Miss Cherokee 2013 Madison Crowe has had a full year for sure. The Mars Hill University senior, who has a double major in art therapy and art education, has juggled her duties as ambassador for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians with her responsibilities at school, and she somehow found the time to open a business, Two Crowe’s Ice Cream Parlor, with her brother, Tagan.

Robins & Morton, a construction and engineering company based out of Birmingham, Ala., is literally moving mountains to complete the new Cherokee Indian Hospital construction project. To date, the project has moved 547,573 total cubic yards of dirt, which would fill one football field 309 feet high and take an F-250 pickup truck 238,075 trips to move.

The Cherokee Recreation Department, in conjunction with the Cherokee Preservation Foundation and the Cherokee DARE Program, held a special ribbon cutting ceremony on Wednesday, Sept. 10 to officially open the new Birdtown Playground.

Sedelta Oosahwee, associate director of The White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education (WHI-AIANE), arrived in Cherokee on Tuesday, Sept. 9 to visit the EBCI Tribal education facilities. This would mark the first visit from the WHI-AIANE to any tribal land in the southeast region of the United States.