Cherokee, NC Summary

Cherokee, located along US-19 in western North Carolina, lies at the center of a 56,000-acre Cherokee reservation at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains. It is the home of about 11,000 Native Americans who are descendants of several hundred Cherokee who managed to evade a forced march to Oklahoma in the 1830s by hiding in the harsh terrain of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The reservation relies on income generated by tourism, so the town has a number of tourist attractions, gift shops, motels, fast-food restaurants, and a casino.

For something more genuine examine the Museum of the Cherokee Indian. It has archeological exhibits and a focus on Cherokee arts and history, including the Cherokee alphabet devised by Sequoyah. Across the road is Qualla Arts and Crafts, a tribal cooperative that sells traditional handicrafts.

Nearby is Oconaluftee Indian Village, a living history complex with a replica of an eighteenthcentury Cherokee village offering demonstrations of how arrowheads, beads, and dugout canoes are made, plus basketweaving, pottery-making, and blowpipe hunting. There are lectures on aspects of Cherokee life and, on summer evenings, performances of the play Unto These Hills, which tells the moving story of the Cherokee people from their first contact with Europeans in the 1520s to the forced migration in 1838. Fishing is also popular on the reservation—there are 400,000 trout in the streams.

Access is by car only.