The Tribal Council of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians has passed a new enrollment ordinance that requires DNA testing for new applicants to the tribe’s rolls. The DNA testing will be used to verify the applicant’s parental lineage.

The new enrollment ordinance also creates a process for disenrolling those who don’t qualify as Cherokee.

The Tribal Council’s vote earlier this month paves the way for non-Cherokee to be purged from the tribe’s rolls as soon as a month after Principal Chief Michell Hicks signs it into law. It is not clear when he intends to do that.

The council passed the new measures with a unanimous 12-0 vote on June 3.

The enrollment ordinance also puts a stop to new people enlisting as tribal members, with the exception of infants and 18 year olds, until an on-going audit of the tribe’s roster of nearly 14,000 tribal members is complete.

The updated ordinance is the result of months of debate on the Tribal Council floor about how the Eastern Band will implement its expensive and lengthy enrollment audit and avoid repeating the process again in the future. Tribal members voted to conduct the audit — designed to weed out people who don’t meet the tribe’s minimum enrollment requirements — in an intensely contested 2002 referendum.

Finally in 2007, the tribe hired an outside firm, The Falmouth Institute, to do the audit, which has cost $746,000 to date.

The audit turned up 303 tribal members with no direct link to the Baker Rolls, the 1920s-era document that served as a census of sorts of who was Cherokee at the time. Tribal members must be able to prove that they have an ancestor on the Baker Roll and have a blood quantum of at least one-sixteenth Eastern Cherokee. The audit revealed another 50 members who lack the adequate blood degree.

That last group is in the crosshairs of the new ordinance. According to the newly adopted policies, members in question will be informed of their status by certified mail and granted the right to a hearing before the enrollment committee within 30 days. If they don’t appear at that hearing, they’ll be automatically disenrolled.

For decades the story of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians wasn’t their own.

Tourists flocked to see Cherokee men dance in the streets dressed as Great Plains Indians, arrayed in long feathered headdresses. The tribe’s history play, “Unto These Hills,” which was supposed to tell the story of the Cherokee nation, was written and acted by whites and riddled with historical inaccuracies.

Meanwhile the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, built in 1976 as the repository of the tribe’s recorded history, didn’t have an exhibit that could communicate an impression of the Eastern Band as a people.

“There were artifacts everywhere, but you wouldn’t know anything more about the Cherokee when you left than when you’d come in,” said Ken Blankenship, the museum’s longtime director.

This weekend, when the Cherokee Voices Festival arrives on the museum’s doorstep, that will all have changed.

The Museum of the Cherokee Indian will have opened its brand new $2 million Resource and Education Building, a project that will share its archives with the tribe’s members and signal the culmination of a decade of effort to recraft the tribe’s historical narrative. That work began with the 1998 update of the museum’s permanent exhibition, which turned the information held in tens of thousands of documents and thousands of artifacts into the story of a people.

At the same time, “Unto These Hills,” now in its 60th year of production, will feature a script written by the Cherokee for the Cherokee, and some of its leading actors will come from communities like Yellow Hill and Big Cove instead of Nashville and Asheville.

In short, the effort to re-cast the story of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and present it to people from outside the Qualla Boundary has reached maturity.

“For years, Native Americans –– Cherokees too –– have been followers,” Blankenship said. “They’ve wanted the Bureau of Indian Affairs to lead. But now we want to lead.”

For Linda Squirrel, program manager for the Cherokee Historical Association and scriptwriter for “Unto These Hills,” the change was a long time coming.

“It’s a breath of fresh air,” Squirrel said. “It’s such a great nation, and there’s nobody better to tell the story and present the culture than the people themselves.”

Turning the

museum inside out

The Museum of the Cherokee Indian opened its new permanent exhibit in 1998. Blankenship had learned museums had to be in the storytelling business, so he went to Los Angeles and spent time and money working with architects and designers associated with Universal Studios. The result of that effort was a building that looked like a part of the landscape and a permanent exhibit that was historically accurate but had a driving narrative and flow that left people with a story in their heads.

“We had to create that storyline over there, and we did that using what we have over on this side,” Blankenship said, referring to the archives.

Blankenship noticed the return on the investment immediately, as visitors began to leave comments that showed their understanding of the Cherokee.

“If you read the comment book, it shows people are starting to get it,” Blankenship said. “What we’re doing is educating them without them knowing it.”

Educating tourists is only one part of the museum’s mission. The other part is to foster a dialogue with the community of Cherokee about its own history. Until now, that effort has been carried out in makeshift spaces by Barbara Duncan, the museum’s education director; Bo Taylor, its archivist; and by the many knowledgeable elders and leaders in the community.

But on Friday, June 11, the Museum of the Cherokee Indian will celebrate the grand opening of its new Resource and Education Building. The centerpiece of the $2 million project is a new archives facility and digital reading room that will open up the tribe’s historic documents to its membership.

The new building also has a multimedia classroom and a community arts center, two spaces that will integrate the knowledge of Cherokee history with the practice of Cherokee culture in a way that brings the museum to life. The project was funded with help of grants from the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, the N.C. Arts Council, the EBCI, and individual donors.

For Blankenship, who has grown the museum through years of hard work, planning, and community building, the new wing is a bridge to the tribe’s vast cache of documents and artifacts.

“For the first time we now know where everything is, and we can find it with a computer,” Blankenship said.

The reading room in the new wing has eight computers that provide access to 25,000 image files, 12,000 pages of material from the 1830s and the Trail of Tears, 2,000 pages of Cherokee language material from the 1880s and much, much more.

For instance, with cooperation from the family of Will Thomas –– the white trader adopted by Yonaguska who was instrumental in preserving the Cherokee’s ancestral homeland –– the archives have landed 20 years of his diaries and papers, his writing desk and a valuable portrait of Thomas that dates to 1846.

Talk about bringing history to life, Thomas’s first trading post was located on a site where a Huddle House now sits near Soco Creek in downtown Cherokee.

Archivist Bo Taylor said the new facility makes the museum a national center for research on the Cherokee people.

“If you want to come do Cherokee research, you want to come here,” Taylor said.

The war dance

Taylor is not your average bookworm archivist. In addition to his duties keeping track of historical materials, he also teaches a 10-day Cherokee language immersion program for adults that has drawn visitors from China and leads traditional Cherokee dance classes in the schools.

“It’s about the museum teaching the public, but it’s also about Cherokees teaching Cherokees,” Taylor said, defining the museum’s education aims.

Taylor thinks the museum’s current temporary exhibit, “Emissaries of Peace: the 1762 Cherokee and British Delegations,” has gone a long way to changing the way both the tribe and the public view Cherokee history.

The exhibit is largely based on the memoirs of Henry Timberlake, an American colonial officer, and provides a seven-month window into Cherokee culture in 1762. It shows the Cherokee nation at the height of its power, negotiating with foreign governments and exerting an influence on the region. That’s a different view of history than the one learned in schools, which emphasizes the Trail of Tears and the dissolution of a nation.

“Now I have young boys wanting to learn the war dance. Their view is going to be different. They see us from a position of strength,” Taylor said. “I feel like the museum is doing this. The story we’re telling is giving our people the full sphere of who we are.”

The revival of the Cherokee war dance is a story emblematic of the effort to reclaim a distinct cultural heritage, separate from the pan-Indian movement of the 1970s.

Marie Junaluska, one of the tribe’s most influential translators and storytellers, approached Barbara Duncan about searching the records for a traditional Cherokee dance to welcome honored guests. Junaluska had the idea that the Eastern Band should perform the dance to welcome the members of the inter-tribal council held with the leaders of the Oklahoma bands.

In response to the request, Taylor worked with Cherokee elder Walker Calhoun and Duncan to breathe life into the Cherokee war dance, which was described as a welcome dance by Timberlake. They re-created the song and worked with dancers in the community to find the steps.

Since that first performance, the Warriors of Anikituhwa have been performing the war dance and teaching it to young people. Taylor said dancing the Cherokee war dance is a whole different feeling than the pow wow dancing the men of his generation grew up with.

“The warriors were pow wow people and now we’re bringing back the war dance. We’re researching the tattoos. Now it’s for real because we’ve researched it,” Taylor said.

A new kind of

community center

“When you’re an archive, you keep everything,” said Barbara Duncan, the museum’s director of education.

Duncan, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, believes the museum’s role is to present the information available in its rich store of records to the community in a way that they can breathe life into it.

She has already seen the revival of traditional Cherokee stamped pottery, a method that was nearly abandoned as a result of the popularity of the glossier Catawba pottery tradition.

But as a result of Timberlake’s descriptions, local potters took up the challenge of bringing their own tradition back to life. Stamped potters craft pots that can hold up to 20 gallons using coils of clay. They then use wooden paddles and stamps to smooth the clay to a remarkable thinness and pattern it before firing.

“The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians has the longest continuous pottery tradition on its own land of any tribe,” Duncan said of the tribe’s 3,000 year-old tradition.

Duncan said as the potters returned to stamped pottery, they rediscovered its secrets. The paddles and stamps pressed air bubbles out and enabled the potters to obtain thinness in the pots that could fire at high heats. The stamps, it turned out, weren’t decorative; they were functional.

“This is Cherokee science really,” Duncan said.

The archives have also provided for the renewal of the tradition of making feathered capes on net backings. No longer the sole purview of the tribe’s chiefs, the capes are now worn by Miss Cherokees.

Duncan recently visited Colonial Williamsburg with a contingent of Warriors of Anikituhwa and Miss Cherokees to take part in a re-enactment of a Cherokee delegation there. She hopes the revival of traditional crafts and practices will flourish in the museum’s new wing.

“You can research all you want, but there has to be someone in the community who can actually make the things,” Duncan said. “And we have that here.”

A new old story

“Unto These Hills” has run as a history drama for 60 years, providing many tourists their first real look at the historical narrative of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. For most of those years, though, the production was a kind of caricature of itself, conceived with a white audience in mind.

Starting in 2006, though, the Cherokee Historical Association set about updating the drama, making it more Cherokee.

“The rewrite came about in the beginning because there was a decline in attendance. The original scripts had gotten stale and the Cherokee people wanted more ownership of the drama,” said Linda Squirrel, who works as a program manager for the CHA and as a scriptwriter for “Unto These Hills.”

Kiowa author Hanay Geiogamah undertook the first rewrite of the drama, and while the result was magical, it didn’t do enough to teach audiences the history of the Cherokee.

“What he came up with was a wonderful production but not necessarily the story of the Cherokee people,” Squirrel said.

In 2007 the association hired two Los Angeles-based writers, Ben Hurst and Pat Allee, to carve out a narrative line. That version was better, but Squirrel said it didn’t really take into account the play’s function and setting.

Squirrel, who had been involved in each of the rewrites, took matters into her own hands.

“I really wanted the historical part to be as accurate as possible keeping in mind the show still has to have an element of entertainment about it,” Squirrel said.

This season, “Unto These Hills” is on its third rewrite, which combines elements of all the rewrites but has a new clarity of focus on the Cherokee narrative.

“It’s not really hard to tell the story because the story’s there. It’s the story of the Cherokee people, and it’s full of drama,” Squirrel.

For Squirrel, the script is just one part of a new ownership stake the local community has in the play.

“I think the thing I’m most proud of is the fact that you have Cherokee people telling their own story; whereas, in the past, you had local people who were only in the crowd scenes who were never given the chance to act,” Squirrel said.

The cast now boasts 35 enrolled members out of a cast of 47, including Mike Crowe Jr. –– a Yellow Hill native who plays Junaluska –– and Dustin French, a Big Cove native as Tsali.

Crowe has been with the drama for three years, and he said this year’s community night show last week put butterflies in his stomach.

“It’s the most intimidating night of the season because if we can’t get the stamp of approval from our own people, then what are we really doing?” Crowe said.

French said the community night show was a chance to prove to locals the show had changed.

“It feels good because we have the support of the local people now and that just shows we’re taking the show in the direction we’ve been talking about,” French said.

Eddie Swimmer, who runs the box office at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, is in his third year as director of “Unto These Hills.”

Swimmer got his acting break in Hollywood bit parts then graduated with a theater degree from Brigham Young University. After spending more than a decade with the American Indian Dance Theater, based in New York, Swimmer came home.

Swimmer is largely responsible for giving local actors like Crowe and French their breaks, which he sees as an opportunity to bring a new kind of energy to the play.

“It’s just about the energy of our cast members,” Swimmer said. “Some of our local cast members are literally reliving the stories of their ancestors.”

Swimmer said part of the purpose of the play is to bring the Cherokee characters to life, to complicate the assumptions the audience has about Native Americans. French’s portrayal of Tsali, the resistor who sacrificed his own life so his people could stay in their mountains, is a prime example.

“We have to show the general public that we are a people and we want to develop the characters,” Swimmer said. “Tsali was a real man. I want to show people how he felt.”

“Unto These Hills” is still a stage play, full of musical numbers and bright costumes, and it even still has a rousing rendition of “Rocky Top.” But now the professional actors who come to play leading roles are rubbing elbows with local talent, and both sides stand to benefit from the collaboration.

Swimmer believes the play can become an incubator for Cherokee talent and an example for other tribes for how to shape their narratives for outside audiences.

“I think we could be a stepping stone for other native nations to set up their own theaters and start telling their own stories,” Swimmer said. “It’s a good way to show Americans who we are.”

Swimmer understands the play’s role and his own role in a much larger drama. After many years of living up to other people’s expectations of them, the Cherokee are telling their own story.

“Like the play says, we did rise from the ashes,” Swimmer said. “Our children now days are speaking the language, and the traditions are being upheld.”

See the change

The Museum of the Cherokee Indian will celebrate the old and the new June 11 and 12. The Museum will dedicate its new Education and Research Center Friday, at 3 p.m., June 11 with a ribbon cutting ceremony and demonstrations of its purpose. On Saturday, centuries old Cherokee traditions will be celebrated at the Cherokee Voices Festival from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. www.cherokeemuseum.org or 828.497.3481 x306

The Cherokee uses and ecology of river cane will be discussed during a guided walk from 10 a.m. to noon on Wednesday, June 9, in Franklin.

“We Brake for River Cane” will discuss biology and ecology of canebrakes, and the cultural and historic importance of this plant to the Cherokee Indians, who had more than 30 traditional uses for the plant. A demonstration will feature one of those uses.

The program along the Little Tennessee Greenway will be led by David Cozzo, an ethnobotanist; Darry Wood, a Native American earth skills expert; and Dennis Desmond, stewardship director for Land Trust for the Little Tennessee.

Meet at the Rotary Shelter at the Airport Trail entrance behind Macon News. 828.349.5201.

Martie Hoofer was driving her motorcycle into Cherokee from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park when an Anikituhwa warrior dressed for battle stopped her and asked for her passport.

“I was shocked,” Hoofer said. “I believed him. My passport is at home.”

Sonny Ledford, a founding member of the Warriors of Anikituhwa, stopped Hoofer and her son Sam and addressed them in Cherokee, his war club clasped in his right hand.

Ledford was participating in a new effort to market the Cherokee Passport, a tourism booklet produced by the Goss Agency that highlights the many cultural activities available in Cherokee.

“It feels like when they used to do it in the earlier times,” Ledford said. “In a way it’s telling people you’re coming onto our land to hear about our people, and we are going to give you a passport so you are welcome.”

The Anikituhwa Warriors are a group of men who speak Cherokee and dress in 17th century traditional costumes. Ledford’s traditional name through his paternal bloodline is Usquetsiwo, which means “wears something on his head,” a reference to the Cherokee warriors’ headdress.

“There’s too much stereotypical Indian out there and people believe it’s true,” Ledford said. “This is who we are.”

The passport checkpoint was essentially a public relations stunt, but it was a significant way of reframing Cherokee as a tourist destination.

The passports have event schedules, write-ups of rich cultural offerings and a short list of free things to do, but their focus is on Cherokee as a cultural landmark.

Robert Jumper, travel and tourism manager for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, helped organize the event.

“It’s a fun reminder of the culture of the Cherokee,” Jumper said. “Certainly you can see the sovereignty of the nation in this, but it’s really just a fun way to introduce visitors to Cherokee.”

Mike Crowe, another of the warriors, said dressing up in traditional attire was an honor.

“We don’t speak in terms of pride. We speak in terms of honor. Adelagwodi. It’s like honor a thousand times,” Crowe said.

Crowe was wearing wampum prepared by Robert Saunooke and a war club fashioned by Ledford.

He said he hoped the checkpoint would encourage tourists to dig deeper into Cherokee culture during their visits.

“Hopefully they’ll get it through their head to check out our museum, our village, and come away with a better understanding of who we are as a people,” Crowe said.

If Karen Bess of Fishersville, Va., is representative of the other tourists that passed through the checkpoint, the plan worked.

“I liked it,” said Bess. “I’ve always been fascinated by Native American culture.”

How do you kick out a member of a Native American tribe? The Eastern Band of Cherokee is about to find out, and there’s no way it’s going down without some bitterness and fighting.

The EBCI is almost finished with an audit of its enrolled members, and the Tribal Council is apparently leaning towards DNA testing to determine who is actually a member in the future.

The 1924 Baker Roll is the official document from which tribal membership is determined. Those families on that roll who meet the blood quantum level are considered members of the tribe. The enrollment audit started in 2006, and the tribal council is set to decide in June how to proceed with those whose tribal identity is being questioned.

Some are saying that new members should only be admitted after a DNA test, regardless of their family history. Others want to go further and do DNA testing on all enrolled members in order to clean up the rolls.

The potential for misery and family upheavals is just around the corner. What if someone has lived their entire life as a Cherokee and now is told, no, you don’t have enough Cherokee blood ? It seems the council has no choice but to follow through with DNA testing, but for some the results will be life changing.

•••

Years of column writing have taught me this — think you’ve written something enlightening that the multitudes should take to heart, and the piece is quickly forgotten; dash off a column that you’d rate as benign at best, and the phone rings off the hook and the email box gets slammed.

Last week’s piece about Haywood County’s solid waste system and proposed changes in how it operates falls somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, but comments from a couple of county commissioners do merit a mention. First, I said commissioners voted to make changes to the solid waste system. That’s a mistake. The proposed budget includes cost savings from the overhaul of the system, but the budget has not been approved yet. Nothing’s been decided for sure.

Second is the widespread use of the term “privatize.” Some are taking exception to that description. A Haywood task force has recommended changes to the solid waste system that would send some services to the private sector. The pick line that separates recyclables would simply disappear, as commissioners would outsource recycling services if the proposal were approved. A private company would also be in charge maintaining the convenience centers. At this point, the county would still be heavily involved in maintaining the transfer station and running the landfill.

Solid waste won’t be privatized entirely. Fewer county employees will be involved in solid waste disposal and recycling. The column’s premise was that these economic times are going to force many elected leaders — not just Haywood’s — to look for cost savings, and that outsourcing what were once government operations is likely to occur more rapidly until things get better.

I think that a close look at what can be outsourced is a good idea, that there is only so much government can and should do. In Haywood’s case, the overhaul of the solid waste system is a good idea with plenty of merit.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

What is the enrollment audit?

A review of the nearly 14,000 people on the tribe’s roll to determine whether they qualify as being Cherokee. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians requires members to be one-quarter Cherokee by blood and to have a direct link to the Baker Roll of 1924.

An outside firm, The Falmouth Institute, was hired to do the audit. So far, the Cherokee have spent $746,000 on the audit, with another $100,000 budgeted for its completion, which is slated for September.

What is the Baker Roll?

The final roll of the Eastern Cherokee, prepared by United States Agent Fred A. Baker, in 1924. Termination of the Tribe as a government and political entity was the ultimate goal of the Congressional act that initiated the Baker Roll. After termination efforts failed, the Tribe continued to use the 1924 Baker Roll as its base roll. Descendants of those persons of the original Baker Roll are enrolled on the Baker Revised Roll, providing they meet the membership requirements of the Tribe.

What did the audit find?

The report found 2,251 “actionable” files, meaning that some action needed to be taken to correct their status. Most were only minor incongruities that were easily cleared up.

The audit turned up only 303 tribal members with no direct link to the Baker Rolls, the majority of them the result of missing birth certificates.

Perhaps the most crucial number turned up by the audit was the 50 enrolled members who were revealed to have insufficient blood quantum levels to meet the enrollment requirements.

What’s at stake?

Enrollment bring with it a host of benefits, including the right to own land in the Qualla Boundary and about $8,000 a year per person in shared casino revenues.

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is talking about moving to DNA testing as a way of verifying the blood requirement to be enrolled as a tribal member.

The tribe’s latest quandaries over its enrollment audit have led Principal Chief Michell Hicks and a number of members of the Tribal Council to point to DNA testing as the way forward when enrolling new members of the tribe.

“Going forth DNA is the only way to correct this issue. I’ve said this from day one,” Hicks said. “Council has control over the enrollment process. The chief’s office doesn’t have any control here. But that’s always been my recommendation. If we want to get it right, let’s get it right, going forward with the DNA process.”

Making DNA testing mandatory for those who want to be included on the tribe’s rolls became the focal point of discussion at a Tribal Council meeting earlier this month. The conversation ensued after two enrolled members from the Snowbird community asked the tribe to stop enrolling new members until the auditing process had been completed.

The Tribal Council received the results of the enrollment audit in October. Since that time, an enrollment committee has worked on implementing the policies and procedures that would allow the tribe to proceed with disenrolling tribal members who don’t meet enrollment requirements.

The auditors report showed that 50 people on the rolls don’t meet the blood degree to qualify as a member of the tribe. Another 303 people on the rolls can’t prove they have an ancestor on the Baker Roll, a 1920s-era federal roster of tribal members considered a litmus test for enrollment today.

Even the Baker Roll is a contested issue. When the roll was adopted in 1924, the Tribal Council approved 1,924 names and challenged 1,222 names on the 3,146-person list.

Big Cove Representative Theresa McCoy said the audit can’t be considered complete until the council acts on the findings of the consulting firm that conducted the study.

“The process included the removal of the names of persons who do not meet the criteria for enrollment when they were enrolled, so to me, the enrollment audit is not complete,” McCoy said. “The paperwork is, the findings are, but the audit is not.”

While the enrollment audit was approved by a vote of tribal members in 2002, it was not until 2006 that the Falmouth Institute, an outside consulting firm, began its work. The Tribal Council is scheduled to vote on the policies and procedures it will use to enforce the results at its June meeting and the process could be complete as early as September.

The painstaking and lengthy audit has led some sitting council members to push for the use of DNA testing in the future.

“Let’s start doing DNA. We’ve got that technology, and we need to utilize it. Instead of putting people on that aren’t supposed to be,” said Snowbird Representative Diamond Brown.

The tribe has enrolled 157 new members, mostly infants, since last June. At its meeting earlier this month, the Tribal Council voted to pass an amendment that would prevent any new members, except those ages 0 to 3 and 18 to 19, to enroll until the audit process is complete.

One of the major issues concerning the tribe’s rolls centers on the right to per capita payments. Every tribal member gets two checks a year as a share of casino revenue. It amounts to about $8,000 a year. Per capita payments will be released to members on June 1.

Snowbird Representative Adam Wachacha said a complete enrollment audit and DNA testing were the only ways to save the tribe from repeating the painstaking review process again in the future.

“The people want the rolls to be cleaned up and unless we fix the process which we’re at, 20 years from now we’ll be in the same boat we are in now,” Wachacha said.

Hawk Brown, an 18-year-old enrolled member from Painttown, said DNA testing could make for painful realizations for some families.

“Everybody’s got skeletons in their closets. But if we want to clean this up, the people voted on it and that’s what they want to do,” Brown said. “Them things will have to brought out. Them things will have to be brought out in my own family.”

The Tribal Council will vote on the issue of whether to include DNA testing as an enrollment requirement and on policies and procedures governing disenrollment hearings in June.

Iolo Williams is one of the Wales’ most recognized TV personalities. “Wildlife” Williams, as he is known by some fans, or “Birdman” as he is known by others, revolutionized BBC nature shows by bringing heady ecology together with rugged good looks and his native language, Welsh.

Williams and his production crew traveled to Cherokee this past week to film an episode of a series whose working titles is “Iolo yn Native America,” scheduled to air in the UK later this year.

The crew –– camera director Mei Williams, researcher Luke Peavey, and producer Bethan Arwell –– have already cut an episode in Navajo country.

But for Iolo, the trip to Cherokee was special, primarily because he sees the parallels between the Cherokee and Welsh efforts to revive their native languages.

“Williams in Native America” is being filmed entirely in Welsh and the indigenous languages of the tribes Iolo interacts with.

“When I was little, Welsh wasn’t cool, and that’s a big thing for kids,” Williams said. “But there’s been a massive revival, mostly through education. With the Cherokee, and with this school, you can see there’s hope now.”

Last Thursday, Iolo visited the Kituwah Immersion Language Academy, the Cherokee’s state of the art new immersion school.

Williams grew up in Llanwwddyn in the Welsh midlands as a Welsh speaker and a child yearning for wild places. His imagination was captivated my Native Americans from an early age.

“One of the main reasons is because of the huge similarities I see between the Native Americans and the plight of the Welsh,” Williams said.

Americans know little of Welsh history. But if your name is Thomas, Morris, Williams or Jones, chances are you could trace the roots of your family tree and wind up somewhere near Cardiff or Builth Wells.

Wales was conquered by England over 800 years ago, and since that time they have slowly become Anglicized.

“A lot of our old traditional ways are long gone, but we do have differences from the English, especially with regard to the ways we value our family and the language,” Williams said.

Today, only 1 in 10 Welsh speak their native tongue, but it is taught to schoolchildren and is an official language in the country. Welsh is cool again, and the Welsh are exploring the boundaries of their own identity. While the English have forgotten they did anything bad to the Welsh, the Welsh haven’t forgotten.

Williams said he admires the way the Cherokee have taken advantage of the economic benefits available in American society while working hard to preserve their own identity.

“The Cherokee haven’t forgotten,” Williams said. “They do remember, but they’ve moved on. You know we still hate the English.”

As Williams and his team toured the Kituwah Preservation and Education Program, he felt a sense of satisfaction.

“It looks like you’ve caught the Cherokee language within a hair’s breadth of dying out,” Williams said. “This really has to be the way forward. There’s a lot of personal responsibility placed on the individual when a language is dying, but education has to be the way forward.”

Williams and his crew will return to Wales to work on other projects before coming back to the United States and Canada to film episodes with the Haida, Lakota, Blackfoot, and Northern Cree tribes.

The show has not yet been scheduled for airtimes in Wales, but Iolo said anybody interested in watching has plenty of time to practice their Welsh.

Many who walk into Joel Queen’s gallery mistakenly assume the artwork there solely represents Cherokee tradition.

After all, Queen comes from a long line of Cherokee potters and basketmakers who passed down their art to him as soon as he was able to crawl. And he’s one of Cherokee’s most prominent artists — among the few to successfully run his own gallery and to teach at the Southwestern Community College’s Oconaluftee Institute of Cultural Arts.

But looking closer, it becomes clear that Queen’s artistic vision extends far beyond the Qualla Boundary. His work is as much inspired from Greek vessels, Egyptian sculptures, and Celtic designs as aesthetic traditions from Cherokee and the Southeast.

Queen is just as interested in seeing what Cherokee artists produce as what artists on the other side of the country are up to. He loves traveling across the nation with his family, competing at art shows like at the Sante Fe Indian Market, especially for this purpose.

“The competition keeps me on my toes,” said Queen. “I thrive on it. If I don’t win one year, I’m going to have to do something better next year. That part of it, I really love.”

Even if he doesn’t win, though, the art market provides Queen the perfect opportunity to observe new artistic traditions as they are being formulated.

Queen, along with fellow artist and friend John Grant, decided to create Cherokee’s own annual art market because they saw it as integral to bringing fresh ideas to the region’s art scene.

“The only way art advances is to be able to see what’s going on outside of here,” said Queen, adding that the art market has the additional benefit of boosting the local economy.

An ongoing education

Queen had learned the craft of basketmaking from his grandmother when he was just 5 years old and later fell in love with sculpture. But when Queen settles down to work in one of his two studios, he doesn’t limit himself to just one, or even two, kinds of media.

Queen credits his high school art teacher for showing him how to diversify, which ended up complementing Queen’s own personality in the end.

“It was very eye-opening for me to be able to work in leatherwork, silverwork, clay and paintings,” said Queen.

“... I don’t like being confined. I like being able to express how I feel through different media.”

Luckily for Queen, that versatility has been useful in a volatile economy, when one medium might not sell as well as another.

With a diverse skill set in tow, Queen set out for his next challenge, large-scale pieces — what later became his signature style. Since many artists didn’t like to work large at the time, Queen had to resort to self-teaching to learn to build such heavy pieces.

“Large pieces are more challenging. That’s why I like doing them so much,” said Queen. “It keeps it interesting. It’s very easy for me to lose interest if there’s not a challenge to it.”

Now, Queen can create sculptures 10 to 12 feet tall as well as he can build miniature pieces as small as 2 or 3 inches tall.

Queen also hand builds his pottery, rather than throwing it on the wheel. Pots won’t be perfectly symmetrical this way, but each piece is unique, different from the one before. Though hand building was slow going at first, Queen learned techniques to speed up the process, so he can create at nearly the same rate as an artist who wheel throws.

“I’m not knocking wheel throwing work,” said Queen. “It’s still beautiful and takes talent to do it, but hand building is just a totally different area.”

For one thing, when the electricity goes out, Queen can go right on creating.

“As long as you got wood, you can still burn the pot,” said Queen.

Wal-Mart will not build a new Supercenter in Cherokee. After months of speculation that the deal between the tribe and the mega-retailer had fallen through, a company spokesperson confirmed the news this week.

“We decided not to move ahead with the project,” said Bill Wertz, Wal-Mart spokesperson. “It is a combination of things. We have to consider a number of factors.”

The tribe hoped Wal-Mart would be the center of a new mega development bringing an array of services to Cherokee, saving residents a drive into Sylva or Waynesville to purchase household wares that they can’t get on the reservation. But the planned Wal-Mart also drew criticism for its potential to hurt local businesses.

To lure Wal-Mart, the tribe intended to build a 150,000-square-foot store at a cost of $25 million on Hospital Road near downtown Cherokee and lease it to Wal-Mart. The store was projected to create 200 jobs and nearly double the tribe’s sales tax collections, theoretically paying for the tribe’s upfront cost of the building over time. Last May, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Tribal Council approved the deal, which was four years in the works, by a vote of 9 to 3.

Last month, Cherokee’s director of economic development, Mickey Duvall, said a consulting firm working on behalf of the tribe was still trying to persuade Wal-Mart’s upper management to move forward with the deal.

“Our consultants informed us in early 2010 that Wal-Mart’s domestic focus had changed primarily to urban markets due to the recent recession, however they would continue to pressure Wal-Mart’s upper management to get the Cherokee deal approved and construction scheduled as soon as possible since lease negotiations with the Tribe had been ongoing prior to the downturn in the U.S. economy,” Duvall said in an update published in the Cherokee One Feather newspaper.

The Tribal Council split on the issue of offering hefty incentives to Wal-Mart to bring the store to Cherokee, and some local retailers said the store would kill their businesses if it came. With the announcement that the project is scuttled, Wertz stopped short of saying Wal-Mart would rule the site out in the future.

“Every year we have a certain amount of investment capital, and we have to determine the sites best suited for its use,” Wertz said. “This site didn’t meet the threshold this year, but that’s not to say it couldn’t do so in the future.”

Wertz said Wal-Mart has focused more energy on remodeling existing stores since the recession hit.

“Two or three years ago, we made the decision to build fewer new stores and devote some of the money to remodeling existing stores,” Wertz said.

Principal Chief Michell Hicks, whose administration has been characterized by an aggressive agenda of economic development, did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

Last month, Hicks had been hopeful that the deal would still go through.

“The Eastern Band of Cherokee remains committed to opening a Wal-Mart in our community however we cannot discuss the content of those negotiations at this time,” Hicks said.