CHAIRPERSON MESSAGE: May 2025
ᎣᏏᏲ ᏂᎦᏛ osiyo nigad! (hello, everyone!)
We had a wonderful Cherokee Nation Community & Cultural Outreach Annual Meeting and Chief's Picnic on Sunday, April 27 in Fairfield. We owe a debt of gratitude to our outstanding and selfless volunteers who served their community all day long! It was a beautiful day spent in community together.
Make sure to mark your calendars for June 21 John Rollin Ridge cemetery dedication and lunch as well as our CNCV Annual Campout held August 1-3. You can make your reservations now for the campout!
After such a wonderful Annual Meeting, I’ve been reflecting on the power of community and feeling of belonging that comes with it. We are incredibly grateful to get to meet and spend time with so many amazing Cherokees. I am especially heartened by those who step up into service as community volunteers. We need your energy, effort, and enthusiasm to keep our community strong!
On the theme of community:
The traditional community value of ᎦᏚᎩ gadugi inspired a recent article by Citizen and board member, Paul David Terry.
We celebrate important community helpers with National Nurses Week and Teacher Appreciation Week in May - ᏩᏙ wado to community helpers! In honor of this, I share one of my favorite traditional stories, The Origin of Disease and Medicine, which teaches us an important lesson about health, balance, and being in community.
Our garden is growing seeds for the community - We are expanding our gardening efforts with our Harvesting our Heritage program and offer helpful information and updates from the garden. I have been growing seeds to share with you all for a few years and gave away hundreds more seed packets at our Annual Meeting on April 27th! ᏩᏙ wado to all of our gardeners! Please reach out with any questions while you’re growing. As it becomes increasingly difficulty to obtain seeds from the Seed Bank, our garden program, with careful attention paid to preserving genetic integrity, will get more seeds in your hands next year.
We share a recipe for frybread - a great meal to eat in community! We’re planning a bison Indian taco dinner with frybread during our August campout. Come visit and eat with us!
Participate as an active citizen in your larger community by voting. It is Election season for Cherokee Nation. We encourage all citizens to participate in the upcoming June 2025 General Election. If you are registered to vote and requested an absentee ballot, you should have received it by now. If you have not received your ballot by May 12th, contact the Election Commission at 1-800-353-2895. Your completed ballot must be returned by June 7th for your vote to be counted. We are voting for one at-large Councilor seat. Here is more info.
We share a big ᏩᏙ wado to CNCV member Daphne Chakurian for donating a Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller “Inspiring Women” doll to the CNCV. She did us a great honor and we’re so very grateful!! ᎣᏣᎵᎮᎵᎦ otsaliheliga we are grateful! We’ve fashioned Chief with a fingerweave belt. Come check her out at our events!
Do you have a question about the language? Joe Fourkiller with Cherokee Nation Gadugi Corps is available to help our community with words, phrases, and spelling! Reach out to Joe with language questions. And feel free to share what you learn with the rest of us! Contact: Joe Fourkiller at Josephc-fourkiller@cherokee.org; 918-871-9248-cell; 918-453-5000 Ext
Finally, the CNCV has a resource webpage for you with many informative links for citizenship, language, culture, history, health, education, veterans, and more. Let us know if you'd like to see something specifically there.
We’re looking forward to visiting together at these events throughout the year and enjoying community, culture, history, and language with you!
ᏙᏓᏓᎪᎲᎢ dodadagohvi (‘til we meet again),
-- Sabrina McKinney
