‘The River’ aims to set the story straight for Patrick Lambert
Former Principal Chief Patrick Lambert released his first book in early April.
When Patrick Lambert first sat down to write his book “The River: A Cherokee Principal Chief’s Fight for Family, Truth, and Vindication” in 2024, he intended it to be about personal finance.
Somewhere along the way, he ditched the original theme, opting for a more vulnerable story. Lambert, former principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, decided to share his perspective about his 2015-2017 tenure and why it was cut two years short. But he also wanted to talk about growing up, dropping out of high school, getting a law degree, building a casino regulatory framework from scratch — all as much a part of his life as his impeachment, the main thing he feels he’s been remembered for.
“I didn’t want the impeachment to define me,” he told The Smoky Mountain News.
“I want people to take away from this not just what my eyes saw — from what happened, the public story of the whole ordeal — but to how I came to be who I am,” he added.
“The River” starts by centering the reader squarely in Lambert’s childhood.
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“Our world was simple but full. Firewood stacked in neat rows outside the back door. Garden rows in the side yard turning the soil dark and rich in spring, my mother’s hands working the earth like she was having a conversation with something ancient and alive,” he wrote.
The theme of “simple but full” echoes throughout this section as both a reflection of Cherokee values and how the love Lambert shares with his mother, father and sisters exerts a steady influence even into adulthood. In fact, he said reliving these memories through writing brought him the most fulfillment of anything in the book.
Lambert continues the book by guiding the reader through the next stage of his journey, from dropping out of high school to graduating from a four-year university.
His professional life — and what would later encompass his work with the tribe — began with the decision to apply to law school. Four years and a Juris Doctor later, the young attorney was hired by Ben Bridgers, an EBCI tribal attorney for whom he had clerked as a student.
According to Bridgers’ legal opinion, since North Carolina had prohibited video gaming, the tribe could not offer such an enterprise on its territory. But in 1990, Lambert caught a break at a Texaco gas station. Though he was only there for a snack, he exited with a revelation after reading the fine print on the slot machine. The state had banned gaming “based on the use of skill or dexterity,” but it hadn’t banned gaming “involving the use of skill or dexterity.” And that slight distinction made a difference.
Lambert’s discovery — along with his help in building a regulatory framework — led the Eastern Band to what would eventually become Harrah’s Cherokee Casino. In 1996, he was hired as the Tribal Gaming Commission’s first executive director, a 21-year role that involved rulemaking, licensing and enforcement through a board he’d helped create.
While Lambert was professionally successful — a major player in gaming law across the country, as well as in securing per-capita casino distributions that transformed the lives of thousands of EBCI citizens — in “The River,” he routinely describes the work as challenging and time consuming. At the beginning of his career, his job demanded between 80 and 90 weekly hours, he wrote.
Still, Lambert told SMN that he never reached a point of burnout, despite losing time with his wife, Cyndi, and children, Gina and Nelson.
“It would take me a while to unwind if we ever would go back to the beach or something for a day or two. [I was] just still worried about what’s going on at home. But it’s a high level of attention and stress, for sure,” he said.
Principal Chief Lambert
Lambert first ran for principal chief in 2007. According to “The River,” he lost to current Principal Chief Michell Hicks by seven votes in a highly contested election. At the time , SMN reported a 14-vote margin but also that seven non-voters claimed to have been denied entry at the polls. Lambert filed a lawsuit and submitted 21 unsuccessful protests; Hicks was declared victor one month after the vote. He lost again in 2011 by narrow margins — according to the “The River” by less than 1%, by 3% according to unofficial election results.
But the third time was the charm — in 2015, he won with a landslide 71%.
Patrick Lambert. File photo
Though Lambert only served as principal chief for two years, he argued in the book that he accomplished a laundry-list of achievements.
“The first thing I did was tear the budget apart and rebuild it,” he wrote, remarking that $20 million was cut without eliminating a single service.
The EBCI had a total debt of nearly $97 million when he was elected. In 2016, he brought that number down to $0. He recounts that in just two years of office, he added 26 positions to Public Health and Human Services, expanded the attorney general’s office to cover enrolled member legal services, installed EMT curriculum in Cherokee High School and built a constituent services office that handled 2,400 cases.
But from the way he told it in “The River,” these changes might’ve been part of the problem. In a passage he described as “reflective and self-deprecating,” Lambert admitted that his sweeping reforms created friction when confronting the slow-moving machine of politics, which required strict bureaucracy and adherence to tradition.
“I hadn’t listened. I had twenty-one years of knowing what needed to be fixed, and I had four years to fix it. The math felt simple: Move fast, get it done, let the results speak for themselves. But politics doesn’t work that way … I also failed to share the spotlight. In regulatory work, credit doesn’t matter, results matter. But in politics, recognition is currency,” he wrote.
His personnel decisions might have also been part of the problem. From the beginning , Lambert terminated six deputy-level employees and demoted eight others, though the former group typically sees turnaround with a new administration. Some praised his follow-through on a promise to ‘clean house,’ while others criticized the actions as political payback.
His ‘clean house’ strategy continued with a request for an independent forensic audit of the EBCI budget. Some things, he noted in the book, were not quite right — namely “weak internal controls,” unrelated credit card expenditures and EBCI reimbursement of personal finances.
“The problems were systemic enough that I knew immediately what had to happen next,” he wrote.
He immediately informed the FBI.
The Bureau sent a letter to the Qualla Housing Authority to notify the director of an investigation. According to “The River,” following that move, tribal council members went to Washington, D.C., to attend USET Impact Week with a secondary goal in mind: hiring an attorney to impeach him.
“I came to believe the decision to remove me had been made long before the first charge was ever written. I cannot prove this conclusively, but the sequence of events — attorney meetings in January, formal charges months later — led me to that conclusion,” the book states.
Following a four-day trial, nine tribal council members voted to remove Lambert, finding him guilty on eight of 12 counts of impeachment. According to the former chief, however, several of the nine were motivated by a fear of exposure; six council members sat on the QHA board.
“I think there are some people that were genuinely concerned about what could be uncovered in a full-on FBI investigation,” said Lambert.
He describes the impeachment as especially brutal.
Rob Saunooke, the attorney arguing for impeachment, faced allegations of unlicensed practice of law, an ethical and criminal violation. One council member did not recuse himself from the vote and still testified for the opposition. So did then-Vice Chief Richard Sneed; Lambert claimed there was a secondary motivation behind “Richie’s” action. There were some “that were sitting there able to gain from [the impeachment],” Lambert recounted.
Sneed would go on to become principal chief following Lambert’s removal.
All nine pro-impeachment members lost resoundingly in the subsequent elections, though it was clear from an earlier 1,140-strong grand council meeting, when 84% of EBCI members voted to halt impeachment proceedings, that they were not aligned with the vast majority of voters.
Were an impeachment to happen again, the statutes dictating its procedure — implemented directly after he was removed from office without a rulebook, he said — are a start. But he’d also like the tribe to enlist a second independent body.
A 2-1 majority opinion issued in 2018 by the EBCI Supreme Court upheld the authority of tribal council to remove Lambert through impeachment and ruled that the Grand Council lacked the power to halt the process. It did, however, concede that tribal members have a “substantial right” to a lawful impeachment.
After the vote
“I woke up the morning after the vote and did something I hadn’t done in years, maybe decades. I stayed in bed,” Lambert wrote, adding that it felt alien to have nothing to do and nowhere to go.
He said the period immediately following the trial was filled with both immense relief and mourning. He was relieved the impeachment was over and he no longer had to watch council members interrogate his position. He grieved the past — and what had yet to come.
“Part of my feeling was not only sad and grief over the loss of the whole thing, but the worry of the tribe’s future, because it’s proven out to be a real, true worry. Because look what happened to us in the post 10-year period,” he told SMN, referencing what he said was tribal debt “north of $200 million” along with certain LLCs that have come under fire for being unaccountable to tribal citizens. Lambert remarked that even Sneed — who he claimed was a huge proponent of LLCs — could not hold Qualla Enterprises to a forensic audit.
As far as QHA goes, he prefers to stay out of it. This attitude applies to many causes for which he was once the fiercest advocate.
“I spent my whole life, my whole career … [in] a political fight, or a fight to get this across the finish line … one thing I learned with my family is we don’t fight,” he said, adding that these days he prefers quality time with his loved ones.
However, he isn’t done fighting for his legacy. “The River” is a large part — though not the only part — of that process.
In 2025, he approached the EBCI Supreme Court to challenge a policy dictating that impeached public officials could never again run for office.
“I just didn’t want that legacy being stuck out there as impeached. And here’s the charges that are sitting out there, and everybody can see them. It needed to be addressed,” he said. Lambert represented himself pro se. The opinion came back in his favor.
The Supreme Court’s ruling carried weight, though he has no immediate intentions to re-enter politics. Now that the book is finished — which he said has consumed his life over the past year — he’d like to reinvest time in his small businesses. Either way, Lambert said, he’s been slowing down — and getting to know his grandchildren.
“For the past few years … whenever I woke up that morning [after the impeachment], I’ve spent quite a few days never even leaving the house, just staying in my sleep pants,” Lambert chuckled. “It’s a different life for me.”
