring — the buried hydrology and spiritual residue of the downstream Cherokee towns and villages of Citico, Chota, and Tanasi, drowned beneath the reservoirs of progress. It is not a monster, but the repressed memory of land and water. The river, I write, “never signed off on any of these modern politics.”

In Citizen One terms, the River Serpent represents a city’s unconscious — the underlayer of memory, grief, and adaptation that powers every visible skyline. Just as smart cities claim to sense and respond through data and networks, ancient places once did so through water, myth, ritual, and transportation. Both are systems of awareness; only some of the interfaces have changed.

This episode asks:

* What do cities forget when they rename their rivers and rearrange their histories?

* Can infrastructure be an act of amnesia as much as progress?

* And how do we recover the voice of a place when it’s been drowned by its own development?

The central line — “You can do surgery with names or you can commit a neat murder” — becomes the moral axis of the discussion. Cities, I would argue, are linguistic organisms. Every boundary, district, and zoning code is a word that can heal or wound the consciousness of the ancestors beneath it or the descendants yet to inherit it.

In connecting East Tennessee’s drowned valleys to the global arc of urban transformation, The River Serpent extends Citizen One’s central premise:

That cities are not merely built environments but living systems of cognition — layered with myth, memory, and moral consequence.

What we choose to call a river, a district, or a nation determines whether we nurture a living system or bury it under another name. The river, like the city, keeps score.