Date: June 22, 2024

Time: 10:30 a.m.

Location: Laughing Waters Retreat – in the orchard

Speaker: Elaine Eisenbraun, Executive Director of the Nikwasi Initiative, and Juanita Wilson, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) Training and Development Manager and Enrolled Member of the EBCI

People have lived on, learned from, and altered this extraordinary landscape for millennia. Noquisi Initiative invites people to cross the bridge between Cherokee heritage and today’s society.  How does the scenery out our window, the stories we tell, even the language we speak bring us together as people and with our homeland. How can we incorporate Cherokee wisdom into our approach to the land and each other? What can we offer in return? This presentation will share the interplay between people and place and how it is influenced by our own experience.

Elaine Eisenbraun guides Noquisi Initiative in its mission to ‘preserve, protect, and promote culture and history in the original homelands of the Cherokee. This is Elaine’s fourth executive directorship and she sees this organization as the one that can have the greatest impact on place-based understanding of diverse cultures. Elaine’s undergraduate work was in forest management, which led to several years of working in the woods for industry, government and consulting. She believes that her years working in the woods was where she learned to see relationships that tend to elude the eye. After drifting toward environmental education, Elaine directed organizations in Vermont and Oregon. She taught communities to be “community focused and landscape reflected.” In a short detour, Elaine founded and led an organization that brought fine art to critically ill children. Then she came to western North Carolina to combine her skills in landscape awareness, community development, art, and outreach. Together, her experience and Master of Science degree in Leadership and Management helps her embrace the tasks that unfold every day within Noquisi Initiative. Sometime, ask her about her fun work in such diverse fields as: avalanche study, equipment operation, textiles, fire fighting, wildlife management and more.

Juanita Wilson graduated from Western Carolina University with a Bachelor of Science in Sociology and completed her Master of Science in Leadership and Management at Montreat College. Wilson’s professional journey has included a directorship with the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, executive leadership with the EBCI, and directorship with Western Carolina University. Along with serving on numerous boards and committees, she has participated in national and state-wide leadership development programs. She currently serves on the Z. Smith Reynolds Community Leadership Council and serves the EBCI through her work  developing talent and development strategies and training the EBCI workforce.

​The Nikwasi Initiative was founded to promote, interpret and link cultural and historic sites (such as the Noquisiyi and Cowee mounds) along a Cherokee Cultural Corridor, along with raising awareness and funds to pursue those efforts and exploring more opportunities for collaboration between the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and local communities. 

Guests will park in the orchard at Laughing Waters Retreat, accessed from the address below, and walk up a little hill and gravel driveway to the pavilion.  If anyone has mobility challenges, there is the opportunity to be dropped off closer to the pavilion.

Programs at Laughing Waters Retreat Center are made possible thanks to our partnership with Laughing Waters Retreat Center. For more information about Laughing Waters Retreat Center, visit laughingwatersnc.com.