Term limits could be on the chopping block in Cherokee’s updated election ordinance due to legal advice arguing that the current law, which restricts chiefs and vice chiefs to two consecutive four-year terms, conflicts with the tribe’s Charter and Governing Document.

Navigating the darkened exhibit halls at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian is slow work on Wednesday evening, Sept. 7. Cherokee people — many wearing traditional ribbon skirts and beadwork — throng the halls, cluster around exhibit cases, and point proudly at the displays of brightly colored artwork that pop alongside the neutral color palette of the archeological objects surrounding them.

On Oct. 1, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians will start a new fiscal year with $732.5 million in the budget after Tribal Council unanimously approved the document Thursday, Sept. 2. Of the total, $241.3 million will go to the operating fund, up from $196 million last year.

A  $39 million hotel project  at the Sequoyah National Golf Course in Cherokee will move forward after Tribal Council overrode a veto from Principal Chief Richard Sneed Thursday, Sept. 1 — by the narrowest of margins.

A unanimous vote from the Cherokee Tribal Council puts the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians on track to start prosecuting a range of offenses by non-Indians that it had previously been powerless to punish, beginning Oct. 1.

Less than three months after being named interim chief of police, Carla Neadeau has been sworn in as the first female chief of the Cherokee Indian Police Department.

Christine Cole Proctor was home alone with her big sister at the family cabin on Forney Creek when she heard an unfamiliar rumble climbing the isolated mountain road. It was a car — the first they’d ever seen scale the rugged route. 

New housing will soon be available for Cherokee tribal members in Whittier following a unanimous vote from Tribal Council Aug. 4. 

While the federal government considers tribal enrollment cards official forms of identification sufficient to board a domestic flight or cross a U.S. border, state law doesn’t recognize them as valid documentation to make tobacco or alcohol purchases. On Aug. 4, the Cherokee Tribal Council unanimously passed a resolution seeking to change that, and Principal Chief Richard Sneed has signed it. 

At an Aug. 11 event  that Principal Chief Richard Sneed said felt more like a pep rally than a ceremony, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians broke ground on a $650 million casino development in Danville, Virginia, in partnership with Caesars Entertainment.