Open Letter from a “Cherokee Princess”

When I was in elementary school, I met a lot of people who claimed to be Cherokee. Every white person I knew, it seemed, had a Cherokee great-grandmother or distant ancestor they heard of who was in a tribe. It was odd, then, that when I first started Indian Education classes it was with only a handful of other students. We had some white kids, others black, but very few people who “looked Indian.” Half of the “full-blooded” natives that ran the program had straight hair and blue eyes- a testament to the interracial history of that particular nation. And though we had a Mohawk student and a Creek girl, our class seemed to focus heavily on Cherokee Immersion, since they had the most infrastructure in that region to do… Read more »