This one is for my old friends, living and dead, in Cherokee. Here’s to you, Trigger Young, Woody Sneed, Bill Young, Darlene Whitetree, Homer Burgess, Wanda Lee Burgess, Darlene Bradley, Ralph Henry, Jean Holt, Ethelene Conseen, Johnson Catoaster, Johnson Lee Owle, Eddie Swimmer Wilber Paul and a hundred others. 

In the early 1900s, in Tsarist Russia, young intellectuals with means would study philosophy and history. Some would feel a longing for their country to become more modern, to become a nation under the rule of law, as other nations in the world had done. 

The Pigeon Community Multicultural Development Center in Waynesville has recently announced its 2025 “Pigeon Community Conversations with Storytellers Series.” 

North Carolina lawmakers are stepping into the ring with a $500,000 proposal to grapple with the idea of establishing a professional wrestling museum, hoping to pin down the state’s rich sports entertainment history before the final bell rings on funding. 

Having grown up in proximity to a Cherokee community (Little Snowbird in Graham County), I’m familiar with and sensitive to the history and the psychology of Native peoples who have been marginalized and worse from their cultural roots and their homelands.

To the Editor:

A significant event in history is being replayed in our time. The Magna Carta was a landmark English document establishing that the power of the English monarchy was not absolute.

Few volunteer service organizations can claim a century of community engagement alongside world-changing influence, but as Waynesville’s Rotary club rolls into its second century, its leaders are looking to bolster the personal, professional and philosophical ties that have brought the organization to where it is today. 

The adage “There are no atheists in foxholes” catches our attention, but is too broad and imprecise for universal application.

Smokies Life received national recognition at the 2025 Public Lands Alliance Partnership Awards for “Letters from the Smokies,” which was named Publication of the Year.

By 1818, despite a growing number of settlers in the region west of the Balsams and along the Little Tennessee River, much of the land continued to be identified as “Cherokee land.”