Citation: Miller, Dez. “Weelaunee, and What a Creek Reveals: A Personal Narrative of the Early Stop Cop City Movement.” Atlanta Studies. April 22, 2025. https://doi.org/10.18737/atls20250422
When I first moved back to the city in 2019 after a decade away, I didn’t think much of the polluted creek with its shiny spots of oil and detergent remnant. I figured this was just another blighted no-man’s land in my infrastructurally neglected South Atlanta neighborhood. I only really noticed Intrenchment Creek once I saw it in a different habitat, a mile or so down river in Intrenchment Creek Park, a 136-acre public forest that would eventually become the battleground for the Stop Cop City movement. Seeing the creek there — still polluted, but surrounded by forest, its banks sandy and dotted with signs of animal life — clued me in. This creek was the linchpin to all the ecosystems that surrounded me. Over the course of the next several years, the creek’s meaning would only continue to deepen for me. It became the key that unlocked a new understanding of the city I grew up in, of its past and possible futures.
Paths through Intrenchment Creek Park.
I first visited the park on the recommendation of my partner, who had been on a tour given by Scott Petersen, an aging firebrand activist then living a few doors down from us. Scott passed away last year. About once a month, Scott would lead curious neighbors, kids, and other interested parties along guerilla trails he and others had cleared in the forest. After snaking between pines, oaks, beeches, and cherry trees, amid native and invasive shrubs, the tour would arrive at Intrenchment Creek, a wide and sedimented water flow as notable for its deer skeletons and active salamander life as for the tires and plastic bags stuck in its eddies.
On a day when the creek wasn’t overly polluted or too high to cross safely, Scott would lead tour attendees westward across the yellow water and out of the park, into the territory of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, where incarcerated people had been forced to grow vegetables for other parts of Atlanta’s prison population throughout most of the twentieth century. They did so under horrific conditions, as many, including Civil Rights student activists who were jailed there in the 1960s, have attested to.1 Prisoners sometimes died from overwork or from improperly treated illness or injury.2 Scott explained the history of the park as he saw it, gathered from stories told to him by folks he had met living along Key Road before the park was a park. He didn’t always have his facts right, but there wasn’t much reliable documentation available then. Scott considered both Intrenchment Creek Park and the land west of the creek to have been part of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. More recent reporting suggests the farm was only the land west of the creek and didn’t cross over into the park at all.3 The creek was called Intrenchment Creek, he said, because of the intrenchments Civil War soldiers built in preparation for the Battle of Atlanta. He pointed out areas of jagged unevenness in the land. Other sources say the creek was named before the Civil War, and that the trenches were probably dug by the Muscogee (Creek) people who had lived there.4 Residents also told him about lynchings that occurred on the land. I’ve never found documented evidence of this, which of course doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. What was clear was that the land’s history was saturated with violence — from the removal of the Muscogee to the land’s use as a plantation, from troop movements during the Civil War to the possible lynchings and the era of the prison farm.5
Violence was written on the land itself. Plantation-style agriculture, subsequent share-cropping, and other intensive agricultural methods constituted an environmental disaster for the South, causing much of the state’s topsoil to erode away, resulting in poor soil productivity and widespread flooding due to rivers and streams overloaded with silt.6 Likely, many of the park’s pine trees and invasives, like the silt grass or the English ivy that thrive on disturbed land, had grown up in the years since the prison farm ended. The reforestation process would have happened spontaneously — the forest doing what forests in this part of the Piedmont do as part of a natural ecological succession, starting with pine and other quick-growth trees which can then support slower-growing hardwoods.7 The few native hardwoods on the site already, including what is possibly the second largest cherry bark oak in Atlanta8 are either relics of the old growth or signs of the forest entering a new phase of maturity. This is what land down here looks like when it’s trying to heal from trauma.
In addition to the haunting prison farm ruins and crumbling concrete buildings that had been burnt and graffitied, the prison farm land held surprising wonders throughout its couple hundred acres. There were the library stones, huge marble stones reading “Virgil,” “Homer,” “Milton,” and “Dante,” dumped here after the Carnegie Library was demolished downtown.9 It was even said that the Atlanta Zoo had buried bones of elephants, giraffes, and a gorilla somewhere in unmarked graves.10 Once I started to explore the park and the prison farm land myself, going almost weekly in the Covid lockdowns, I’d sometimes take friends or partners on my own ad-hoc tours. There was a romance to this secret forest where coyotes, wild turkeys, hawks, and deer clearly thrived, where library stones and elephant bones were slowly being eaten by microbes. You just had to avoid walking too close to the nearby juvenile detention facility, because footfall could trigger an automatic announcement to blast out of speakers and echo through the forest: “You are trespassing. Leave the premises immediately.” Once, after taking someone to the library stones, we accidentally triggered this announcement, and in our haste to escape, we couldn’t find a good place to re-cross the creek for a half hour or more.
The more time I spent in Intrenchment Creek Park, the more I felt connected to the part of the creek near my house where it emerges from the sewers and first meets daylight.11 The path of the creek became etched into my brain, and whenever I drove south down Moreland Ave., I thought about it. After Intrenchment Creek daylights, it meanders through the backwoods of Southeast Atlanta neighborhoods, crosses under two busy roads, trickles behind a drive-in movie theater and some tire shops, and proceeds to form the western border of Intrenchment Creek Park. After that, it continues a short way to join the South River and then the Ocmulgee, which meets other rivers in Jackson Lake, ultimately flowing onward together as the mighty Altamaha River until the water meets the ocean.12 Along their way, these waters nourish countless animals and entire cities.13 Thinking about how runoff from my yard directly fed the creek, I felt a newfound sense of connection to and responsibility for it. But there wasn’t a safe way to walk along the part of the creek near my house; the bank was too steep and overgrown. I got to know the creek by visiting Intrenchment Creek Park.
When I heard from Scott that the heart of Intrenchment Creek Park might be clear-cut in a proposed land swap deal between Dekalb County and Blackhall Studios, a nearby movie studio where blockbusters were shot on green screens, I wanted to let more people know about it. Blackhall was proposing to trade some mostly cleared floodplain land it owned nearby for around fifty acres of the lush forest that was now part of my weekly pandemic anti-depressant regimen. A coalition sprung up to “Stop the Swap.” I wrote a couple articles about the forest for a local journalism site, Mainline.14 As part of my research, Scott took me and my partner and I on a tour of the land; my partner took photographs while I took notes. On the tour, I also learned that the former prison farm was being considered for the site of a giant police training facility, but I wasn’t able to verify the story before my articles in Mainline came out. This was 2020, the same year I watched the Wendy’s near where I live burn down because Rayshard Brooks, a young Black father of three, had been shot by police.15 The tragedy was witnessed by two friends who happened to be at the Wendy’s drive-thru that night. Throughout that June, my partner and I would ride our bikes downtown to participate in the Black Lives Matter protests, asking our friends to feed our dog if they didn’t hear from us by curfew time. I’d never seen youth-led political activism of this scale in my hometown. The idea of the city responding with a huge investment towards a police training facility on the site of a recovering forest in a Black neighborhood seemed unbearably dystopian. But the backlash to the protests, especially in the form of media narratives that stoked fear around looting, may have caused the police training facility to gain political support.16
Through my research, I started to get to know watershed activists around Atlanta. Dr. Jackie Echols of the South River Watershed Alliance, one of the “Stop the Swap” leaders, told me her organization was suing Dekalb County and Blackhall because of the dangerous precedent it would set for Dekalb County to sell or give away public lands without a referendum to voters. Also, Dr. Echols was concerned about how the land swap deal would affect the limited health of the South River, given the importance of Intrenchment Creek as a tributary. The forest filters water for the creek, Dr. Echols explained in her soft yet powerful voice.17 Already, Intrenchment Creek was helping to make the South River one of the most polluted rivers in the country.18 The creek is fed by water from a pipe combining rainwater and sewage, which is cleaned at a chemical treatment facility nearby my neighborhood. Though it was supposed to be fully disinfected, the South River Watershed Alliance routinely found that water from the creek tested positive for fecal matter. By fostering biodiverse plant and animal life, the forest along Intrenchment Creek helps filter out some of that remaining pollutant; it also provides a physical buffer from pollution from manhole overflows or sediment washed down from roadways. Dr. Echols was concerned that existing pollution problems would only worsen with new construction along the creek bank. She said that adherence to water quality regulations had been so lax in the City of Atlanta and Dekalb County that both were under several federal consent decrees for Clean Water Act violations.
I ended up kayaking the South River one day with Dr. Echols and others. The experience felt surprisingly revolutionary given that we were not following paths determined by the state, but were winding between the backyards of mansions, under roads and through restricted-access land, on a waterway that had existed for eons. In Georgia, as long as a river is navigable, you have a right to be on it for fishing, kayaking, or other recreation.19 But rivers, as Dr. Echols underlined, need protection from the land around them, and their navigability is affected by the nature of that surrounding land.
Learning about the South River pointed me to another forgotten river on the Southside — the Flint — and the work of Hannah Palmer, journalist and leader of the organization Finding the Flint. Palmer writes about what water has meant to this region: a national boundary between white settlers and the Muscogee (Creek) lands after the First Treaty of Indian Springs,20 a place where Atlanta residents go to practice spirituality,21 and a site of the horrific Atlanta child murders,22 which associated Atlanta waterways with violence and danger. Through Finding the Flint, I went on a tour of the various flows in southeast Atlanta that feed the Flint River. Like Intrenchment Creek, these streams were often found at the back of parking lots, along roads, and in areas that seem to have been deliberately neglected. Palmer’s work also made me aware of Flux Projects, a public art fund which in 2021 began funding work related to Atlanta’s waters in a series called FLOW. Some of these, like “Emergence” by Rachel Parish which framed dancers and projected videos as temporary monuments of the downtown underground springs, seemed to try to re-establish sacrality to the very concept of headwaters.23 This was a growing movement of folks who were determined not to look away from these polluted waters, but to find out what could be uncovered by intimate engagement with them.
Hannah Palmer hosted periodic cleanups of the Flint on the property of the Atlanta Hartsfield Jackson International Airport. On a clear fall day, I put on my yellow vest and went behind the tall wire fence on the edge of a parking lot. The river was beautiful and bizarre, glinting with a blue vibrancy from the residue of periodic jet fuel spills. Bamboo and other invasives mingled with plants like wild ginger, marking the forest as one containing older growth. Hannah’s son hopped with friends on stones that formed the small rapids of the river. How had I grown up in Atlanta and entirely missed two whole rivers? How had my mother and mother-in-law, both Atlanta natives, not known about these rivers? Had my grandparents known? When had these flows been forgotten?
Thinking of Atlanta through water allowed me to see the city as it was in different time periods, to see the ways in which we are inextricably tied to the past. Rivers and other water flows have a tendency to do this — to evoke memories of other eras, either in the way they return to previous flow patterns or in the traces their flows leave behind. Now, when looking at Atlanta’s rivers, I think of the vast time between 8000 years ago and the year 1821, when the Muscogee thrived along these creek and river valleys and used the soapstone from these Appalachian foothills to make bowls and tools.24 I think of what the nearly empty city might have looked like in 1837, when railroad speculators came and placed their flag on the two intersecting ridgelines of what would become downtown, marking this as a place where capitalism might thrive.25 I think of how the rivers influenced the makeup of post-Civil War Atlanta, the formerly sleepy train town which had been leveled by the fires that had swept through it. According to historian Bartow Elmore, people flocked here because of its views and fresh breezes, its reputation for plant and animal life, for clean and abundant water.26 Elmore writes about how segregation in this reinvented city happened through water flow. Black residents were only permitted to form neighborhoods in the city’s low-lying areas because that was where the sewage ended up. Exceptions to this pattern, like the 1867 founding of the city’s first Black college Atlanta University on top of a hill, were acts of defiance.27 Natural springs that constituted some of the first stops on the city’s extensive streetcar system would eventually become white-only resources with the onset of Jim Crow.28 Throughout the Reconstruction Era, water infrastructure was dismal, lagging far behind those of northern cities. From their high-ground dwellings, white residents espoused a belief that waterborne diseases were signs of moral or racial inferiority, and so they stymied many of the early efforts to build sewers and water pumps.27
In an experience that collapsed time for me, I interviewed Jason Dozier, now a city council member, about flooding in Summerhill. The historic Black neighborhood, which was founded in a city sink, had recently been experiencing sewer overflow spills into people’s homes, causing damages that residents couldn’t afford to repair and thus furthering rapid gentrification.29 Water had made modern Atlanta; it was also determining the city’s future.
In late spring of 2021, plans were released for a police and fire training facility to be built on 150 acres of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm property.30 I remember watching a promotional video, which has since been taken down, depicting computer-generated cadets and buildings in a mock city where police could practice urban warfare, shooting guns and rehearsing crowd control tactics under the shade of a picturesque forest. Dr. Echols and other environmentalists quickly expressed concerns about the impact this would have on the creek, including via heavy metal pollution caused by ammunition casings.31 Soon, a lot more people started showing up to the forest. With the announcement that the plan to build a training facility was being pushed forward, “Defend the Atlanta Forest” was born, a new iteration of the movement to save the forest that linked the Blackhall land swap with the Old Atlanta Prison Farm fight. By fall, the movement would begin to use the name “Stop Cop City.”32
Under the leadership of this new forest defender movement and over the course of the summer and fall of 2021, the park became a hub for art and music, a replacement of sorts for the DIY venues that closed during the lockdowns and the real estate market spike.33 Lacking those spaces, art and music festivals found respite in the “living room,” a pine clearing in the forest halfway between the paved Georgia P.A.T.H. trail and the creek. In October 2021, my son, my partner and I saw performance artist Nneka Kai lay prostrate on the pine straw floor for hours, tied to the earth by long ropes of hair in a seeming eulogy to the past violences of forced removal, plantation slavery, and the prison farm. Many of these art and music performances felt like rituals, meant to rewire our understanding of the forest, symbolic disinterments of all the buried history. Public events at the park continued throughout the spring and summer of 2022, ranging from hardcore concerts and bonfires to a gathering where historians and local spiritual leaders met to hammer out what was known about the history of the site. At that event, I learned of evidence that Intrenchment Creek had been used as a site of baptism among enslaved people who lived on the plantations nearby. Again, I developed a new understanding of this creek’s presence across time; in the midst of utter horror, what had the creek meant to people?
The park’s new users built fresh infrastructures to support a different kind of engagement with the land. The mostly young people showing up to Intrenchment Creek Park and the Old Atlanta Prison Farm land were making homes in the form of tents, wooden huts, and treehouses. They turned the “living room” into a functioning community hub with a kitchen, a water catchment, and a compost station. They built a more permanent bridge across the creek. The site was idyllic in a way, reminding me of my time at the Occupy Wall Street encampment in 2011. This was a moment for utopia, and it felt like the moment was stretching out longer than expected. There were raids and arrests in December 2021, again in May 2022, and then more after that. But over this period of about a year and a half, folks kept moving back in and rebuilding. Local pre-school educators and parents started a pre-school coalition, bringing young kids to the forest and teaching them to thank the trees and the creek for what they provided. The community was committing to the forest.
The ongoing land swap deal with Blackhall Studios, which at the time of writing is still being litigated, constituted an important part of the initial movement opposing the police training facility. The protestors’ linking of the two fights — to save Intrenchment Creek Park and the Old Atlanta Prison Farm land — spoke to the ways in which the movement was trying to redefine the stories associated with this place. It was clear to anyone who visited the land that the forest on either side of the creek was one and the same. “No Cop City, No Hollywood Dystopia” was the early slogan. A few months in, the second half of the slogan began to be left off. My guess is it’s because the legal situation had become overly complex and hard to communicate; even in media coverage, the aspect of the movement relating to the land swap has been under-discussed. However, the legal ambiguity introduced by the land swap deal added a complex dynamic to the protests. Technically, Intrenchment Creek Park was still public forest, perhaps the closest thing we have left to a commons. For Dekalb County and for Ryan Millsap of Blackhall Studios, the park was a property that needed to be monetized. The land’s ambiguous status meant that protestors would feel empowered to be in the park while state and business interests would eventually feel empowered to violently re-take it.
For the Muscogee (Creek) People who participated in the early movement, the forest had yet another meaning. On a cold evening in November 2021, my partner and I wrapped our then four-month-old in a heavy onesie and blankets to join nearly a thousand people to witness the Muscogee (Creek) from the Oklahoma reservation participate in what they described as the first re-migration of a large group of Muscogee since the 1821 removal treaties. They performed ceremonial stomp dances. They talked about Land Back. They talked about this being a turning point from the land being used for violence to it being used for ritual, for community, for life. They spoke their language in that forest for the first time in two hundred years. I think of this night as the beginning of a new phase. The Stop Cop City/Defend the Atlanta Forest movement had been growing throughout the summer, but this seemed like the kind of landmark event that really sets something off. I’d never seen so many people at that trailhead, let alone imagined that so many people would ever come to know this forest in a forgotten corner of Atlanta, a mostly Black and low-income area that felt somehow rural despite being just outside of city limits.
It wasn’t until early 2022 that I heard the original Muscogee name for the South River, Weelaunee, which A Dictionary of Creek/Muskogee identifies as meaning “green/brown/yellow water.”36 Throughout all of 2021, the forest was mostly referred to either as the Atlanta Forest —this was the largest remaining contiguous forest in the city, hence Atlanta is known as “the city in the forest,” — or as the South River Forest, an homage to the scuttled plan to build a 3,500-acre connected park system along all the tributaries of the South River.37 Once “Weelaunee” began to be used by activists, it became the default name for not only the land, the creek, and the river, but also for a certain idea of that ecosystem as a living entity with which we are in relation.
The words we use about our local waters matter. The narratives we tell or don’t tell about them shift our understanding of history. What does it mean to start calling the forest the same name as the original Muscogee name for the South River, of which Intrenchment Creek is a tributary? For one, it reinforces the connections of the forest to the creek and the creek to the river, underlining their intertwined ecology and resisting the way Western or “dominant” thought separates everything into parts, what Max Liboiron calls universalism.38 As Sasha Tycko and Grace Glass write, there was something counterintuitive to a Westernized mind about calling the area Weelaunee:
…the South River does not run through either of the properties at risk. At some point, the name must have gotten mixed up with the civic proposal for the South River Forest, because the forest defenders, and soon the publications quoting them, have all begun to say or imply that this land has been called the Weelaunee Forest since time immemorial. Sometimes Weelaunee refers to the territory held stubbornly by the movement against the developers. At other times, it seems boundless, mythical, and much bigger than Atlanta.39
Calling it Weelaunee signals the utopic visioning of the Stop Cop City movement, which refuses a forward march of history that erodes commons and public spaces and treats any resource, like the Weelaunee River, as a tool for the state or for corporations. “Weelaunee” gestures to the early Muscogee involvement in the fight and to what the place might have meant before colonization. The name also looks toward the future, to new ways of conceptualizing forests and creeks that run counter to their commodification.
In late 2022, the crackdown on the protests escalated. In December 2022, five protestors were charged with domestic terrorism.40 In January 2023, during yet another raid of the encampment in the forest, Tortuguita was killed. They were the first environmental protestor killed in the U.S. on what was still technically public land.41 They were twenty-six years old, and the autopsy concluded that they had their hands up, yet were shot fifteen times.42 Police say an officer was shot beforehand, but there’s some evidence that this was friendly fire.43 Tortuguita’s parents launched a lawsuit against the police in December 2024.44 In my mind’s eye, I can still see Tortuguita at one of those spring 2022 events, a smiling face by the potluck tent. I’m not sure if my memory has inserted this image. Then there were more legal charges against protestors. Sixty-one activists were hit with RICO charges.45 In June 2023, folks living at a home I knew as the Teardown were raided by a SWAT Team for running a bail fund.46 I knew the Teardown folks mainly for having organized a hugely successful mutual aid program in Atlanta during the pandemic, Food 4 Life, which my partner and I participated in, delivering free groceries weekly to anyone who needed them.47
The movement, which now had martyrs, metamorphosed. The encampments were over but other methods of activism blossomed. The city quashed each form the protests took. In 2021, over seventeen hours of voicemail public comments to city council were entered into the record; they were largely in opposition of the training facility. The project was nevertheless voted through. When the next votes authorizing the training facility came up, in May and again in June 2023, twenty-one more hours of public comment were entered into the record, this time in person and nearly exclusively in opposition to the facility. The vote still overwhelmingly passed.48 Later that year, the movement filed a petition for a ballot referendum that included over 100,000 signatures; the mayor’s office tangled it up in legal challenges.49
The movement is trying to regroup again, but Cop City has been built.50 I stopped going to the forest probably around that May 2022 raid. I’d sometimes drive by and see an intense police presence where I used to park my car. I followed events from afar; I would make calls and participate in small ways. But as a new, breastfeeding parent, I didn’t feel I could risk arrest. I stopped taking my son to the park. I stopped going at all. I ache for it.
Instead, I visit Intrenchment Creek where it daylights near my house. I look to it for lessons about what comes next. The creek continues to flow, connecting disparate neighborhoods and fostering ecologies despite ongoing pollution. I imagine the creek as a connective tissue between me and the forest I grew to love but can no longer access. Instead of thinking of my route to the forest by car, I imagine a world in which I could walk along this creek until I reach the forest. There, my son, now three, could roam freely, getting to know how other creatures live and how water brings life to everything. In this world, we would learn from the creek, not only about Atlanta’s buried history, but about the extent to which our lives and neighborhoods are intertwined.
Dez Miller is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University, where they are working on a dissertation about urban rivers in contemporary culture. They hold a Master of Social Work from Washington University, and MFA from Boston University, and a BA from New York University. Outside of their scholarly work, they have published short stories, local journalism, and generative poetry written in collaboration with coding languages.
