The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians has filed a federal lawsuit seeking damages from 23 companies that manufacture or distribute opioid drugs. Listing a total of seven counts, the suit alleges violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act as well as negligence, conspiracy, fraud and creation of a public nuisance.

Principal Chief Richard Sneed is now under investigation following the Cherokee Tribal Council’s unanimous vote Jan. 4 to look into a settlement agreement he signed off on to pay seven former tribal employees a total of $698,000.

War hero and former Principal Chief Robert Youngdeer received the highest honor available in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians when Tribal Council voted unanimously during its Jan. 4 meeting to name him a Beloved Man.

An alcohol commissioner who was removed from his post last month will get a hearing following the Cherokee Tribal Council’s unanimous decision to grant A.J. Bird’s request to protest the decision.

Cherokee inched closer to holding a referendum vote asking how widely available alcohol should be on tribal land with a vote during December’s Tribal Council meeting, but exactly what the implications of such a referendum might be is still unclear.

Note: This is the second of a two-part series about Christian Priber, an utopian socialist whose beliefs — including free love — caused him in the mid-1730s to “flee” from Germany and eventually into the Southern Appalachians, where he intended with the aid of the Cherokee, to establish a Kingdom of Paradise in which those beliefs could be implemented.

Seven tribal employees who were fired or demoted when former Principal Chief Patrick Lambert took office in 2015 have received a combined $698,000 in settlement payouts following a November agreement that Lambert made public this week.

Christianus Gottlieb Priber was born in Zittau, Germany, where he was the son of a beerhouse owner. In October 1722, Priber’s Doctor of Jurisprudence thesis (written in Latin) was published at Erfurt University in Erfurt, Germany, after which he returned home to practice law. In time, he became the German equivalent of a district attorney (Oberamts-Reigierungs-Advokat) for the government in the superior bailiwick that included Zittau. And in 1722 he married Christiane Dorothea Hoffman, with whom he had five children.

Pride-filled pandemonium reigned in Cherokee Saturday night, Dec. 8, as the victorious Cherokee Braves football team returned to town. Police cars and fire trucks from the Cherokee Police Department and Jackson County Sheriff’s Department flashed their lights and blared their horns in an escort that had met the buses all the way back at Balsam, and fireworks filled the air as fans already tired from the five-hour drive back from Raleigh cheered till they were hoarse.

In a split decision, the Cherokee Tribal Council voted Dec. 7 to remove a member of the Tribal Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission who had been appointed to the board during the Patrick Lambert administration.