Special to the One Feather
Students in David Pringle’s 8th grade social study class at Cherokee Middle School are letting their voices be heard in regards to Cherokee getting back an important piece of land.
Students recently completed a diorama project that shows the importance of the land in Monroe County, Tenn. as a part of Sequoyah’s birthplace where his museum is located near Tellico Lake in Tennessee. Emma Milholen said the purpose of the dioramas was to allow people to see what Sequoyah’s birthplace might have looked like in the region at the time of his birth. They used paper and cardboard to put the projects together. Piper Owle said that a diorama shows what something might have looked like in history.
Emma Milholen and Keilani Arch, two students in David Pringle’s 8th grade social studies class at Cherokee Middle School, are shown with their project. (Photo courtesy of Cherokee Middle School)
Gabriel Read said the purpose of the project was to bring people’s attention to H.R. 226 (Easter Band of Cheroke Historic Lands Reacquisition Act) and help get the bill passed. The billl was introduced into the House of Representatives on Jan. 1, 2025, and the bill was then passed out of the House on Feb. 4, 2025 and has been in the Senate since.
Jacob Jackson said that students were given images to model their dioramas after as they created them. He made his after images of the Tucksasegee village where it is believed that Sequoyah was born. Read said the project was more difficult than it looked and Jackson said it was important to accurately recreate what the villages would have looked like at that time to help get the point across about the land belonging to the Cherokee tribe.
Jackson stressed that even though the Sequoyah’s Museum is on the land and it is also the birthplace of the famous founder of the syllabary for the Cherokee, the tribe still does not own the land. Odie Owle and Keylani Arch stated that the land is needed because of Sequoyah’s historical significance to the tribe in his founding of the Cherokee Language. Owle also stated that the Cherokee used to own the land but it was taken from them and now they need it back.
Keylan Jumper and Owle stated that students wrote to Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) and former North Carolina Governor and current Senate candidate Roy Cooper to persuade them about the importance of the Cherokee getting their land back.
The following is a letter one of the students wrote
Dear Honorable Roy Cooper,
Good evening, I am writing about my concern about passing H.R. 226. For tribes, lands are very sacred for the tribes. For many years our request has been to get the land back in Tennessee. Our request has been ignored many times. We have hope that you will help us to get back the land that we lost. The law is passed every year by the House, but year after year the Senators ignore it.
The lands of H.R. 226 are very important to the Cherokee. At one time the land of Echota was the capital for Cherokee. Not having this land hurts us because of how sacred the land is. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians own the Sequoyah birth place but we cannot expand the place because the land is not ours at one time that was our land. It’s sad we don’t have this land because this is where the history of Sequoyah is. It is where he was born, where we grew up, and just his life in general.
We hope that you will help us reclaim this land of HR226. As kids, we are trying to keep our traditions alive and our language alive for generations to come. If we can expand and reclaim our land, we can have stronger connections to the land and have more for our grandkids and so on to see.
Sincerely,
two EBCI citizens
