An April 25 Qualla Boundary town hall about data centers, featuring three speakers instrumental in the fight against hyperscale expansion on Indigenous land, both generated support for a tabled tribal council moratorium and explained the myriad ways these facilities can harm environments and cultures alike.  

Brad Hoxit made history last month, but not in a way he’d ever have hoped.

Hoxit appeared in Graham County Superior Court from March 24-27 for a hearing to determine whether he would be permanently removed as sheriff of the small Western North Carolina county. Last week, Superior Court Judge William T. Stetzer did indeed bar Hoxit from returning to office, and now his attorneys say an appeal is imminent. 

What do you do when the place that seems to best accommodate your child fails them the worst? 

That’s the question Amber Kevlin was grappling with on Sept. 25, 2023, after she was called to pick up her 12-year-old autistic son from the office of Shining Rock Classical Academy School Resource Officer Bryan Reeves.

A low-flying plane circling his property was the first sign. The passes were frequent enough to be noticed. Haywood County farmer and longtime Farm Bureau President Don Smart knew immediately what that kind of attention usually means. 

In the old days, Smart said, they’d have been looking for illegal cannabis or tobacco plantings, but that wasn’t why the plane was tracing slow, deliberate circles in the sky over his farm. Two weeks later, confirmation of his suspicions arrived in writing.

The question of who will control one of Jackson County’s most visible public assets is beginning to draw clear lines, and on March 26, Sylva’s Board of Commissioners stepped firmly onto one side. 

In a unanimous vote, commissioners adopted a resolution supporting continued control of the Jackson County Library Complex by the Jackson County Public Library, signaling opposition to any effort that would shift authority elsewhere. 

The stories came in waves, each more graphic than the last, until the room itself seemed to tighten under the weight of them — a dog so badly abused she could not walk, a horse found dead in a dry creek bed, another starving animal that did not survive despite last-ditch rescue efforts. By the time public comment ended March 16, Haywood County commissioners were left facing a stark question residents had repeated in different ways all night: how had so many warnings gone unanswered? 

It was always more than just a place to pick up the mail. Long before asphalt and electronic highways reduced time and space to mere trivialities, a quieter system stitched scattered settlements together. The tiny Jackson County municipality of Webster grew up around that system, bringing residents together, creating a sense of identity and promising them that even remote mountain towns belonged to a wider republic. 

Former Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Principal Chief Patrick Lambert and Beloved Woman Myrtle Driver proposed a resolution renaming the tribe the “Eastern Cherokee Nation” and later encouraged tribal council to withdraw it. 

In those 30 minutes between Resolution 147’s introduction and withdrawal, tribal council and public commenters engaged in rich discussion centering tradition, history and identity.

The Shining Rock Classical Academy board at its Feb. 25 meeting voted unanimously to end grades 9-11 instruction effective June 30, 2026, and to close grade 12 after the fall 2026 semester, in front of an audience of more than 100 people.  The high school had been consistently running a deficit, and the board argued that it has a fiduciary responsibility to move the organization in the right direction. 

For months, Jackson County commissioners have been making material decisions to advance a costly and widely criticized plan to pull its two libraries from the Fontana Regional Library system.

Nonetheless, in 2025, the Jackson board proposed three amendments which, contingent on passage by fellow FRL-member counties Macon and Swain, might convince commissioners to change their course.