Read the excerpt from "Rebuilding the Cherokee Nation.”

One of the things that I saw, just as if you look at what happened after the Trail of Tears, you can look at some of the positive things that happened among our people. What I looked at in our communities is I saw among our people—they had unbelievable tenacity. Our tribe is one of the most acculturated tribes in the country, and yet there are thousands of people who still speak Cherokee. Ceremonies that we’ve had since the beginning of time are still going on in a tribe as acculturated as ours is. Our people are very tenacious, and it was that tenacity that I saw as a strength we could build on.