Crime reporting in the region has moved into the digital age, thanks to the Cherokee Police Department’s new text-a-tip program.

The system offers tipsters the option to text, via their cell phones, about crime they know about. This can be done anonymously, and the text-a-tip program has the added option of online reporting.

“It is good,” said Bo Taylor, a resident of the Big Cove community, and leader of the neighborhood watch. “Our only issue is everywhere in Big Cove is not accessible to the Internet, or has good phone coverage.”

Police Chief Ben Reed said the new program gives his department another weapon in their arsenal to use against criminals, while simultaneously offering the community another avenue to stay connected to the organization tasked with keeping them safe.

“I thought it would be a good way for the public to report crime anonymously,” Reed said. “A lot of people want to contribute and talk but they don’t want to put their name out there.”

Reed said the system is not only targeting would-be informants wishing to protect their identities, but also those too busy to use traditional means of reporting.

“A lot of people communicate though texting and we saw that it was a convenient way to target the amount of people that do text on a daily basis.”

The system itself is simple to operate – a text to the designated number along with keyword “saferez” will instantly reach the department’s e-mail system. It’s then forwarded to the appropriate officers to investigate the charge.

The data sent to police is encrypted on multiple levels, so it’s impossible for investigators to track the sender, making it a truly anonymous report. Citizens can choose to allow the department to text them a response to the tip, but their phone number still won’t be available to investigators.

Reed said that although many of the tips they get are for drug-related crimes, he wants residents to know that the system isn’t just a drug-reporting line.

“It’s important for people to know that this is designed to report any crime, not just drug crime,” Reed said. “You can report child abuse, neglect, information on theft, open investigations, assault, drug crimes, traffic crimes, anything.”

Cherokee isn’t the first to implement such a program; tip texting has become part of the reporting system at larger police departments around the country in places such as San Francisco and Boston, where police said they struggled for decades against a strong anti-snitching culture. But Reed said that his department is the first to offer the service in this area.

Cherokee offers the service through a company called TipSoft, which sells and operates a wide-ranging menu of software designed to help law enforcement officials track, report and stop crime in an increasingly digital era.

Reed said they’re employing text-a-tip as one facet of a new digital approach to crime prevention. Soon, he said, they’ll be rolling out online programs that will allow residents to access digital maps of the crime in their area and see constantly updated crime statistics for the entire reservation.

Reed said he sees far-reaching implications for these new, hi-tech crime-fighting techniques, and hopes that they will engage the younger generation to actively work against crime in the community.

“We want to target younger people as well with this by promoting it in the school system to help prevent bullying,” said Reed.

Such measures might also help relieve community tensions that have built surrounding arrests and prosecutions on the reservation. At a special public meeting on law and order held last month, Reed fielded complaints from more than a few citizens who lamented witnessing crimes in their neighborhoods but having little police response, especially in outlying areas of the reservation.

While the crime mapping and statistical services are not yet operational, the text-a-tip server is up and running, and officials said they’ve already seen an uptick in reporting, a trend they hope will continue.

Tribal leaders and prosecutors in Cherokee will now have stronger tools to mete out justice to criminals on the reservation, thanks to a bill signed into law by President Obama last year.

The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010, approved by Congress and the president in July of last year, gives tribal governments and court systems such as the ones in Cherokee increased power and flexibility in fighting crimes that are committed on their lands.

In the past, the jurisdictional tangle surrounding justice for crimes committed on the reservation, along with limited allowances on punishments, have meant that criminals don’t always get the penalties they may deserve for offenses in Cherokee.

Under old law, the harshest sentence a tribal court could impose for any charge was one year in prison and a $5,000 fine, which pales in comparison to the maximum penalties allowed at the state and federal level.

Now, tribes are free to approve penalties of up to three years and are allowed to stack up to three charges. That means that, if adopted by Tribal Council, multiple severe offenders could see as much as nine years of prison time.

To Tribal Prosecutor Jason Smith, this is a huge accomplishment for tribal justice and will change the face of many of his cases.

“It’s the biggest change that the new law has brought about as far a criminal liability is concerned,” said Smith. “I’m hopeful that it will allow the tribal court to prosecute and to punish a broader range of crimes more appropriately, to more appropriately and effectively deal with more serious crime than they have done in the past.”

A convoluted court

Committing a crime in Cherokee – and being prosecuted for it – isn’t as cut and dried as it would be outside the reservation. Not everyone who breaks the law in Cherokee can expect to go to tribal court for it, nor can everyone expect that they’ll be held accountable by state or federal law enforcement. As Smith puts it, “jurisdiction is a huge quagmire. It’s not as simple as that.”

To begin with, only enrolled members of the Eastern Band, enrolled members of other federally recognized tribes and non-U.S. citizens can be punished by tribal courts. In Cherokee, they have an extra provision for others who want to fall under the tribe’s authority – a waiver of jurisdiction, in legal speak – but it’s entirely optional and not without controversy.

Everybody else – which includes non-Indian local residents, American tourists, casino patrons – will get pursued by the long arm of some non-Native law, be it local for piddly offenses such as speeding, state for bigger but still victimless crimes, or federal for more major crimes or those perpetrated by Indians against non-Indian victims, and vice versa.

To call it a quagmire is putting it kindly, but according to Smith and Don Gast, his cohort in the U.S. Attorney’s office who prosecutes Cherokee’s federal cases, they do a good job of working within that framework.

According to Gast, his office doesn’t decline tribal cases in the same way they would with non-tribal cases. Of the many cases that come across a normal federal prosecutor’s desk, many are just too small-time to warrant attention in federal courts.  Gast doesn’t do that with cases that come to him from Cherokee.

“We don’t decline cases in our districts on the basis of crimes being not big enough in scope like we do on state cases,” said Gast, because they realize that for these cases, many of which are violent crimes such as rape and child abuse, federal court is their one chance to bring the alleged criminal to justice.

Bringing order out of chaos

Such crimes are the very reason the Tribal Law and Order Act was created. An Amnesty International study found that Native American women were more than twice as likely to suffer domestic abuse than other women in the United States, and a separate Department of Justice study found that one third of Native American women will experience rape in their lifetime.

Although neither of these unusually high statistics is caused by the difficult maze of prosecution and justice tribal jurisdiction creates, both named it as a barrier to lowering those high rates.

In light of that, the other important provision the law makes is a recommendation for formalized procedures for sending cases to federal court and closer communication with the local U.S. Attorney’s office. There’s even a provision for cross-training a tribal prosecutor as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, or SAUSA, who would be able to follow cases off the reservation and into federal court and prosecute them there.

In Cherokee, they’re keen to see more cases federally prosecuted. At a special meeting on law and order held last week, more than one member expressed frustration at what they perceive as a high number of cases that don’t get taken to federal court, leaving victims without justice.

Council Member Teresa McCoy believe that some of the burden for making sure fewer cases fall through the cracks should fall to the council.

“Well, if we’re telling our public it just wasn’t big enough for the feds to take, then our laws should handle it,” said McCoy, advocating for adoption of the stiffer penalties the new federal law allows and possible banishment from the reservation for non-tribal members who can’t be prosecuted in tribal court.

“Every time there’s a dismissal there’s a victim and that victim got no help,” she said.

“We still have a way to help ease the pain of the public.”

No state “safety net”

Gast wouldn’t entirely agree with that assessment. He’s firm on the fact that he prosecutes any and every tribal case that comes before him unless it’s out of his jurisdiction or it’s a bad case. And, he said, because of the nature of many of the crimes – domestic, child and sexual abuse, among other violent crimes – there are more bad cases than a normal federal prosecutor, who mostly deals with proactive cases like sting operations, would see.

The sad truth, said Gast, is that often victims won’t or are afraid to speak, recant their stories or don’t want to prosecute their attackers. And this is true across the nation, not just on the reservation.

He maintains that, while tribal cases may be declined more often than non-tribal federal cases, that declination rate isn’t really any higher than the rates for similar crimes in state courts. Unreported or unprosecuted violent crimes are part of a broader, national trend that often has nothing to do with the prosecutor and everything to do with the victim.

“The mission of the U.S. Attorney’s office is to prosecute crime,” said Gast. “And in Indian country, the scope of that mission is broader because we don’t have the safety net of the state court.”

Still, in Indian Country, many would like to see the cracks that criminals have long slipped through closed, in whatever way they can.

Though Gast doesn’t see a need for it, Smith said he’d like to look into the possibility of a SAUSA for Cherokee. “It’s certainly something I think a lot of the public here would be in favor of,” said Smith, an observation that was proven true by public sentiments expressed at last week’s meeting.

But overall, Smith echoed Gast, noting the good working relationship that he enjoys with Gast’s office, a benefit not enjoyed by many western tribes, who are laboring with overworked prosecutors in huge districts.

“We’re in better shape than a lot of places and a lot of reservations because we have that cooperation and we have had with the U.S. Attorney,” said Smith. “But could it be better? Absolutely.”

(Note: This is part one of a two-part series regarding the Cherokee Ghost Dance. Part two will present Michelene Ethe Pesantubbee’s conclusions and perspectives on the movement.)

The belief in the coming of a messiah, or deliverer, who shall restore his people to a condition of primitive simplicity and happiness, is probably as universal as the human race, and takes on special emphasis among peoples that have been long subjected to alien domination. In some cases the idea seems to have originated from a myth, but in general it play safely be assumed that it springs from a natural human longing.

— Handbook of American Indians (1906)

Few know there was a Ghost Dance movement among the Cherokees almost 80 years before the infamous epoch in the American west that culminated in the Indian massacre at Wounded Knee.

Flash back to January 1889 … a Paiute Indian named Wavoka (aka Jack Wilson), while suffering from high fever, had a vision during a total eclipse of the sun. This revelation became the genesis of the religious movement known as the Ghost Dance. At first the Indians believed the dance would simply unite them with friends and relatives in the ghost world. As the movement spread from tribe to tribe, however, the dancers began to imagine that the dance would make them invincible.

It consisted of slow shuffling movements following the course of the sun. It would be performed for four or five days and was accompanied by singing and chanting. It would, they imagined, cause the world to open up and swallow all other people, while the Indians and their friends would remain on this land, which would return to its beautiful and natural state. In addition, a ghost shirt made of buckskin cloth was said to render the wearer immune to bullets.

The unity and fervor that the Ghost Dance movement inspired, however, only fear and hysteria among white settlers and contributed to the events ending in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. When the smoke cleared and the gunfire ceased, more than 300 Sioux, some wearing ghost shirts, lay dead.

Flash back another 78 years. The story of the much earlier Cherokee version of the Ghost Dance is related in an essay titled “The Cherokee Ghost Dance Movement of 1811-1813” by William G. McLoughlin in the book The Cherokee Ghost Dance: Essays on the Southeastern Indians, 1789-1861 (Mercer University Press, 1984).  McLoughlin’s essay is presented as an overview of the extant 19th century accounts of the movement: as told by two Cherokees, Major Ridge and James Wafford; as published in the “Cherokee (Oklahoma) Advocate” in 1844; as recorded in the official mission diaries, 1811-1812, of the Moravians; and as observed by two U.S. Indian agents.

It was James Mooney, author of Myths of the Cherokees (1900), who first characterized the events as a Ghost Dance movement. Mooney, who lived among the Cherokees during the late 1880s, was also the author of The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee, the definitive study of the western events.

McLoughlin summarizes the eastern Ghost Dance events as follows, with this writer’s additions in brackets:

“In the troubled years 1811-1812 . . . a prophet named Charlie [i.e., Tsali, but not the individual involved in the Removal events of 1838] appeared among the Cherokee and described a dream or vision in which the Great Spirit spoke to him. [Some accounts speak of there being several prophets rather than just one.] The Great Spirit said he was angry with the Cherokees because they had departed from the customs and religious practices of their ancestors and were adopting the ways of the white man. To regain the favor of the Great Spirit and overcome their troubles, the Cherokees were told by their prophet to give up everything they had acquired from the whites (clothing, cattle, plows, spinning wheels, featherbeds, fiddles, cats, books) and return to the old ways: they must dance their old dances…. The prophet also said that those who did not heed this message would be punished and some would die. [`Now I have told you the will of the Great Spirit, and you must pass on it,’ he is reported to have said in one account, `But if you don’t believe my words, look up into the sky.’] Though Charlie met some opposition, he found many ready to accept his revelations, and he went on to say that it had been revealed to him that on a specific date, three months hence, a terrific wind and hailstorm would take place that would annihilate al the white men, all the cattle, and all the works of the white man. [Some accounts predicted a three-day eclipse rather than a hailstorm.] The hailstones would be ‘as large as hominy blocks’ and would crush all those who did not retreat to a special, charmed spot high in the Great Smoky Mountains where they would be safe. [The charmed spot was perhaps Clingmans Dome, the highest peak in the Smokies, which the Cherokees know as Yonah.] After the storm, these true believers would be able to return to their towns where they would find all of the deer, elk, buffalo, and the other game that had disappeared. Then they would live again as their ancestors did in the golden era before the white man came.”

There was no storm or eclipse. The Ghost Dance fervor withered and died without a return to a golden era. In the end, as was inevitable, superior numbers won out. Four thousand Cherokees died during the 1838 forced removal. But for a while the Cherokees danced and returned to the old ways in an attempt to stem the tide.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

This year in Cherokee, a major change will quietly work its way into law, causing little fanfare but marking a historic shift in policy towards the casino profits that, for 15 years, have been divided among all members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

After April, teenagers will be required to go through financial training, before getting their share of the money, a measure that’s the first of its kind among Native American nations.

Principal Chief Michell Hicks says he’s pretty pleased with that decision, and the advantage it gives the tribe.

“Cherokee is way ahead of the game,” Hicks says. “The Eastern Band stands out in front.”

Hicks interacts with other tribes at conferences and events around the country, but knows of none that require this level of financial planning for the recipients of casino profits.

He — and the Tribal Council — hope that it will bring increased responsibility and burgeoning bank accounts to the tribe’s newest adults, who have not always had a history of cultivating either.

Big money (and big responsibility)

It’s ten minutes past three on a cold, Friday afternoon, and five high school seniors are gathered around a conference table at Cherokee High School, laden with backpacks and clearly very ready to get away from school work and into the weekend.

In the vast majority of ways, they appear to be like every high school senior in every town across America. They have the kind of names that characterize their generation — Kayla, Katlin, Skylar — and the attendant trappings, too. Cell phones flip back and forth idly in more than a few hands, more than a few thumbs swiftly click across tiny keyboards.

But in one unique way, they’re less similar to their peers in other places than a first glance might betray: these particular kids will mark their 18th birthday with more than some kudos, a voting card and maybe the keys to a used clunker. Quite a bit more, actually.

Since the end of 1995, every enrolled tribal member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians has enjoyed a cut of the earnings from the boundary’s biggest breadwinner — Harrah’s Cherokee Hotel and Casino. Back then, that amounted to $595 a year. By 2010, it had jumped to $7,347 annually.

Today, the total payments for someone who have received the money from the outset works out to $92,000, no paltry sum. Children have their portion held in trust until their 18th birthday, and invested – “conservatively” says Chief Hicks – by Tribal Council and a special committee. And as the casino grows, so will revenue, and so will the trust fund for minors.

So when that monumental day comes to these six teens — and the other four-and-a-half-thousand odd tribal members who are still minors — a sizeable chunk of money will be laid in their newly adult hands.

“The first thing one goes out and gets is a brand new car,” says Jeremy Wilson. “This is the first question everyone who is about to get their big per-capita check is asked: ‘What kind of car you going to get?’”

Wilson would know, too. He’s 22 now and he got his money in 2007, so he had 12 years to consider what four-wheeled treasures such a cache of cash could purchase.

When he got the money, he did buy a new car — a Honda, relatively low in the flash department but still with a respectable level of youthful hipness — but with the remaining $35,000, he made a rather more adult decision. He invested it.

Is that normal?

He’s not sure. He can’t speak for everybody, says Wilson diplomatically. He was pushed towards the decision by his mother and elders in his life. But he will say that he was fairly unique among those he went to school with.

“When you’re 18 years old, and you are holding a check for $50-70,000 in your hands, what is the first thing you are going to think of?” he asks, almost rhetorically, answering himself: “it most likely won’t be mutual funds or Roth-IRAs.”

The Prodigal Spender

If you spend long enough talking to nearly anyone in Cherokee about kids and their per-capita checks, there is a certain sentence that will always enter into the conversation, in some incarnation or another. You will hear it from local leaders, young adults like Jeremy Wilson, school officials, financial counselors — the underlying theme in the current of conversation that will, without fail, bob to the top of the stream. It goes something like this: “you always hear about the kids who got the money and frittered it away on flash,” or some variant thereof.

According to Tribal Council Member David Wolfe, it’s why the idea of mandatory financial education was broached in the first place. And it was, in fact, an effort by young people themselves.

The teens at Junaluska Leadership approached the tribal council asking for help for themselves and their peers.

“They’ve heard the horror stories,” says Wolfe. “As the money in the trust fund has grown over time, now it’s getting to be a huge pot of money for them to be responsible for at 18.”

Keith Sneed, who works with Qualla Financial Freedom and has a vested interest in the issue, puts it in terms of cars. There is a multitude of bad stories, he says, about the giddy purchase of a set of wheels at sticker price and nothing to show for it years later but an old car.

“That’s all he’s going to have is an old Ford pickup,” says Sneed of the proverbial teen about whom there are so many cautionary tales.

It would be an understatement to say that Sneed rather dislikes that scenario. It is his dream to see every per-capita check recipient parlay that money into a million by age 40. And he genuinely doesn’t think that’s an unreasonable goal, which is why he started Manage Your ECBI Money.

In the simplest terms, it’s an online financial management course, and as of April, passing it with 80 percent is mandatory for anyone who wants their money at 18, as is high school graduation. For those that forego either, they’ll have to wait until age 21 to get their check.

Sneed is no fool when it comes to knowing what does — and does not — get through to teenagers.

According to Jason Ormsby, Cherokee High’s principal, he’s started heading up a yearly program called Mad Money, where he and volunteers from the community come together and simulate real life for an hour, throwing ninth graders into an imaginary financial world where they must manage their own money and deal with financial problems that are thrown their way.

“It’s real world scenarios in about a hour — your whole life in about an hour,” says Ormsby succinctly. And, he says, the simulation’s proven a success thus far.

Sneed is a far cry from teenagerhood himself, but he has spent the lion’s share of his life in the presence of the young, as a school teacher and now a financial outreach worker of sorts. And, making the adept observation that his interactions with youth these days trended towards the technological — e-mail, texting and the like — he saw an opportunity emerging to realize his dream that could actually work.

So he pitched it, and pitched it hard, enlisting the help of the First Nations Development Institute, who offer support and grant funding to initiatives by and for Native Americans, as well as the expertise of financial experts from every side of the economic world — bankers, investors, money managers and their ilk. And when he’d gotten a product he liked, he took it to the Tribal Council, who voted to make it mandatory.

It’s all in the approach

At this point in the tale, it should be noted that this isn’t the tribe’s inaugural foray into giving their young members some guidance in the ways of wise money management. It is the first time it’s been mandatory, but there have long been voluntary options for fiscal training.

Jeremy Wilson says he got some, in the form of the College Experience Program put on by the Tribal Education Department. A guy from First Citizen’s Bank came in, he says, and talked to Wilson and his youthful compatriots about financial options, wise investing and other similarly responsible and important economic topics.

“The only problem was, we were young,” says Wilson, by way of explanation for the less-than-lasting impact the surely admirable efforts had.

“This was nothing but sheer boredom to us, and even though a lot of people get onto us about how important it is for us to listen and pay attention, those people need to realize that you have to have the right strategy for the right audience,” says Wilson, offering a comparison to put a finer point on the problem. “If you are going to talk to a bunch of 15- to 18-year-olds about portfolios and showing stocks and numbers in a Powerpoint, you may as well talk to your grandfather about how to work an iPad.”

And it’s a salient point. If the youth of Cherokee have been playing the part of the prodigal son for the last 16 years, the well-intentioned programs and educational options of teachers and other adults were little more than the father’s pontificating to the son’s party-ready ears.

That, says Sneed, is why he’s looking to the kids themselves to craft a program that’s a little more, well, down with the kids.

“We’re asking the questions that they ask, not what their parents want to ask,” Sneed says. He brought young people into his office to meet with bank presidents, let them open up about what they didn’t understand in a more familiar environment on their terms, because, he says, “an 18-year-old walking into a bank president’s office is intimidating. It’s intimidating for grown people.” And the feedback from those interviews and many more like them built the groundwork for the Manage Your Money course, which is the first of its kind. They even have a series of YouTube videos featuring young tribal members and a hip-hop soundtrack that tout the merits of the program.

Sarah Dewees, a lead consultant with First Nations who helped Sneed develop the curriculum, says the efforts are groundbreaking.

“EBCI is actually on the cutting edge,” says Dewees. “They’re the first tribe that I know of to do an online financial course,” though she says many are re-examining their policies about minors and their monies, now that the amounts are beginning to grow.

She too, thinks the program is becoming necessary, not because Cherokee teens in particular have a hard time managing money, but because kids in general do.

“Any young person who is given a big responsibility or a large amount of money needs help to think about the best way to manage it, and when you’re young, you don’t really have a long-term view,” says Dewees. That’s the sentiment in Cherokee among those working to put that education in place, and those who wish they’d had it.

Getting back to 22-year-old Wilson, he has a lot of faith in his peers, but there’s only so much you can expect from an 18-year-old if you don’t give them any guidance.

“Our youth are smart, they really are,” says Wilson. “They just need to be given the right tools and strategies to help them become financially savvy.”

Chief Hicks says that this, more than anything, is the goal for young people, and the goal of this new law — equipping them to make better investments that will serve them longer than a new car.

“I’ve always been a believer that we need to continue to raise the bar on financial responsibility,” says Hicks. He says that financial programs like Sneed’s are, and have been, the key to changing the way young members think about where their money goes. That, says Hicks, is the long-term goal: change thinking to change actions.

“We want them to simply make the long-term investment, whether that’s a home or some other long-term investment, [to think] ‘you know this big nest egg, I’m going to do something with it,” says Hicks.

The conscientious kids?

Cut back to the high school, where our six seniors are sharing their plans for their per-capita money. Given Wilson’s assessment of his classmates attitudes towards investing the cash just four short years ago — “it’s not a popular topic”— it’s a little surprising to hear six teenagers talk about what they’re going to do with tens of thousands of dollars and not hear a single mention of the word Porsche.

In fact, the buzzwords that are bandied about are fiscal terms like “stocks” and “property” and “savings account.”

At the head of the table is Troy Arch. He’s antsy to leave for some other extracurricular activity, and when asked what his plans are, he quickly shoots back, “invest it in stocks.”

What kind of stocks?

“I don’t know, just some kind of stocks.”

Well, at least the intent is there, even if he hasn’t gotten the specifics nailed down yet.

Down the table, Kaitlin Bradly interjects confidently, rattling off what she thinks today’s Google stock price is.

She seems to be the ahead-of-the-curve type — the only one here who has already gone through the online course — and she’s in favor of settling her money in several different bank accounts, choosing the ones that have the best interest to drop the bulk into.

Skylar Bottchenbaugh, one of two 18-year-olds in the room, wants to invest his, too, though he’s got a more concrete goal in mind than simple savings.

He’s headed to Texas upon graduation, where he’ll study to be an auto mechanic.

“I want to invest into my own garage,” he says, and he’s gotten feedback from his family and college advisors that investing his big check first is a good way to start on that dream.

Of course, he adds, he’s going to buy himself a car, but not a new one, “because you’ll end up trading it in sooner or later. Probably a Kia or something.”

Again, not quite the expected car of choice for a teenager sitting on 70 grand.

In terms of pure intent, these students are a far cry from the anecdotal teen who has historically featured so heavily in the minds of those trying to help educate them. And that may be, in part, because that education is working, that programs like Mad Money are already getting through.

But another factor in play here may simply be time. Per-capita checks have been handed out now for just over 15 years, which is as far back as most of these students can remember.

All of them will say that the decisions of those that came before them had a hand in crafting their outlook today. They have seen firsthand how easy it is to flush away a few thousand. And so have their families.

“My parents have kind-of had a say in mine,” says Kayla Smith, also 18. “They see how everybody else spends theirs just randomly — two months and it’s gone.”

Yes, agree the others, we’ve seen that, too. And we do not think it is a clever idea.

To stick with the Biblical analogy, they’re playing the part of the other brother, watching unimpressed as the prodigal parties to the pig pen, determined not to share that path themselves.

Some of them, though, are similarly unimpressed that their responsibility — or intent towards such — hasn’t translated into a greater degree of respect from authorities. They don’t think money management should be mandatory for everyone, just those who drop out or flunk out. Yes, they’ve all chosen to study up on savings and investment, to seek sound financial counsel. But they resent the fact that they’re being forced into it.

“I think it’s unfair that they make us take this test,” says Bottchenbaugh. “We’ve waited all this time to get it. It’s our money, we should be able to spend it the way we want to, even if it’s blowing it in a few days.”

Some of that viewpoint, of course, is a by-product of youth, the compulsion to bristle against anything that’s compulsory.

And Sneed says he thinks the tribe would be remiss in not giving every kid the chance to acquire some solid financial skills, because, he says, in every group, regardless of outside influence, there will always be a few on each extreme of the spectrum — some who blow through the money recklessly, some who care for it wisely. The crowd he’s after is the middle, the average kid who might do great things with it, if only they knew how.

“There’s going to be a few that, no matter what you do, they’re going to throw their money away,” says Sneed. “The majority need direction and help, and that’s what we’re trying to provide: direction and help.”

Chief Hicks has a response for that mindset, as well: they will still get their money, just a few years later. And, he says, the idea in that was to, at least, provide every young person with three extra years of “natural experience” before coming into such wealth.

In other tribes around the country, the concept of staggered payments – breaking the lump sum into smaller chunks to be paid out at age 18, 21 and 24 – has been introduced for precisely that reason. And Hicks says it’s been bandied about for years among the Eastern Band. Even with the new course in place, it’s an idea that he’s certain isn’t dead yet and will swing back into the dialogue at some point.

“I think it’s going to be a topic that comes back alive as the money increases,” says Hicks. “Our students could save $10,000 if we did staggered payments.”

Hope for the financial future

Whether or not attitudes are already changing among Cherokee’s youth, Sneed says he hopes the direction and help will begin to show itself four, five or 20 years down the road, when today’s teens — and by extension the community around them — are more financially stable than their predecessors.

For the chief, it’s his hope as well, that the young people of the tribe would make sound investments now that would carry into the future. And while he thinks that gaining experience, education and training off the boundary is important — he, Sneed and Wolfe have all done so — he doesn’t see return and reinvestment of that same money into the reservation as an impossibility.

“I definitely think that’s an area that’s wide open,” says Hicks of entrepreneurship on the boundary, and he says that, even now, the tribe is making efforts to close the gap between current entrepreneurs, many of whom are older, and younger minds and money trying to learn the ropes.

In Wolfe’s eyes, he sees the long-term benefits of this program and others like it coming back to boost the whole community. He sees it as a “nation-building” effort.

“Before this, we didn’t have very many going to school and college. I think that’s a great sign of things to come out of these investments — to promote secondary education, that we can build on it,” says Wolfe. “That’s the type of scenario that we’re trying to create in a nation.”

And it’s hard to tell if our six teens represent a wholesale change in the attitudes of youth across the board. There is some element of self-selection — why come talk about your per-capita plans if you have none or don’t care to make any?

Principal Jason Ormsby, who has a more on-the-ground perspective, says he has seen a change in the attitudes of his students as a whole.

“I see more and more kids investing it, going on to college or buying a house, using it more wisely,” Ormsby says, and he hopes his students take the new education they’re about to get to heart.

“I’d like for them to take some of it and have a good time, you know buy themselves something, but I’d like to see them invest it and go on to school and see what happens then. Just don’t be in a hurry to spend it on stuff that’s not really that important.”

As someone who’s looking back from just a few years down that path, Jeremy Wilson’s parting wisdom to today’s 18-year-olds runs in the same vein.

“Don’t let per-capita consume you, don’t let it be your main concern, because there are too many areas in our communities that are in need of dire attention,” counsels Wilson. “If we can improve how we manage our money, we won’t need to look forward to the next per-capita check because then we will know we’re doing just fine, and we can then focus on more important things.”

The Haywood County Arts Council is proud to present Master Cherokee storyteller and historian Lloyd Arneach will perform at the Haywood County Arts Council’s Sunday Concert Series at 3 p.m. on Jan. 16 at the Haywood County Library in Waynesville.

An enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Arneach was born and reared on the Cherokee Reservation in Cherokee. He learned his first legends from two storytelling Uncles on the reservation.

His father was vice chief of the Eastern Band and his mother was the first woman ever elected to the Tribal Council. From 1970 to 1990, Lloyd traveled throughout the state of Georgia lecturing on Cherokee history and culture. This was done in his spare time while working for AT&T. In 1990, he added storytelling to his presentations on culture and history, and in 1993 began a full-time career as both storyteller and historian.

Arneach  presents his stories in a style that is humorous, informative and extremely moving. Lloyd’s stories range from the “old stories” of the Cherokee to contemporary stories he has collected, from creation stories to behind the scenes of “Dances with Wolves.” He tells stories of different Native Americans like Floyd Red Crow Westerman; Billy Mills, an Olympic champion; a young Cree Indian girl with no stories to tell; and a postmaster on the Papago Reservation.

He shares historical stories from a variety of Native American tribes. Some of these stories are difficult for Arneach to tell because of the strong feelings associated with his experiences as a Native American. Arneach will also have a number of Native American artifacts to show and demonstrate on Jan. 16.

Arneach has told stories at the Kennedy Center, National Folklife Festival (Washington, D.C.), the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, D.C.), the Winnepeg International Storytelling Festival (Canada), festivals, schools, universities, pow-wows, theaters, and other venues throughout the United States. He has also told stories on the Discovery Channel. His CD Can You Hear the Smoke? features stories and legends adapted by Arneach. In 1992, Children’s Press published his book, The Animal’s Ballgame, based on one of Lloyd’s favorite Cherokee animal stories. During the summer of 2006 and 2008, Arneach performed in the Cherokee outdoor drama “Unto These Hills - A Retelling.” Lloyd finished a book of Cherokee stories, Long-Ago Stories of the Eastern Cherokee, that was released in early 2008. Lloyd now resides in Cherokee.

The Sunday Concert Series is co-sponsored by the Friends of the Haywood County Library. The concert is free and the public is cordially invited to attend.

For more information about the Sunday Concert Series, as well as other programs or events, visit the Haywood County Arts Council website at www.haywoodarts.org or call 828.452.0593.

Who: Haywood County Arts Council’s Sunday Concert Series

What: Native American Storyteller Lloyd Arneach

When: Sunday, January 16, 2011 @ 3pm

Where: Haywood County Public Library, 678 S. Haywood Street, Waynesville

Editor’s note: George Ellison is snowed in without an Internet connection. This column first appeared in The Smoky Mountain News in January 2003.

Tuckaseigee, Oconaluftee, Heintooga, Wayah, Cullasaja, Hiwassee, Coweeta, Stecoah, Steestachee, Skeenah, Nantahala, Aquone, Katuwah, and on and on. Our place names here in the Smokies region are graced throughout with evidence of the Cherokee culture that prevailed for over 700 years. Wouldn’t it be nice if Clingmans Dome was correctly designated as Mount Yonah (high place of the bears)?

Still, we’re fortunate that all of the original place names weren’t obliterated. The same can be said for the Native American words that persist in what we now know as the American language. They add a poetic, almost musical touch to our everyday lives that would otherwise be sorely missed.

It’s interesting to keep track of the ways we find books that we enjoy via reviews, blurbs, word of mouth, etc. Before Christmas my friend Lee Knight, the folklorist and musician, came by for a visit and presented me with a little book titled Tracks That Speak: The Legacy of Native American Words in North American Culture (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002) by Charles L. Cutler.

“There,” he said, “You’ll be able to get several columns out of that one.”

Lee knows me pretty well, so I just nodded agreement. And he was, of course, quite right. It’s my kind of book and touched upon the sort of material that I like to share via this column. I’m going to provide some of Cutler’s research to whet your appetite. Many will then no doubt want to obtain their own copies.

The author’s wife, Katherine, indicates that her husband passed away before the book’s publication. An Internet search indicates that he wrote various titles related to American history and Native American language. Tracks That Talk bears evidence to the obvious fact that he knew what he was writing about and enjoyed doing so.

The book is divided into various sections having to do with topics like shelter, clothing, plants, animals, and artifacts. Other sections are dedicated to miscellaneous words and, lastly, words having to do with “Spirit.”

In his introduction Cutler tells us that “This bountiful harvest of words springs from the more than one thousand native languages currently and formerly spoken in the Western Hemisphere ... many as different from one another as English is from Japanese. At the dawn of European settlement, probably sixty separate [word] families graced North America alone. Sadly only about half of the continent’s original stock of indigenous languages that existed [then] are still alive today, many of them spoken by no more than a handful of elderly tribes people ... This book examines the most prominent of English words that were borrowed from North American Indian languages and explains their background and the significance of the things they refer to, both in Native American and in general American cultural practices, each with its own tradition, extending into and influencing the present. When we follow their trail, we are reminded of words a storyteller of the Slavery tribe in Canada once used to describe the wolverine: ‘His tracks go on and on.’”

Here are some very brief excerpts from various entries within Tracks That Speak. These are misleading in that entries for individual words often go on for a page or more, creating mini-essays.

MOCCASIN: “The first appearance of the word in English occurs in 1609 [as] ‘mekezin’ ... A Crow warrior flaunted wolf tails at the heels of his moccasins after he accomplished that most daring of plains Indian feats — scoring a ‘coup,’ or touching and enemy’s body without injuring him.”

SUCCOTASH: “Combining the two main vegetables [corn and beans] was natural, since they were grown together (often with squash). According to the Iroquois, the spirits of the two ‘sisters’ wanted to remain together even when cooked and served.”

POKEWEED: “Settlers learned [from Indians] that pokeweed yielded still another bonus [other than as a cooked green] — a long-lasting red or purple ink [made by] boiling together pokeberries, vinegar, and sugar ... The great Sequoya would use pokeberry juice and a quill pen to transcribe the Cherokee language for the first time ... In the twentieth century rural people sometimes used the concoction for special writing purposes.”  

PERSIMMON: “The Indians customarily dried persimmons on mats spread over frames. This led to the Algonquian term ‘pasemenan,’ meaning ‘fruit dried artificially.’”

TERRAPIN: Indians respected the turtle as deliberate, calm, steadfast, and long-lived. Many revered it. A widespread belief in the Northeast ... was that Earth is Turtle Island — an island resting on the back of a giant turtle.”

CHIPMONK: “The outsized power of the small chipmonk is described in Iroquois legend. In early days, an animal council debated whether Earth should always remain in day or in night. Bear argued for perpetual night, but Chipmonk kept chattering for alternate night and day until dawn broke and resolved the argument. Bear angrily raked Chipmonk’s back with his claws, leaving indelible stripes on the animal ... [The Cherokee disagreed] saying that the animals once held a council in which it was proposed that each wish a disease on men for hunting them. Chipmonk refused to join in because it wasn’t among the hunted. The other animals attacked the little SQUAW: “some Indians claimed that ‘squaw’ arose from a Mohawk word meaning vagina. The word was worse than demeaning, they said — it was obscene. But Ives Goddard, the authority on American languages at the Smithsonian Institution, explains that this interpretation is not correct: ‘It is certain as any historical fact can be that the word squaw that the English settlers in Massachusetts used for Indian woman in the early 1600s was adopted by them from the word ‘squa’ that their Massachusett-speaking neighbors used in their own language to mean ‘female, younger woman’ and not from Mohawk.’”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

In the storefront of Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, shelves and tables are laden with handmade baskets that shimmer dully with a multitude of brown hues. From deep walnut umber to the blanched eggshell of white oak and the glinting toasted saffron of maple strips bent into tiny, v-shaped curves, these baskets represent a brilliant array of every brown, tan and cream imaginable.

But they also represent generations of knowledge and craftsmanship passed down within the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians from parent to child, master craftsman to student.

And while the knowledge and practice lives on and thrives on the boundary, the plants and trees vital to maintaining the art are becoming increasingly scarce, dying out and being ravaged by the blight of insects and encroaching development.

Just across the Oconaluftee River, Butch and Louise Goings are sitting at a plastic table in the Cherokee Reservation Extension Office, talking about the craft. They have been seeking out basket-quality white oaks for years, and Butch Goings says he’s long noticed the viable trees thinning out.

“The white oak is really getting scarce,” he says.

He has now harvested unsuitable trees his basket maker mother-in-law passed up years ago because ideal trees started becoming difficult to find. Goings is sporting a red pullover and clutching a white coffee cup, smiling faintly as he jokes with his wife about his role in the basket-making process. He is a wood carver, chiefly, and it is his wife Louise who is the real basket maker. He’s never minded gathering and chopping the white oaks saplings that make his wife’s baskets, but that’s as far as he goes, he jokes. Louise Goings, is, he says, particular about her splits. She likes to do them herself.

She laughs but does not disagree. She likes things the way she likes them, and even on the splits she doesn’t cut herself she still likes to clean them up a little bit.

She learned the craft from her mother, who took Goings and her siblings out into the woods to look for straight, high-limbed white oaks. Back then, Goings says, you could gather virtually anywhere without fear of confrontation. Today, she and her husband don’t seek out their own white oaks, partially because of their scarcity and partly because of the changing social climate.

“Boundaries became more permanent, “ Goings says, explaining what has changed since her childhood. “Back when my mother grew up and when I grew up, you could go on your neighbor’s land and look.”

Not so today. Over the last few decades, land ownership has become more concrete and the hallmarks of modern progress have taken their toll on traditional basket-making resources. River cane, which is the oldest Cherokee basket-making material, fell to agricultural land clearing and dam building, while the white oak has been lost to land development as well as the restrictions that comes with an increasingly privatized view of land ownership.

Louise Goings now relies on a supplier, named only as James, who has his own mysterious ways of finding good material in the limited stands of white oak that are left. It also probably helps that he likely has special relationships with an array of private landowners and organizations like the U.S. Forest Service that would be hard for individual basket makers to cultivate.

James, Louise Going says, knows and supplies virtually all of the white oak basket makers on the Qualla Boundaries, though he is a relatively elusive presence. David Cozzo jokes that, in his six-and-a-half years working with Cherokee artisans, even he’s never met James.

Cozzo is the project director at the Revitalization of Traditional Cherokee Artisan Resources. It’s a long name that stands for a simple goal — saving the source materials that will keep the traditional arts alive.

RTCAR started in 2004 to combat the swift depletion of resources such as river cane and white oak by pulling in grant funding to help protect the plants that are left as well as trying to reintroduce them into the environment and encourage them to grow in new spaces.

They’ve found partners in existing environmental protection groups like the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition and the Land Trust for the Little Tennessee. These conservation organizations were already working to guard species like river cane that are natural water filters and, when planted at the river’s edge, create what ecologists call a riparian buffer that protects water from the assaults made on it by land runoff.

RTCAR gives them an extra incentive — and extra money — to double their efforts.

“We bring a cultural reason,” says Cozzo. “Folks here need it. It’s not just about a place, it’s about a history. A lot of people are getting excited about [river cane] now because it’s also got a strong ecological value.”

Callie Moore is one of those people. She heads up the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition, which, much as their name suggests, is active in restoring and maintaining healthy creeks and rivers in the watershed. It started working with RTCAR and, last year, launched a pilot project to grow  a new stand of river cane. It was a relatively ambitious project because, while they conserve a lot of existing cane breaks, cultivating a completely new brake is pretty uncharted territory.

That’s because, although it’s useful for the arts and the health of waterways, river cane isn’t exactly a commonly cultivated plant. You can’t eat it, you can’t build with it, it grows on arable land but it’s not exactly a crop – in essence, no one has ever documented how or why it grows or experimented with intentional cultivation.

So, Moore says, they did a lot of research and got a wildly varying degree of advice from a range of experts, some more complicated than others. One expert said he’d done it, but then proceeded to describe an arduous process including soaking the plants’ roots and hanging them in bags, among other things.

In the end, they settled on the advice of one of the landowners they already worked with in their conservation project. His land boasts one of the highest quality cane breaks in the area, and he told Moore and her staff that his octogenarian grandmother used to plant river cane all the time. It just needs to be done in the rain.

Seeing nothing to lose in the situation, they tried it and, to their delight, it seems to be working.

“We watered it,” says Moore, “because that’s the big thing that everybody’s been saying, ‘you’ve got to keep it wet.’”

Although it initially seemed like a failure — the plants looked as though they were dying — they’ve since begun sprouting like mad. Moore is delighted, but says there was no secret to the success.

“We didn’t do anything special. We had no ceremony. We had no secret ingredient,” Moore says, but they’re hoping they can repeat the feat.

Another large front in the battle to save river cane for artisans is just access. There are a lot of healthy cane breaks within easy reach of the Qualla Boundary, but not many landowners would be open to artisans arriving unannounced and harvesting the plants. That’s where groups like Moore’s can step in and serve as a go-between for the weavers with the landowners that they already know well and work with. Since they started approaching locals several years ago, they’ve been able to gain access to a good percentage of the river cane that they know of in the area.

Elsewhere in the region, RTCAR is working with the Land Trust for the Little Tennessee, doing much the same thing. LTLT actually owns a substantial amount of land that has river cane growing on it, and it has signed a memorandum of understanding with the artists for harvesting. They’ve also gotten three rounds of grant funding through RTCAR to keep their cane healthy and thriving, although it’s a fraction of what used to cover the area.

“These cane breaks that used to cover hundreds of acres are down to about 1 percent of their former extent,” said Dennis Desmond, the land stewardship director for LTLT, which is why the groups are so keen to keep what they’ve got.

Not all of RTCAR’s partner efforts have been such triumphs, though. Back at the Extension Office, Butch Goings crosses his arms and laughs wryly when Cozzo mentions their efforts at growing white oaks for basket making. To give some exposition to this inside joke, Cozzo disappears into his office and returns with a photo of a field of PVC pipes planted like trees among tangles of branches at their roots.

He explains that the idea was to cultivate the perfect basket tree – as straight as possible with branches starting as high on the trunk as possible, because branch structure reaches to the heart of the tree and beyond the first branch, the wood is unusable. The concept was a good one: grow the saplings in pipes to maintain the vertical integrity  and prevent branches from developing.

But the result was a bit of a disaster.

“They grew too fast,” explains Beth Ross Johnson, a community development specialist with RTCAR. “The wood was really stringy is what everybody said.”

So now they’re looking for alternative methods to save and grow the white oak population, though, Cozzo muses with a laugh, it wasn’t a total loss. They’ve got a great source of firewood for the winter.

After trying their own campaigns with mixed success, RTCAR this year decided to reach out to artisans from other traditions whose art and source material were also fading away. What were they doing to hold onto their traditions? And was it working?

So in mid-November, they invited speakers from around the country to a symposium designed to open dialogue about salvaging waning traditional arts and resources.

They spoke with sweetgrass basket makers from South Carolina who have seen some success in their public campaign to save the coastal grasses and heard from other Native American tribal artists about their plights.

Kelly Church, a fifth-generation black ash basket maker from Michigan’s Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa, told of her tribe’s fight against the Emerald Ash Borer, an insect that is threatening to eliminate the species entirely. She’s pursuing a seed-saving crusade and shooting videos of artisans at their trade, in case the tree — and with it the art — die out entirely and have to be regenerated in the future.

In Cherokee, artisans like Louise Goings aren’t as concerned about losing the knowledge, mostly because they’re actively guarding against it with in-school programs and in-home instruction by individual craftsmen.

Her own son, she says, is a talented basket maker. Although he isn’t pursuing it as a career or even a regular hobby, he kept up with it, even as a teenager, she jokes, because he realized quickly that baskets equal money.

“They do it whenever they think they need a dollar,” Goings jokes of her children, but says she hopes they keep the tradition alive. And she’s confident they will. She herself started weaving baskets at the tender age of nine, and although she grew bored of it as a teenager, she came back to the craft in her early 20s and has been weaving ever since.

And the folks at RTCAR realize that maintaining this knowledge is the other key component in keeping traditional Cherokee arts alive.

“You can save all the material you want,” says Cozzo, “but if people don’t know how to use it, you’re just doing plant preservation.”

Which is why the knowledge of artisans like Louise Goings is so vital in making sure that the efforts of RTCAR and others aren’t just preserving plants, they’re preserving arts, history and culture that can’t be replaced.

Three professors from Western Carolina University who co-edited a work of collected historical writings about the Cherokee will sign copies of the book from 2-5 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 18, in the Education and Research Center of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee.

William L. Anderson, history professor emeritus; Jane L. Brown, instructor of anthropology; and Anne F. Rogers, professor of anthropology, edited “The Payne-Butrick Papers.”

The annotated, two-volume set is available at the museum gift shop for $150.

Published recently by the University of Nebraska Press, the work is a collection of writings about the Cherokee from the 1830s, when John Howard Payne, an author, actor and playwright, and missionary Daniel S. Butrick, gathered information on Cherokee life and history, fearing that the cultural knowledge would be lost during the impending forced removal west. Butrick, who was a Baptist minister, lived with the Cherokees for a number of years and accompanied them when they were taken on the Trail of Tears.

Prior to the published version, the papers were available to researchers in a typescript that contained a number of errors, or by traveling to Chicago to read the original manuscript archived in the Newberry Library there, Rogers said. “The material is valuable because it provides information not only about the political and economic aspects of Cherokee life at that time, but gives insight into ceremonial practices, traditional beliefs and other components of their traditional culture,” she said.

The work is part of the Indians of the Southeast Series, which also includes “Demanding the Cherokee Nation,” a work by WCU associate professor of history Andrew Denson that examines 19th-century Cherokee political rhetoric to addresses the contradiction between the sovereignty of Indian nations and the political weakness of Indian communities.

For more information about the signing, contact Joyce Cooper, membership manager at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, at 828.497.3481, extension 305.

Western Carolina University, Wake Forest University and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians have reaffirmed their partnership to promote Native health initiatives.

Since 2006, the three institutions have collaborated to support the Culturally Based Native Health Program, or CBNHP. The CBNHP has two components: a graduate and undergraduate Native health certificate offered through WCU; and a Native youth-to-health careers initiative summer camp that takes place at Wake Forest.

“We are recommitting ourselves to initiatives we started four years ago,” said Lisa Lefler, a professor of medical anthropology and director of the WCU component of the program.

Principal Chief Michell Hicks of the EBCI, WCU Chancellor John Bardo and Provost Jill Tiefenthaler of Wake Forest formally updated the agreement at a meeting Nov. 16 on the WCU campus. Provisions of the new agreement include an extension of the terms through August 2015 and for Wake Forest to support qualified EBCI applicants. WCU agrees to “provide in-kind technological support and consultation to promote these collaborative efforts and support of American Indian students in education and career development.”

Bardo stressed the partnership’s strength and value. Tiefenthaler, citing the economy, said institutions are “in the age of partnerships.” Hicks said the tribe is interested in expanding the relationship to include other fields, such as architecture or accounting, for example.

The Native health certificate was developed with tribal community members and health professionals to provide a curriculum based on culture to inform providers about the unique nature of Indian health policy and the historical and cultural contexts of heath. This 12-hour, fully online program is one of the first in the nation to include a partnership with a Native community.

The second component of the CBNHP, the medical career counseling and technologies program, also called MedCat, responds to the universal need for more Native health care workers by recruiting high school students interested in medical careers and related technologies.

The CBNHP works in other ways to heighten awareness of Native health issues. A public lecture series featured its second speaker this fall semester, and a concert and free symposium in October raised raise awareness of the intersection of environmental, health and indigenous issues related to the destruction of mountain land.

Recognizing that Cherokee has roads, too, a transportation-planning group for the state’s six westernmost counties opted to give the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians a voice in decisions being made about highways and byways.

The decision to include the tribe wasn’t unanimous. Robbinsville Alderman Jacky Ayers voted “no,” without elaborating why.

The tribe has lands in Swain, Jackson, Graham and Cherokee counties. The group — the Transportation Advisory Committee, made up of elected officials from those counties, plus Macon and Clay — met this week.

Ryan Sherby, who heads the group on behalf of the Southwestern Development Commission, a behind-the-scenes but vitally important state planning organization, initiated the addition of Cherokee.

Joel Setzer, a division engineer overseeing the state’s 10 westernmost counties for the state Department of Transportation, endorsed the proposal. He pointed out the tribe would, subsequently, be treated like municipalities. It will have a voice and a vote, but specific road-project recommendations must be tendered to the particular counties where the roads are located before being included for DOT review.

Ayers, while inarticulate on why he wanted to exclude the tribe, found his voice in a sudden burst of praise following the vote, characterizing Conrad Burrell as the “best board member in the state.” Burrell represents this region on the state board of transportation.

Burrell responded, after other meeting-goers had burbled their agreement, that he wanted the elected officials to note during his decade-long tenure: “we didn’t keep all the money in a single county. We try to equal it out, not just give it to one or two counties.”