Quotes

"You have noticed that everything that an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round....The Sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours....Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves." -

Black Elk - Oglala Sioux

The Little People

I see them in the darkness
running as if in a race.
I watch in awe and wonder
as I hide in my secret place.
They dance around the fire,
they even know that I'm there.
I can see they are happy, celebrating.
The excitement is in the air.
I watch in total amazement.
I watch as they're having fun,
then a drum starts and they begin praying
that the Cherokee will unite as one.
Little People I want to thank you,
you have taught me so much today,
For the Cherokee to be united,
everyday this is what I will pray.

Written by Bear Warrior

Cherokee Principal Chief Chad Smith Responds

SUBMITTED BY CHEROKEE NATION, PRINCIPAL CHIEF CHAD 'CORNTASSEL' SMITH

Cherokee people in Sequoyah County need to understand the truth about what is going on in tribal court and with our tribal citizenship.

First of all, the Cherokee people have the right to decide who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. With the support of 83 percent of the Cherokees in Sequoyah County, the Cherokee people decided they wanted to be just like more than 500 other Indian tribes in the country: you have to be Indian to be a citizen of our Indian Nation.

Some of the non-Indians who lost citizenship are appealing their case in tribal court. But, contrary to what you might have read, the court has not ruled in their favor. The Cherokee Nation attorney general agreed to let non-Indians remain citizens while the appeal process progresses, but the court has not even begun to consider the arguments, much less rule on what the 1866 Treaty says.

A simple, straightforward reading of the 1866 Treaty with the United States shows that it did not provide citizenship for the Freedmen. Cherokee District Court Judge Cripps did not rule that barring the Freedmen could not be done under existing law. He ruled that Freedmen could be citizens while their case was pending in tribal court. Additionally, the highest Cherokee court and the federal courts have ruled the Cherokee people have the right to define membership even if it means barring people without Indian blood.

Click here to read the full article: http://www.sequoyahcountytimes.com/articles/2007/06/20/news/frontx.txt

Image and Reality

Appearance is not Everything: To the unsuspecting eye, the buckskin dress that Ruth is most famously known for wearing before and during her excursion to Washington D.C., is not what a Cherokee Indian would have been found wearing in their prior Georgian homeland hundreds of years ago, or even presently in Oklahoma Indian Territory. The dress that Ruth wore for her introduction to President Calvin Coolidge was a called, in an article published after her presentation by the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, a "symbol… of traditional craftsmanship of her race...made of buckskin and covered in ornate beaded designs."(21) The dress, described like the beaded cover of The Red Man in the United States, the book given to President Coolidge in 1923, were not actually crafted by Cherokees at all, but rather Cheyenne and Apache Indians.(22) According to the Cherokee Heritage Center, "elaborately beaded buckskin and feathered costumes were not the style of the Cherokee"(23) Traditional Cherokee women's' dresses were actually fashioned after white settlers' clothing in colonial Georgia. The Cherokee dresses were called Tear Dresses, named after their experience on the Trail of Tears in 1838, and made from cotton and hardly ever beaded. Ruth's choice of attire played into white Americans' conceptions of what an Indian should look like. The response to her image as a traditional Indian was seen in the articles published in conjunction with Ruth's trip to Washington.

To read more click here: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hatlas/mhc_widerworld/cherokee/ruth_dress.html