“The mid-20 th-century tourism model had to appeal to the mass market with an often-stereotyped image of indigenous people,” Andrew Denson, director of Cherokee studies for Western Carolina University, said in an interview for this article. Wooden Indians stood sentinel on the sidewalks outside the shops. Visitors to Cherokee in the 20 th century will likely remember the town as a smaller version of Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, tourist towns on the opposite side of the Smoky Mountains from North Carolina and Cherokee.Ĭherokee in the 1970s and 1980s was a town full of shops selling inexpensive T-shirts and jewelry like those at any tourist spot. Both measures were approved “overwhelmingly,” Smoky Mountain News reported, as was the replacement of the principal chief and four members of the tribal council. Voters also endorsed recreational marijuana use on the Qualla Boundary and gave the go-ahead for hotels and restaurants to serve mixed drinks. Now faced with the prospect of competition for tourism dollars from other proposed North Carolina casinos, the Native American people of Cherokee are making changes: In early September, voters came to the polling places and voted out current tribal leadership. This land, called the Qualla Boundary, is owned by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and kept in trust by the federal government.” Instead, in the 1800’s, the tribal members purchased 57,000 acres of property. The Eastern Band of Cherokee website explains that “Cherokee people do not live on a reservation, which is land given to a native American tribe by the federal government. The Qualla Boundary is not a reservation but a nation within a nation.

The town of about 2,200 people is the center of the Qualla Boundary, created in the 1870s when the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians purchased more than 75,000 acres of land, mostly in Swain and Jackson counties in Western North Carolina. Decades of change have transformed Cherokee, North Carolina, from a tourist spot marked by shops with live bears in parking lot cages to a town that is dominated by a large casino and resort.

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