TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma District Court is preparing to consider a motion seeking dismissal of a records-related lawsuit filed against Tribal Secretary Caleb Grimmett-Smith.

Candy Mink Springs Media LLC filed the Petition for Writ of Mandamus on March 4, seeking an order requiring Grimmett-Smith, in his official capacity as Tribal Secretary, to identify and produce records referenced in Resolution 25-UKB-42EV or certify under oath that responsive records do not exist after a diligent search.

The petition centers on records associated with references contained in Resolution 25-UKB-42EV, including language concerning electronic voting procedures and the establishment of a Department of Communications.

According to court filings, Candy Mink Springs Media LLC submitted a written records request to Grimmett-Smith on Feb. 4 and followed with a second letter on Feb. 20 after receiving no records responsive to the request.

The petition argues that the Tribal Secretary has a ministerial duty to maintain official records of Council proceedings and seeks a writ compelling performance of that duty.

Assistant Attorney General Victoria Holland filed a Motion to Dismiss and Brief in Support on June 17.

The motion argues the case should be dismissed on sovereign immunity grounds, contending the Tribe has not waived immunity for the claims asserted in the petition.

The motion also argues the petition fails to state a claim upon which relief can be granted and contends dismissal is supported by public policy considerations.

The petition does not seek monetary damages. The requested relief asks the court to order identification and production of responsive records or require certification that the records cannot be identified, located or do not exist.

Court Administrator Kristie Bradley said June 23 that no hearing order has been filed.

“None has been filed; this case has been sent to the Judge for a hearing to be scheduled. Once that order for hearing is filed, I will send that out,” Bradley wrote in an email.

The court has not ruled on the Motion to Dismiss.

The case remains pending before the United Keetoowah Band District Court.

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — Applications for the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma (UKB) Back-to-School Assistance Program are now available through the UKB Education Department.

The program provides assistance to UKB member families with children enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade for the 2026-27 school year. Assistance will be distributed by check payable to parents.

Parents must submit a separate application for each eligible student. Application packets must include a completed application form, a W-9, a copy of the student’s UKB membership card and enrollment verification from the student’s school.

Enrollment verification must be on school letterhead and clearly show the student’s name and enrollment status for the 2026-27 school year. Report cards or verification documents from the previous school year will not be accepted.

Applications became available June 23 at the UKB Education Center. Completed application packets must be received by the UKB Education Department by close of business July 21. Incomplete or partial application packets will not be accepted.

According to UKB Education Director Dr. Leslie Hannah, approximately 250 families are expected to benefit from the program this year.

Checks are expected to be mailed or available for pickup during the last week of July.

To assist families in Adair County, the UKB Education Department will make a visit to the UKB Stilwell suboffice from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday and will have back-to-school assistance applications available.

For more information, contact the UKB Education Department at (918) 871-2828.

[Updated June 24, 2026]

My son ᏍᏏᏉᏯ was nearly 4 years old before he could tell us what he wanted.

For years, the wrong sound could end an afternoon. So could a texture, a taste, a room that was too much at once. He couldn’t say what was wrong. We spent a long time trying to find out.

We had help most families don’t.

We live on the Oklahoma Cherokee Reservation, in the rural eastern corner of the state. I research and advocate for a living. We had a car that ran and insurance that paid. When the clinics close to home were too overloaded to get us in, we could drive for one farther out.

After evaluations, including an assessment at Griffin Promise Autism Clinic in Broken Arrow, a suburb outside Tulsa, ᏍᏏᏉᏯ was not diagnosed with autism. He needed services anyway. Speech delay. Developmental delay. Sensory need. A child doesn’t need a label to deserve a real evaluation and the support that comes after it.

We found that support at Siloam Springs Pediatric Therapy, just across the state line in Arkansas. They were a godsend. They still work with my son today. He’s 7.

The therapies worked. ᏍᏏᏉᏯ found his voice.

The services the law already promised him were another fight. His individualized education program was set in a spring meeting. The services in it didn’t start until about 10 weeks into the next school year, and they ran only until state testing in March. Late. Partial. Gone by spring.

I asked the school why. The answers never came. I sat on that school’s board of education, and no one would answer me.

We pulled him out and enrolled him somewhere that worked with its students.

We had a researcher, a working car, insurance and the time to fight, and we still had to fight.

What happens to the family that has none of that?

Across Indian Country, plenty don’t. Some live hours from a specialist. Some lean on one overburdened public system because it’s the only one within reach. Some are working two jobs and caregiving in between. Some have never been told what their child is owed. Others know exactly what their child is owed and have no way to make anyone deliver it.

A father and disability advocate named Rob Gorski is asking that same question out loud. He writes as The Autism Dad, and last week he saw something that turned the question urgent.

On June 18, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion, written by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lanora Pettit. It argues that federal disability law never required states to serve disabled people in their own communities instead of institutions. It reinterprets Olmstead v. L.C., the 1999 Supreme Court decision behind what advocates call the integration mandate, the rule that says you serve a person in the most connected setting that fits them. The opinion admits its own reading is “out of step with the common understanding” of that decision in the federal courts. A government lawyer put that in writing.

Nothing has been repealed. No one is being put in an institution because of an opinion. Say that plainly, because it’s true.

Here’s what’s also true. Home and community services run on Medicaid. Oklahoma’s waitlists for them already run for years. Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act added Medicaid work requirements and cut the federal funding states rely on, and home and community services are optional state spending, the kind that gets cut first. Take away the federal rule that forces states to serve people in the community, and a years-long waitlist stops being a failure a state has to fix. It becomes a shortfall a state is allowed to keep.

For Native families, this isn’t a new fear. It’s an old one with a federal paper trail. The Interior Department’s boarding school investigation documented what happened when the government decided where Native children belonged. Children were separated from family, community and language in the name of their own good. That’s not a comparison I’m inventing. It’s a history the federal government documented itself.

Self-determination doesn’t stop at the tribal border. It applies to disabled people and their families too.

So the question isn’t whether disabled people get institutionalized tomorrow. They don’t, not from this. The question is who decides where a person belongs when the money runs short. The family, or the agency with the budget.

We could afford our answer. Most families can’t. The ones with no car, no second option, no time to burn are exactly the ones a weaker rule reaches first. That’s Gorski’s whole point, and he didn’t stop at making it. He wrote the scripts.

Call your senators, your representative, your governor. The ask is short. Oppose any move to rescind the integration mandate. Protect and fund the home and community services that keep disabled people out of institutions in the first place. Members of Congress can’t write or unwrite a legal opinion, but they can pressure the agencies, fund the services, and make weakening disability protections cost something at the ballot box.

The integration mandate is still on the books. No rescission has been filed. While that’s still the sentence, the Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121.

Troy Littledeer is a Keetoowah Cherokee writer and photographer from Candy Mink Springs on the Oklahoma Cherokee Reservation. He writes about tribal sovereignty, education, accountability and the people living with the consequences of government decisions. His reporting and commentary have appeared across Indian Country for more than two decades. In 2025, he received the Indigenous Journalists Association’s Tim Giago Free Press Award.

It is fourteen hours of driving to see his own kids.

Troy W. Green and his wife make the trip to Texas, where both of their adult children live in group homes. Seven hours to pick them up. Seven hours to take them back. The children have Williams syndrome, a genetic condition that brings lifelong medical needs and developmental disability, the kind that takes daily support and trained caregivers to manage. Oklahoma didn’t have what they needed. So the Greens cross a state line to be a family, and they have built their weeks around the highway.

“No parent should have to send their child to another state simply because their own state lacks the resources to care for them,” Green said.

Anybody in Adair County can do that arithmetic without a calculator. The gas. The lost day of pay. The specialist who is always three counties over. When Green talks about rural families getting left behind, he is not reading from a binder. He is telling you about his Saturday.

Raised in Oklahoma’s foster system. Out of high school and sleeping under bridges and train trestles at 17. And then, decades later, in his fifties, he walked into a college classroom for the first time. He started at Murray State College in January 2020 and came out in spring 2023 with an associate degree, magna cum laude. He and his wife sold what they had in Ardmore, the pawn shop and the family martial arts school, and moved to Norman so he could keep going. Oklahoma City University, May 2025, a history degree, summa cum laude, with a senior capstone on the Tulsa Race Massacre. He is at the University of Oklahoma now, working toward a master’s in criminal justice, due to finish in August 2027.

“It’s never too late to reinvent yourself,” he said. Coming from most candidates that is a bumper sticker. Coming from a man who learned to read a syllabus at 50, it is a fact about his life.

Before the classrooms came roughly thirty years in public safety, across law enforcement, corrections, juvenile detention, investigations and private security. Green says he carried CLEET certification through his law enforcement career, the license Oklahoma requires to work as a peace officer, and still holds it. Somewhere in there he founded Safe Haven Oklahoma, a nonprofit aimed at human trafficking and child exploitation, and he paid the freight himself. The lawyer, the filings, all of it out of his own pocket. “It was created because I saw a need, not because someone handed me a check,” he said.

Then he did something candidates almost never do. He told the truth about how small it still is. Asked what Safe Haven has accomplished, Green said growth has been slower than he wanted, squeezed between his investigation agency, grad school and a statewide campaign. “I won’t exaggerate our accomplishments,” he said. In a business built on exaggeration, a man who refuses to pad his own résumé tells you something.

Here is the part that matters most on this side of the state. We asked Green where he stands on McGirt, the 2020 Supreme Court ruling that affirmed much of eastern Oklahoma is still tribal reservation land, the case that decides who holds legal authority over what happens on it.

“The Supreme Court did not create new treaties in McGirt; it recognized treaties and obligations that already existed,” Green said. “Tribal nations are sovereign governments, not special interest groups. They deserve a seat at the table when decisions affecting their people, lands, and treaty rights are being made.”

He said he would stand against any move in Congress to narrow McGirt or chip at treaty rights without real consultation with the tribes it touches. “Honor the Constitution, honor the treaties, and work together to solve the practical challenges that follow.” Among the answers the five Democratic candidates have put on the public record, none states the position in writing as plainly. He said it without a tribal voting bloc waiting to reward him for it.

He does not pretend to be a party man. “I don’t believe my job is to vote with my party 100% of the time,” he said. “If my own party is wrong, I’ll say so.” Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Tribal leaders, he said he’ll work with any of them. “I wasn’t sent to Washington to be a party mascot.”

On the Epstein files, the federal records tied to the late financier and his trafficking of minors, he would not guess at evidence he hasn’t seen. Then he set his jaw. “I don’t care how wealthy they are. I don’t care what party they belong to. I don’t care how powerful their friends are. If they harmed children or helped protect the people who did, they should be exposed and prosecuted.”

Ask him for one bill he would carry with Republican Sen. James Lankford in year one and he goes straight to foster care, back to where his own story started. “Children don’t care whether help comes from a Democrat or a Republican. They just need someone willing to help.”

These answers came in writing, in response to questions submitted by email, on deadline. The dates and degrees in them can be checked against the record. Where Green declined to expand, the gaps are his own.

The primary is June 16. If nobody clears half the vote, the top two go to a runoff on Aug. 25.

About the author: Troy Littledeer is a journalist, photographer and researcher from Candy Mink Springs in Adair County, Oklahoma. He is a member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians and has spent more than two decades covering tribal governments, education, rural communities and Indigenous affairs across Oklahoma and Indian Country. His reporting has appeared through outlets including Cherokee Phoenix, Osage News, NDNSports.com and Giduwa Cherokee News. In 2025, he received the Tim Giago Free Press Award for defending tribal press independence and government accountability.

ROGERS, Ark. — The heat hadn’t broken when Marcus Mumford walked out at 9:15 and hit the stage electric — not plugged-in electric, charged electric, the kind of energy that decides a show’s temperature in the first ten seconds.

By the back half of the set he’d left the stage entirely, cut through the floor, and climbed the lawn to the cheap seats without dropping a note — the kind of move a band makes when it has decided the people farthest from the stage paid the same emotional price as the people up front and ought to get the same show.

That’s what this was. Mumford came up busking the London underground and folk clubs, and the band built its first records on a few voices and a kick drum. The core that took the stage with him in Rogers is the one that made the name: Marcus Mumford on lead vocals, guitar and drums; Ben Lovett on keys and vocals; Ted Dwane on upright bass and vocals. They walked into an 11,000-seat shed off Interstate 540 with a full production behind them and refused to let the production become the point. The Prizefighter Tour is the biggest thing Mumford and Sons have ever carried on the road. Rogers got the version that still acts like it’s playing a room you could shout across.

They opened with “Run Together,” then went straight into “Babel” and “Little Lion Man” — the old kick-drum stomp that made their name, played without apology to a crowd that knew every word. “White Blank Page” came fourth. Mumford mentioned afterward, almost as an aside, that he’d heard Taylor Swift once covered it, then held the pause just long enough to watch the room decide how to feel about that. The Knicks came up once. He promised, tongue in cheek, to spare everyone the score updates somebody apparently insisted on the night before, and offered to talk politics instead. He did neither. The set was the better for it.

The catalog ran deep and unsentimental. Eight from Prizefighter. Six from Sigh No More. Four from Babel. A horn section thickened the songs that wanted weight and stayed out of the ones that didn’t. Then the band walked to a second stage and stripped the whole apparatus down to nothing — one microphone, three voices, one guitar nobody bothered to plug in — and asked the crowd to go quiet for “The Boxer,” the Simon and Garfunkel cover. The crowd went quiet. And in the silence the band had just built, the traffic on I-540 came drifting in from the dark, the sound of the interstate that runs past the venue, the sound of everywhere else trying to get somewhere. Nobody planned that. It was the best thing that happened all night.

That’s the thing folk music never stopped knowing how to do. Put a few voices together, ask a room full of strangers to hold still, and let the noise of the world press in at the edges. Mumford and Sons spent the better part of two and a half hours proving they can fill a shed the size of a parking lot. Then they spent three minutes proving they didn’t need to.

The encore closed on “Conversation With My Son (Gangsters and Angels).”

Mumford and Sons take the Prizefighter Tour to Wrigley Field next. Dierks Bentley plays the Walmart AMP on Friday.

UPDATED — Bill Anoatubby will resign as Governor of the Chickasaw Nation at noon June 26, 2026, ending a tenure that began in 1987, according to a statement Anoatubby posted June 8.

Anoatubby said he reached the decision after prayer and discussion with his family and framed it as a retirement, writing that it was time to entrust leadership to a new generation. He stated he will invoke Article XV, Section I of the Chickasaw Nation Constitution, under which Lt. Governor Chris Anoatubby becomes Governor for the remainder of the unexpired term. Chris Anoatubby, the governor’s oldest son, has served the Nation more than two decades and is in his second term as Lt. Governor. The term Anoatubby won in 2023 runs into 2027.

Anoatubby has led the Chickasaw Nation for the entirety of his governorship since 1987, the longest of any sitting Chickasaw governor, and is the 22nd person to hold the office. The government he built employs more than 14,000 people and operates the hospital, clinics and pharmacies that serve Chickasaw citizens across 13 counties in south-central Oklahoma. The transition sets who runs that system, and the budgets behind it, for the rest of the term.

The announcement drew statements from across Oklahoma government June 8. Attorney General Gentner Drummond, House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, Senate President Pro Tempore Lonnie Paxton, R-Tuttle, and House Democratic Leader Cyndi Munson, D-Oklahoma City, each praised Anoatubby’s tenure and congratulated Chris Anoatubby. Anoatubby closed his statement with “Chikasha poya,” we are Chickasaw.

As of this writing, the Chickasaw Nation had not posted a formal government announcement on its public channels separate from the governor’s own statement. This story will be updated.

ROGERS, Ark. — Mumford & Sons play the Walmart AMP on Tuesday, June 9, 2026, with a listed show time of 7:30 p.m., according to the venue’s event page and the band’s official tour schedule. Special guest Dylan Gossett opens.

The Rogers show sits between two larger stops. According to the band’s tour schedule, the group plays Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas, on June 8, then Wrigley Field in Chicago on June 11, before moving north into Illinois and on to Toronto.

The tour supports Prizefighter, the band’s sixth studio album, released February 20, 2026, on Gentlemen of the Road. According to the album’s release announcement, the record was co-produced with Aaron Dessner of The National at Long Pond Studio in New York and was written and recorded in ten days.

No setlist for the Rogers show is published. According to the Prizefighter tracklist, the album includes “Here,” “The Banjo Song,” the title track “Prizefighter,” and “Begin Again.” Coverage of earlier dates on the run reports the band has continued to play catalog staples including “I Will Wait,” “The Cave,” “Little Lion Man,” and “Rubber Band Man.”

The Walmart AMP sits in Rogers, in Northwest Arkansas. General tickets went on sale February 27, 2026, through Ticketmaster, where pricing and remaining inventory for the June 9 date are listed.

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — The U.S. Department of the Interior has permanently withdrawn a 2025 Solicitor’s opinion that recognized reservation and gaming rights for the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma (UKB), a reversal Chief Jeff Wacoche told the Tribal Council at its regular monthly meeting June 6 does not erase the band’s treaty-based rights.

According to a withdrawal memorandum designated M-37089 and signed May 22, 2026, by Solicitor William L. Doffermyre, the department withdrew Solicitor’s Opinion M-37084 in its entirety. The withdrawal runs one page. The opinion it reversed runs 56 pages.

M-37084, issued Jan. 17, 2025, by former Solicitor Robert Anderson, had concluded that the Cherokee Nation reservation is also the band’s reservation for federal land-into-trust purposes, that UKB holds exclusive jurisdiction over lands taken into trust for it on that reservation, and that those lands are eligible for gaming under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

In his address to the council, Wacoche called the withdrawal a political act rather than legal reasoning. He said its rationale amounts to a single sentence: that the conclusions in M-37084 do not represent the best interpretation of applicable laws, treaties and federal and Supreme Court case law. Wacoche put the citation count in the withdrawn opinion at more than 400.

Wacoche told the council the withdrawal was the Solicitor’s last public action before he left Interior.

The opinion did not create the band’s rights and its withdrawal does not erase them, Wacoche said. He accused the Cherokee Nation of using its size and influence to pressure tribal governments, non-tribal governments and the federal government, and said the reversal harms UKB Members who live within the shared reservation.

Wacoche said the band has a gaming trust-land application pending before the Department of the Interior and that the record supporting M-37084 was to be the basis for that decision, subject to final review by the federal courts. Trust land approved for gaming would fund tribal jobs and the services the band provides its Members.

The withdrawal memorandum directs all relevant Interior bureaus and offices to treat the reversal of M-37084 as binding and authoritative.

Council actions

Coming out of executive session, the council approved four measures, each on a motion that carried. By the executive-session roll, absent were Goingsnake representative Willie Christie, Tahlequah representative Sammy Allen, Second Chief Amos Ketcher and Treasurer Sonja Gourd. The Canadian seat is vacant.

The council directed the UKB Corporate Board to advance funding for the 2026 Summer Youth Program and to transfer program funds to the UKB Museum upon receipt. It approved a Corporate Board resolution to resubmit a grant application for the Garrett Lee Smith Tribal Suicide Prevention Program. It authorized a UKB subsidiary to apply for, and if awarded accept, the Indian Health Service Small Ambulatory Program Grant. And it approved submitting an application for the Staff Sergeant Parker Gordon Fox Suicide Prevention Grant Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

In announcements, the council said a UKB Free Dump Day is set for June 13 at the Tahlequah City Solid Waste Center, with a tribal card required to dump, and that a Horseshoe recycling collection for plastic, aluminum and cardboard is set for June 27, with the time and location to be determined.

Member access at the Council table

Earlier in the meeting, Sequoyah district representative Donald Adair read complaints from Members at the table. The complaints described UKB officers and directors who do not return phone calls and raised questions about the Secretary’s travel, including who approves it, what it costs and what it has produced for the tribe.

Wacoche, who presides over Council meetings, ended Adair’s report and moved the meeting forward. “We get your point,” Wacoche said.

“Do you have any more complaints to read?” He then said, “Okay, thank you, sir. And with that, we’re gonna move on.” Wacoche directed Members to the UKB Facebook page, a Council text thread and email summaries from the Attorney General for travel information. “You just gotta read your emails, sir,” he said. He did not provide travel costs or approval details at the meeting.

Secretary Caleb Grimmett-Smith did not address the concerns at the meeting.

Under the band’s By-Laws, Article I, Section 1, the Chief presides over Council meetings. Under Article V, Section 1 of the Constitution, the Council is the supreme governing body of the band, made up of nine members elected from the nine districts of the Old Cherokee Nation and four officers elected at large.

The questions Adair raised about the travel were not answered at the meeting.

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma said Friday that the U.S. Department of the Interior has withdrawn a federal legal opinion backing the tribe’s claims to reservation authority and trust land eligibility — and announced it will pursue every legal avenue to defend its treaty-based rights.

The Oklahoma Cherokee Reservation covers all or part of 14 counties in eastern Oklahoma. Which tribal governments hold authority there determines who controls land, economic development, and services for the people who live on it.

In a statement, UKB called the withdrawal of Solicitor’s M-Opinion M-37084 “deeply flawed” and said the decision was completely disconnected from the historical and legal record that has repeatedly affirmed the tribe’s treaty-based rights.

“The historical and legal record underlying United Keetoowah Band’s treaty-based rights was not created by an M-Opinion — nor is it erased by its withdrawal,” the tribe said.

M-37084 was issued Jan. 17, 2025, by then-Solicitor Robert T. Anderson. The 56-page opinion concluded that UKB is a successor in interest to the Cherokee Indians who signed the Treaty of 1846 and possesses an ownership interest in the Oklahoma Cherokee Reservation. UKB has interpreted the opinion as recognizing both UKB and the Cherokee Nation as equal successors in interest to the reservation. The opinion also concluded that land placed into trust for UKB within the reservation could qualify for gaming under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

The withdrawal was signed May 22, 2026 — seven days before UKB’s public statement — by Solicitor William L. Doffermyre and designated M-37089. According to the withdrawal memorandum, Doffermyre determined that M-37084’s legal conclusions “do not represent the best interpretation of applicable laws, treaties, and federal and Supreme Court case law” and permanently withdrew the opinion in its entirety.

The withdrawal memorandum’s operative determination is one sentence. UKB noted that M-37084 contained more than 400 citations across 56 pages.

The withdrawal does not state that UKB has no treaty rights, that UKB is not a successor in interest to the 1846 treaty signatories, or that Cherokee Nation holds exclusive jurisdiction over all reservation lands. The memorandum states only that M-37084’s legal conclusions are withdrawn as not representing the best interpretation of the relevant authorities.

The withdrawal also leaves open the possibility of future reconsideration. According to M-37089, the permanent withdrawal applies “until such time as the Office of the Solicitor revisits this issue in a subsequent M-Opinion, or other guidance.”

M-37084 had been placed under suspension review on Feb. 28, 2025, by Gregory Zerzan, Senior Advisor exercising the delegated authority of the Solicitor, along with all other M-Opinions issued during the Biden Administration.

The dispute centers on a longstanding disagreement between UKB and the Cherokee Nation over treaty succession and governmental authority within the Oklahoma Cherokee Reservation. M-37084 addressed and rejected arguments that Cherokee Nation alone succeeded to governmental authority derived from the historic Cherokee Nation. The withdrawal removes Interior’s most recent formal legal endorsement of UKB’s treaty succession and land authority claims. It does not affect UKB’s status as a federally recognized tribe.

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. issued a statement May 29, 2026 applauding the withdrawal, calling M-37084 “a Biden-era political appointee’s flawed opinion” and stating there is nothing in the historical record supporting any other tribe’s claim to Cherokee Nation’s treaty rights. The withdrawal memorandum itself does not adopt that characterization.

“As has been the case for all too long, our ultimate vindication will rely upon the judicial review,” UKB said.

According to UKB, both the original opinion and its withdrawal are expected to be part of future litigation over the tribe’s treaty-based rights.

This story has been updated with the text of M-37089, the withdrawal memorandum signed by Solicitor William L. Doffermyre on May 22, 2026.

The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma approved two federal grant applications through certified electronic votes this month, according to official tribal resolutions obtained by the Giduwa Cherokee News.

The resolutions involve potential funding for addiction treatment, jail-based reentry programs, behavioral health services, and health facility construction and repairs — programs serving Band members and other eligible American Indians across a fourteen-county service area on the Oklahoma Cherokee Reservation.

Here is what that means. When the UKB Council approves a federal grant application, it is giving the tribal government legal authority to ask the federal government for money. Without that approval, the application cannot move. The council’s signature is the proof the federal agency requires before it considers the request.

Both grants touch things people deal with directly. The first is money for addiction treatment and recovery — including people coming out of jail who need somewhere to go. The second is money to fix or expand a tribal health clinic. Across Indian Country, where the nearest specialist can be an hour’s drive from communities that still don’t have reliable broadband for a telehealth call, that building matters.

Both votes happened electronically. Twelve council members participated in each. Seven voted yes. None voted no. Four did not respond.

Resolution 26-UKB-54EV, dated May 11, 2026, authorized submission of a grant application to the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance under the Fiscal Year 2026 Comprehensive Opioid, Stimulant, and Substance Use Program. The proposed 36-month project would expand access to treatment, peer recovery services, naloxone distribution, prescription drug take-back programs, and jail-based reentry services, according to the resolution. Echota Behavioral Health and the Adair County Sheriff’s Office and Detention Center are named as partners.

A second resolution, 26-UKB-55EV, dated May 26, 2026, authorized the UKB Health Director to submit an application for the Indian Health Service Fiscal Year 2026 Capital Infrastructure Program Grant — renovation, expansion, and modernization of existing tribal health facilities. The Indian Health Service set a May 30, 2026 deadline for project proposals. The UKB resolution was certified four days before that deadline.

Both certifications use identical language. The UKB Council approved each measure “through an electronic vote,” according to the documents. Chief Jeff Wacoche signed both. Secretary Caleb Grimmett-Smith attested both.

Federal agencies receiving grant applications rely on certified tribal resolutions as proof that an authorized governing body approved the request. The DOJ Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Indian Health Service both require that documentation before processing an award.

No procedural document governing the UKB electronic voting system was included in the materials reviewed by the Giduwa Cherokee News. No rules for authentication, member notification, vote archiving, or records retention were produced.

The record does not show that governing procedures for the UKB electronic voting system have been made publicly available.

The UKB Constitution, ratified Oct. 3, 1950, sets seven council members as the quorum required to conduct business. According to the UKB Corporate Charter, approved by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the Assistant Secretary of the Interior, the council is charged with conducting the Band’s business and finance. Neither document addresses electronic voting procedures.

By Staff Reports

According to a statement posted to the tribe’s official Facebook page, United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma (UKB) Chief Jeff Wacoche participated in meetings with federal officials and attended congressional budget discussions tied to tribal funding and policy priorities.

According to that statement, Wacoche spoke before top officials at the U.S. Department of the Interior to advocate for the rights, sovereignty and future of the UKB. Wacoche and UKB Comptroller Meosha Rambo then attended a Department of the Interior consultation session of the Tribal Interior Budget Council. According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the TIBC provides a forum for tribes and federal officials to work together in developing annual budget requests for Indian programs at the Department of the Interior.

According to the tribe’s statement, Wacoche and Rambo also attended a Senate Committee on Indian Affairs budget hearing focused on the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Health Service. Committee records show the May 20, 2026 hearing examined the FY2027 budget requests for those agencies and included testimony from Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs William “Billy” Kirkland and Indian Health Service Chief of Staff Clayton Fulton.

Those discussions reach directly into Keetoowah Cherokee communities: IHS funding determines whether the clinic has staff, BIA dollars shape roads and housing, and federal budget priorities can affect programs and services used by tribal communities.

Publicly available materials identify Sonja Gourd as serving as treasurer of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma under the UKB Constitution and By-laws, ratified October 3, 1950, and published by the United States Government Printing Office. According to that document, the treasurer is the custodian of all Band funds, maintains accurate financial records, and disburses funds in accordance with votes of the Council. The treasurer renders a written financial report at the annual Council meeting.

The comptroller position held by Rambo does not appear in the offices listed in the UKB Constitution and By-laws.

The Constitution does not specifically require the treasurer to attend federal consultation meetings or congressional hearings.

Questions remain:

• Was Sonja Gourd, who publicly available materials identify as serving as treasurer, notified of or invited to participate in the Washington meetings?

• If not, who made that decision?

• What role does the administration assign to the elected treasurer during federal funding discussions?

• Were written funding priorities or budget requests submitted on behalf of the tribe?

• Will those materials be made available to Keetoowah Cherokee people?

The UKB Facebook statement did not specify dates for the DOI meeting or the TIBC consultation. No public records reviewed for this report identified written UKB submissions connected to the reported events.

The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma is a federally recognized tribe based in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. It has a Constitution. That Constitution says who can vote. Member, twenty-one years old, show up. That’s it. Ratified by the membership in 1950. Clear as spring water.

Then the Council passed an ordinance in December.

Now it’s five requirements where the Constitution requires two. Six months of exclusive membership — meaning you can prove at least one-quarter Cherokee blood and you’re not enrolled in any other tribe. Six months of residency in or affiliation with one of the nine electoral districts the tribe uses across northeastern Oklahoma. Your name on an approved voter list. Plus the original two. Which apparently nobody on the Council was counting when they compared this to the document the members actually ratified.

The Constitution gives the Council authority to regulate elections. So does the Corporate Charter. The Corporate Charter isn’t a business document — it’s a second foundational governing instrument issued to the tribe by the federal government in 1950 under the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, giving the Band legal standing to operate as a corporate entity. The membership ratified both documents on the same day, October 3, 1950. Both carry governing authority. Nobody’s disputing that the Council can run an election.

The question is whether running an election includes deciding who gets to be in it.

Because there’s another section in that same Corporate Charter — sitting right there, same document, same ratification date — that says membership, officers, and management of the Band shall be as provided in the Constitution and bylaws.

Not as provided by the Council in December. As provided in the Constitution.

The Constitution also has an amendment process. Article XII. Majority Council vote, approval by the Secretary of the Interior — the federal cabinet official who sits above tribal governments in the federal approval chain for constitutional changes — membership referendum, thirty percent participation floor. A real process that exists for exactly this kind of change.

Nobody used it.

What the Council produced instead was a resolution. Approved December 6, 2025. Resolution 25-UKB-132. Done before Christmas.

Now let’s talk about running for office, because it gets better.

The 1950 Constitution says a candidate for Chief needs to be thirty-five, live within the nine-district territory in northeastern Oklahoma that the tribe uses as its electoral map, and be a UKB member. Three things. Also clear.

The 2025 Ordinance says a candidate for Chief also needs five years of exclusive membership, twelve months of residency before filing, a valid driver’s license, and a high school diploma.

And the ordinance bars anyone who has previously served as an elected official of another federally recognized tribe.

None of that is in the Constitution the members ratified. Not one word of it.

Supporters of the ordinance will tell you this is about integrity. Meaningful community ties. Election security. And maybe some of those requirements make sense as policy.

But good ideas still need to go through the process. Especially when the process is written into the same document they’re working around. Especially when the change determines who gets a ballot and who doesn’t.

Here’s what that looks like on the ground.

You enrolled in the UKB in the last six months. The ordinance says you can’t vote. The Constitution says you can.

You served on a council for another tribe. The ordinance may bar you from running for UKB office. The Constitution doesn’t say that.

You don’t have a driver’s license. Maybe you never needed one. Maybe you couldn’t afford one. The ordinance says you can’t run for Chief. The Constitution doesn’t say that.

No UKB court has resolved which document controls. That question is still open.

The same Council that passed an ordinance adding five new requirements for voting and running for office hasn’t answered a public question about whether one of its own members meets the requirements already in the law. On January 3rd, UKB Treasurer Sonja Gourd raised the question publicly during a livestreamed Council meeting: whether Illinois District Representative Janelle Adair lives in the district she represents. Under Article II, Section 4 of the UKB Bylaws, a representative who moves out of their district forfeits the office automatically. The Election Ordinance requires that at least two Election Commission members visit every candidate’s residence to confirm residency before an election. Nobody produced a documented result. Nobody answered.

None of this is happening in a vacuum.

Across the United States, voting districts are being redrawn, consolidated, and eliminated — and the people who lose access first are almost always the same people. Native voters know this story by heart. In North Dakota, the Spirit Lake Nation and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians spent years in federal court fighting a legislative map that advocates said diluted their voting power. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that private parties — tribes, individual voters, advocacy groups — can’t sue to enforce the Voting Rights Act. That ruling conflicted with decades of case law. According to the Associated Press, the U.S. Supreme Court this week vacated that ruling in Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe and sent the case back to the 8th Circuit for further proceedings.

That’s the national context in which the UKB Council added five requirements to vote and run for office without asking the membership.

COMMENTARY

Restricting access to the ballot in Indian Country isn’t a new idea. It’s a very old one. Which raises the question the documents don’t answer but the pattern does: when the supreme governing body of a tribe starts building the same gates that have always kept Native people out of the room, who exactly are they trying to keep out — and why?

The documents wrote that story. We just read them.

The UKB Constitution and Bylaws were ratified October 3, 1950. The Corporate Charter was ratified October 3, 1950. The Election Ordinance of 2025 was approved by Council resolution, December 6, 2025, Resolution 25-UKB-132. The Supreme Court vacated the 8th Circuit’s ruling in Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe on May 18, 2026, according to the Associated Press.

By Troy Littledeer. Troy Littledeer is a Keetoowah Cherokee journalist and photographer, publisher of Giduwa Cherokee News and Kituwah Punk. He covers tribal governance, sovereignty, and community impact across Indian Country from Stilwell, Adair County, Oklahoma. He is a member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma.

The air in Rogers Tuesday night was the kind that settles into your jacket and stays there. Damp from the afternoon showers. Almost cold. The AMP was still holding the wet when the lights went down — the covered sections dry, the open sections reminding you exactly where you were.

The first time I saw the Black Crowes was February 12, 1993. Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Not this version. That one.

Brothers Chris and Rich Robinson are still the Black Crowes. Have been since 1984. Everything around them has changed. They’re the core. They’re the constant. That’s the whole history you need.

The music is like an ex you loved completely — the kind that rewired something in you. You reunite years later and find she’s a better friend now than she ever was a girlfriend. You love her more for it. Not less. Just differently. Time changed both of you and neither of you owes the other an explanation why. Springsteen knew this feeling. He sang it straight in Glory Days — not bitterly, not with regret, just with the plain honesty of a man who understands that the looker in the hallway and the woman she became are both real and neither one cancels the other out.

That’s the Black Crowes in 2026.

Whiskey Myers opened. By the time the Crowes walked out the crowd was already warm, already decided, already theirs to either hold or lose.

They opened with No Speak No Slave and moved through Cruel Streak and Sting Me before reaching back for Jealous Again — one of the few moments the Tulsa 1993 crowd inside this one got what they came for. Ballad in Urgency held the crowd. Then Wiser Time started and the sky made a decision.

A heavy mist came in during Wiser Time. Not quite rain. Close enough. The people under the covered sections stayed dry and stayed put. The ones in the open air shifted, pulled jackets tighter, looked up without meaning to. Some moved for cover. The ones who didn’t leaned in. Weather at an outdoor show self-selects the crowd. By the end of that song the people still standing in it were the people who meant it.

Poor Elijah / Tribute to Johnson gave the set its roots. Hard to Handle — the Otis Redding cover that’s lived in their catalog since the beginning — still hits the way it always has.

Then Thorn in My Pride. Then She Talks to Angels.

The crowd went quiet for both. New fans took them in the way you take in something you didn’t know you needed. Long-time fans went somewhere else entirely — somewhere the current lineup can point toward but can’t quite reach. Both kinds of quiet happened at the same time. That’s a strange and specific thing to witness.

Twice as Hard into Remedy closed the main set. Then they came back and covered Bitch for the encore.

Fourteen songs. The bones of a great band still visible. The flesh changed. The mist made it feel more honest than it might have otherwise.

If you walked in expecting Shake Your Money Maker — the raw, greasy Southern rock that hit like a screen door in July — you felt the distance somewhere around the second song. Same sign. Different kitchen. That’s not an indictment. It’s just true. And the people who love this band enough to show up on a Tuesday night in May deserve to have it said plainly.

She came back different. You stayed anyway. That’s not a consolation. That’s its own kind of love.

The Walmart AMP keeps making its case. Rogers showed up on a damp Tuesday night for a band that isn’t what it was and is still worth every mile of the drive.

By Troy Littledeer · Photos Troy Littledeer

I knew some of it going in. Not all of it.

That’s the best way to walk into a Whiskey Myers set, it turns out — knowing just enough to recognize what you’re hearing, not so much that you’ve already decided what it means.

The Walmart AMP was still holding Tuesday’s rain when they walked out. The air was almost cold. Parts of the crowd were dry under the covered sections. The rest of us were in the open air taking whatever the May sky decided to send. That kind of night makes a show feel earned.

They opened with Midnight Woman and the crowd that knew — really knew — answered immediately. By John Wayne the rest of us were catching up. By Time Bomb there was no difference between the two groups anymore.

That’s what a band that’s spent years on the road does. They don’t wait for you. They start and you either find your footing or you don’t. This crowd found it fast.

Lonely East TX Nights landed somewhere specific for a lot of people in that damp Rogers air. You could hear it — not just applause, the kind of singing that comes from somewhere involuntary. Broken Window Serenade into Tailspin into Bar, Guitar, and a Honky Tonk Crowd — three songs that understood exactly what kind of night this was and played accordingly.

Bury My Bones. The Wolf. The set kept building without announcing that it was building.

Ramble On — their own, not Zeppelin’s — held the crowd still. Stone and Frogman gave everyone a breath. Then Gasoline took it back. Bitch — the Rolling Stones cover — hit harder here than it probably should have for an opener. Die Rockin’ meant every word of its title. Heart of Stone closed it and the crowd didn’t want to let it close.

Sixteen songs. Every one of them landed. The singalongs weren’t prompted — they were inevitable. These fans didn’t need cues. They needed the first note and they took it from there.

I came in knowing some of Whiskey Myers. I left knowing I hadn’t known enough.

That’s the best thing a show can do. The Walmart AMP gave them the stage to do it.

By Novena Littlejohn; photos by Troy Littledeer.

The Walmart AMP in Rogers opened under a breezy May sky — cool enough to remind you you’re outside, comfortable enough to stay there all night.

Cheap Trick opened. By the time Styx walked out, the room was already warm and the crowd was already ready.

Styx opened with Build and Destroy. No easing in. No warmup. Statement first.

Too Much Time on My Hands followed and the crowd was already there — singing it back before the band needed them to. The Grand Illusion stretched the room. Lady hit somewhere more personal. The set moved through Great White Hope, Light Up, Lorelei, Crystal Ball — deeper cuts that rewarded the people who showed up knowing more than the hits.

Rockin’ the Paradise came with band introductions, which is the right place to stop and let the room catch its breath before the back half lands.

Then it landed.

Blue Collar Man (Long Nights) into The Best of Times into Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man) — three songs that don’t ask for your attention, they take it. The cool May air had the crowd locked in by then.

Then the sound did something.

Outdoor venues gamble every night on acoustics. The AMP didn’t gamble — it delivered. Clean, full, nothing lost in the open air. Styx gave 110% and the room gave it back at full volume. Every note landed where it was supposed to.

Come Sail Away in open air is a different animal than it is anywhere else. The build needs room. Rogers gave it room. The crowd gave it back.

Mr. Roboto followed. Then Renegade closed it.

Fifteen songs. No filler. A band playing like something’s at stake, in a room built to carry it. The guitar on Renegade didn’t ask permission to end the night that way. Neither did the audience.

The AMP’s calendar doesn’t slow down either. The Black Crowes and Whiskey Myers hit the stage Tuesday, May 19. Kali Uchis follows May 29. Taylorville lands May 30. HARDY brings Cameron Whitcomb and McCoy Moore on June 4. Mumford & Sons close out the run June 9 with Dylan Gossett in tow.

Show by show, booking by booking, the Walmart AMP in Rogers keeps making its case. A perfect May night, an opener that set the table right, a headliner that left nothing behind, and sound that delivered every bit of it. The calendar says the rest.

By Novena Littlejohn | Photos by Troy Littledeer

Erik Terwey did the reading. That deserves to be said first, and it deserves to be meant.

The former public school teacher from Bartlesville wrote something most non-Native candidates running for Oklahoma’s 2nd Congressional District never bother to write: a careful, researched argument for honoring a treaty promise made to the Cherokee people 190 years ago. He named all three governments. He acknowledged complexity. He said Washington should not decide which Cherokee government speaks for the Cherokee people.

For a non-Native candidate in this district, that clears a bar most never attempt.

This piece is not an attack on that work. It is an invitation to go further — because the gap between where Terwey’s piece ends and where the actual record begins is exactly where Cherokee people keep getting left behind. Not by bad actors. By people who learned the vocabulary of sovereignty without learning the disputes living inside it.

READ THE TREATY AGAIN

Terwey quotes Article 7 of the Treaty of New Echota correctly. The operative clause reads: “The Cherokee Nation shall also be entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.”

Cherokee Nation. Two words. Named entity.

Cherokee Nation’s legal team leads with that language and calls the delegate right unique to their government. The text gives them ground to stand on.

But the treaty does not end at Article 7. The 1835 treaty’s own preamble states it was entered into “with a view to reuniting their people in one body.” The signatories — however disputed their authority — claimed to act on behalf of the Cherokee people rather than solely as isolated individuals. Read the treaty. It says so.

The 1846 Treaty of Washington, signed to settle the divisions removal had created, declared that the Cherokee reservation lands “shall be and remain the common property of the whole Cherokee people.” Interior Solicitor Robert T. Anderson’s 57-page legal analysis, M-37084, issued Jan. 17, 2025, confirmed that Article I of the 1846 Treaty proclaimed the lands “shall be secured to the whole Cherokee people for their common use and benefit.” Not to a government. To a people.

M-37084 concluded — following more than two years of legal, historical, and genealogical analysis of submissions from both the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma (UKB) and Cherokee Nation — that the UKB is a successor in interest to the tribal signatory of the 1846 Treaty. That the Cherokee Reservation is UKB’s reservation for purposes of federal land-into-trust regulations. That UKB has exclusive tribal jurisdiction over its trust lands. And critically: the opinion concluded that the Treaty of 1835 guarantees exclusive Cherokee jurisdiction over the reservation — not exclusive Cherokee Nation jurisdiction. Those are different things, and the opinion says so plainly on page 49.

On Feb. 28, 2025, Interior Senior Advisor Gregory Zerzan, exercising delegated Solicitor authority, placed M-37084 under “Suspension Review.” Every M-opinion issued between Jan. 20, 2021, and Jan. 20, 2025 was suspended pending individual review to determine whether each should be reinstated, modified, or revoked. During the suspension period, no Interior unit may rely on covered opinions as “authoritative and binding without first consulting with the Office of the Solicitor.”

Suspended is not repealed. Suspended is not wrong. The legal reasoning in M-37084 remains in the federal record. The history it documents did not change when the administration did. The 57 pages of analysis did not disappear because a new Solicitor’s office wants to review them. What is paused is the binding force on Interior decisions — not the conclusions themselves.

The record may support an interpretation that treaty obligations extend beyond a narrow government-only reading. That is not a settled conclusion — it is a contested legal and historical question. But it is the question. Any candidate serious about Cherokee delegate legislation needs to grapple with it directly, because the question of who holds treaty rights under New Echota cannot be answered by reading Article 7 alone. You have to read the whole treaty. Then the 1846 Treaty. Then M-37084. Then the suspension memo. Then you understand why the question is hard — and why pretending it is simple does a disservice to every Cherokee person who has waited on the answer.

WHAT THE FRAMEWORK MISSES

Terwey’s piece, read carefully, operates on the assumption that all three Cherokee governments begin as live claimants to the Article 7 right — that Congress should create a mechanism and let the Cherokee people resolve the internal question among themselves. That destination is sound. The problem is the foundation beneath it.

M-37084, even under suspension, appears to provide a legal framework that may affect how successor-interest claims are analyzed — an architecture that any legislation on this topic needs to account for before the mechanism gets designed. Without that accounting, legislation built on Terwey’s framework embeds a contested legal assumption inside a neutrality argument. It sounds like staying out of the question. It is actually answering it — quietly, and without the work the record requires.

That line — “embeds a contested legal assumption inside a neutrality argument” — is the core of this critique. It is not a criticism of intent. Terwey is asking the right question. The argument here is that the answer requires more foundation than the piece currently provides.

As of publication, no public record reviewed by Candy Mink Springs Media LLC establishes whether the Terwey campaign has contacted UKB Chief Jeff Wacoche or Congressional Delegate Victoria Holland. That gap matters because the piece calls for consultation while the author’s own consultation with the affected government remains unconfirmed. The record does not establish contact occurred. It does not establish it did not.

That is not a character flaw. It is a gap. Good-faith candidates fill gaps when someone points them out. Terwey has time — and the door is open.

WHAT WE DON’T NEED MORE OF

Indian Country has seen this pattern before. A candidate learns the language of sovereignty. Posts about it. Builds a platform around it. The people the platform is supposed to serve are still waiting on a phone call.

It has happened with candidates who praised one Cherokee chief in June and called another tribe’s land fight “abstract” by September — then made a video about tribal sovereignty in January without ever contacting the tribe at the center of the dispute. The written record documenting that sequence is retained by Candy Mink Springs Media LLC.

The point is not to relitigate that. The point is that Cherokee people — Keetoowah Cherokee members, Cherokee Nation citizens, Eastern Band citizens — have watched this pattern long enough to recognize it on approach. A candidate who writes about treaty rights without reading the treaties in full. A candidate who calls for consultation without consulting. A candidate who finds the language of Indian Country without doing the work Indian Country actually requires.

Terwey is not that candidate yet. His piece is evidence of genuine effort. The question is whether the effort continues past the writing — into the documents, into the phone calls, into the hard conversations that don’t make for clean campaign posts.

WHO THIS IS FOR — AND WHERE THEY LIVE

If you are reading this in Tahlequah, you already know what the UKB’s 76 acres means. The UKB has federal recognition. It has members. What it does not have is the land-into-trust status that would allow gaming — and the revenue gaming produces funds the human services, healthcare access, and tribal programs that members depend on. Other tribes generate that revenue. The UKB cannot, yet. That gap shows up in what does and does not get funded for the people on the other end of it.

If you are reading this in Washington, D.C., or Portland, or Phoenix, or anywhere else in Indian Country — the structure of what happened here is not unique to northeastern Oklahoma. Questions involving land status, jurisdiction, and federal recognition carry practical consequences for housing, development, and access to services. When those questions go unresolved, the consequences land on specific people, in specific communities, on specific mornings.

A federal promise made to a people, administered through governments, contested by governments, suspended by administrations, while the people wait. That is not a Cherokee story. That is an Indian Country story. It plays out from the Dakotas to Nova Scotia to the Illinois River.

The UKB member waiting on an application approval for services is not waiting on a legal opinion. He is waiting on a roof. The elder who drove to Okmulgee on Aug. 23, 2025, to watch the Muscogee (Creek) Nation National Council vote on a resolution supporting the UKB — and went home without allies after a 9-4 tabling vote — did not go home to a policy debate. She went home to the same situation she woke up to that morning.

That is not abstract. That is a Tuesday.

THE DOOR IS OPEN

Terwey has time. His piece is a starting point, not a closing argument. If he reads M-37084 in full — suspended or not — he will encounter a legal framework that his legislation will likely need to confront. If he reads the suspension memo, he will understand exactly what is paused and what is not. If he calls UKB Chief Jeff Wacoche and Victoria Holland before the bill language gets written, he will understand what the consultation needs to resolve and why it has not resolved in 190 years.

The 1846 Treaty said “the whole Cherokee people.” That phrase is still in the federal record. M-37084 devoted substantial legal analysis to the historical and treaty questions surrounding those claims. None of that went away on Feb. 28.

The conversation does not have to begin in Washington. The phone numbers already exist.

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is a journalist, reporter, photographer and researcher from Candy Mink Springs in Adair County, Oklahoma, and a member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. His work has included Cherokee Nation Communications, the Cherokee Phoenix, contributions to the Stilwell Democrat Journal, NDNSports.com, and Osage News, with reporting focused on tribal sovereignty, government accountability, education, community issues, and Indigenous affairs. A longtime supporter of Oklahoma high school athletics and NCAA sports, he also has a strong interest in women’s basketball and broader sports coverage. He received the 2025 Tim Giago Free Press Award from the Indigenous Journalists Association for defending tribal press independence.

House leadership described in a press release the session as producing significant policy wins. That depends entirely on whose kitchen table you’re sitting at.

Oklahoma’s American Indian and Alaska Native population is among the highest in the country — 523,360 people, or 13.36 percent of the state’s total population. That’s roughly one in eight Oklahomans. Any session summary that doesn’t account for that one in eight isn’t a complete picture.

The release celebrates $232 million in new common education spending — reading screenings, math interventions, teacher pay raises. What it doesn’t mention: more than 150,000 Oklahoma students are Native American, making up 15 percent of the state’s total K-12 enrollment, according to Oklahoma State Department of Education enrollment data for the 2024-25 school year. That’s the population those dollars are supposed to reach. All of it lands — or doesn’t — in classrooms where nearly one in six kids is Native.

Here’s what the press release also left out.

Gov. Kevin Stitt vetoed House Bill 3006, which would have extended the Oklahoma Advisory Council on Indian Education by another five years. The bill passed 81-8 in the House on March 12 and 37-8 in the Senate on April 15 — bipartisan, lopsided, about as close to consensus as this Legislature produces. Stitt vetoed it anyway.

The Legislature established the council in 2010 to advocate for Native American students and offer recommendations to the State Board of Education and the Superintendent of Public Instruction. Supporters said the council created a formal venue for tribal governments and Native education advocates to raise concerns about student outcomes, curriculum, and representation in state education policy. Governor Stitt’s veto threatens one of the state’s formal venues for tribal nations to raise those concerns.

Cherokee Nation Chief of Staff Dr. Corey Bunch, who chairs the council, said in January: “Varying administrations have varying priorities, and we want to make sure Native American students are always at the top of the priority list.”

In his veto message, Stitt stated the council’s work overlaps with the Education Department’s Office of American Indian Education. He wrote the council “does not appear to have functioned as an active or effective body.”

The Oklahoma State Department of Education webpage for the council still lists a June 17 meeting. The body sunsets July 1.

As of adjournment Thursday, publicly available legislative records did not show a completed veto override of HB 3006.

Meanwhile, the session’s literacy push — SB 1778, the reading reform bill the release leads with — carries real dollars and real mandates. Native American incomes in Oklahoma’s tribal areas grew 56 percent from 2010 to 2023, outpacing the statewide average, but the median Native American household in tribal areas still lagged the statewide median income by more than $7,500. Literacy policy that reaches those communities could help close that gap. Or it can land like every other reform that wasn’t designed with those communities in the room.

The House leadership press release did not mention the council veto.

Session adjourned sine die, May 14, 2026.

Troy Littledeer is a journalist and photographer from Candy Mink Springs in Adair County, Oklahoma. He is a citizen of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians and has reported on tribal government, education, sovereignty, and rural Oklahoma issues for more than 20 years. His work has appeared in the Cherokee Phoenix, Osage News, NDNSports.com, and Giduwa Cherokee News. He is a lifetime member of the Indigenous Journalists Association and received the 2025 Tim Giago Free Press Award for defending tribal press independence.

Oklahoma’s attorney general says Roblox marketed itself to children while failing to implement safeguards the state says were necessary to protect minors on the platform for years.

The state filed suit Thursday in Cleveland County District Court. Case No. CJ-2026-810.

Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed the petition under the Oklahoma Consumer Protection Act, 15 O.S. §§ 751–763, alleging two counts: unfair trade practices and deception. The state is asking for civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation under 15 O.S. § 761.1, a permanent injunction requiring meaningful safeguards, and a court order requiring Roblox to publicly disclose platform risks on a regular basis.

According to Roblox’s own Q4 2025 shareholder letter, as cited in the petition, the platform reported 144 million daily active users at the end of 2025 and generated $4.9 billion in revenue that year. Two-thirds of U.S. children ages 9 to 12 have accounts, according to Roblox’s own figures cited in the petition. The platform launched in 2006.

According to the petition, account creation required a birthdate, a username, and a password — with no meaningful verification of claimed ages and no documented parental consent process regardless of the child’s age. For most of the platform’s history, the petition alleges, adults could contact minors without robust age-verification barriers or comprehensive parental controls. That changed in November 2024 — 18 years after launch.

According to the petition, Roblox declined to implement stronger parental consent measures despite internal proposals to do so. Former employees reported that a proposal requiring verifiable parental consent reached company management and was rejected before reaching the experiment phase.

The petition alleges Roblox knew a consistent grooming pattern was occurring on the platform and failed to implement safeguards the state argues were necessary to interrupt it. The petition describes the sequence as follows: a predator used the platform’s messaging and social features to target a child, offered Robux — the platform’s in-game currency — as an enticement, then moved the conversation off-platform to Snapchat or Discord before soliciting explicit material.

The petition cites an Oklahoma case filed in September 2025: a mother alleged a man in his mid-40s used Roblox’s account creation system to pose as a 15-year-old boy and groomed her 12-year-old daughter, using Robux to build trust before soliciting sexually explicit photos and videos. A second Oklahoma family filed suit in November 2025 involving similar allegations.

The petition also describes a case in another state involving an autistic teenage boy who believed for years he had a friend on the platform. According to the petition, law enforcement later informed the family that the contact was likely a 37-year-old Florida man subsequently arrested for possession of child sexual abuse material. According to the petition, the boy died by suicide in April 2024 at 15.

The petition cites a Nov. 21, 2025 New York Times interview in which Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki was asked about predators and platform safety. According to the petition, Baszucki responded: “We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well.”

The state alleges Roblox publicly promoted child safety as a top priority while acknowledging risks in SEC filings. According to Roblox’s own 2020 S-1 registration statement, as cited in the petition, the company told investors it was “unable to prevent all such interactions from taking place.”

According to earnings call transcripts cited in the petition, Roblox told investors trust and safety expenditures were increasing more slowly than revenue.

Roblox, Inc. is a Nevada corporation headquartered in San Mateo, California. Oklahoma argues jurisdiction in Cleveland County based on Roblox’s sale of physical gift cards and merchandise at retail locations in Midwest City, Del City, and Tulsa, and its contracts with Oklahoma consumers.

The company has not filed a response. The record does not show a hearing date.

Troy Littledeer is a journalist and photographer from Candy Mink Springs in Adair County, Oklahoma. He is a citizen of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians and has reported on tribal government, education, sovereignty, and rural Oklahoma issues for more than 20 years. His work has appeared in the Cherokee Phoenix, Osage News, NDNSports.com, and Giduwa Cherokee News. He is a lifetime member of the Indigenous Journalists Association and received the 2025 Tim Giago Free Press Award for defending tribal press independence.

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians Tribal Council met May 2 with an agenda that moved from Washington policy discussions to staffing shortages at tribal businesses, including openings at Oklahoma Station and Diamondhead.

Chief Jeff Wacoche reported on April’s Annual Self Governance Conference in Arizona, where a UKB delegation met with federal officials and attended sessions focused on tribal self-governance initiatives. Wacoche also discussed the House passage of the 2026 Farm Bill, which now advances to the Senate. He said the legislation restores the Local Food Assistance Program and described the proposed 2027 federal budget as supportive of long-term tribal self-sustainability.

Wacoche said the tribe has submitted land-in-trust applications to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and continues work involving historic preservation, youth programs and internship opportunities.

Secretary Caleb Grimmett-Smith attended a tribal meat and poultry processing technical assistance fly-in in Missoula, Montana, focused on expanding tribal agricultural production capacity.

Jeremy Wright, COO of the Federal Corporation, reported that $57,516 was submitted to the tribe for April, bringing the year-to-date total to $285,231.

Wright said several tribal business operations are seeking employees. Openings include a kitchen supervisor position at Oklahoma Station, therapists at Echota Behavioral Health and seasonal hiring connected to Diamondhead operations. He said approximately 186 employees currently work for the Federal Corporation.

Council members also discussed a damaged billboard structure. Wright said repairs are estimated at approximately $500,000 and could take decades to recover through advertising revenue. Discussion included whether the structure should be repaired, replaced or leased to another operator. No vote was reported during the meeting coverage reviewed by the paper.

During public comment, tribal member Anile Locust criticized portions of the tribe’s election process and hiring practices.

Locust objected to time restrictions involving candidates and voters under the election ordinance and urged the Council not to impose additional filing or voting restrictions.

“Let’s not put time restraints for voters and filers in our election ordinance,” Locust said.

Locust also said some hiring managers were not following UKB hiring preference policies for tribal citizens.

“It appears some hiring managers and directors are unaware of our UKB preference policy,” Locust said. “It looks like the ABK policy, ‘Anyone But Keetoowah.’”

She additionally referenced prior Council actions involving the tribal administrator position held by Jennifer Cole-Robinson and questioned whether the matter had been properly addressed. Cole-Robinson later returned to the tribal administrator position. The meeting coverage reviewed by the paper did not include documents explaining the administrative changes discussed during public comment.

Grimmett-Smith also presented the enrollment report and said four membership applications and one relinquishment application had been received.

Tax Commission Chairwoman Joyce Hawk reported $20,072.45 in gross sales for April. After distributions, she said $1,176.10 was allocated to education funding and $10,584.83 remained for tag office operations.

The Council also passed measures requiring monthly reports from Federal Corporation executive leadership and the tribal health director.

— Staff Reports, May 2, 2025 Council Session

CANDY MINK SPRINGS, Okla. — Until Sequoyah Littledeer was almost four, he didn’t speak.

As a non-verbal infant and toddler, his parents struggled to understand and interpret their youngest son’s meltdowns as they navigated a disordered minefield of sensory issues. Tastes, textures, clothes, colors and sounds sent him into screaming fits that seemed to come out of nowhere.

As he got older, other atypical behaviors also began to emerge, like spending hours organizing forks, spoons and knives in ever more elaborate fractal patterns, coordinating pens and markers in rigid color schemes and obsessing over Hot Wheels.

“He couldn’t speak, so we didn’t know what was bothering him,” says his father, Troy Littledeer, who is the media director for the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians of Oklahoma. “At first, it was just little things, but over time we began to realize that he not only had sensory issues, but he also had foot problems and was substantially delayed in his milestones. So getting him checked out before he started preschool became critical”.

At almost three-years-old, Sequoyah was about to begin preschool at Dahlonegah Elementary. A small pre-K–8 school on the Cherokee Nation Reservation, Dahlonegah is a public institution serving a large majority of Native students from the surrounding communities, including historic Candy Mink Springs, where Littledeer’s family has lived for generations since the Trail of Tears in the 1830s.

With limited resources available on the reservation, the Littledeers began a desperate search to find help for their son’s multiple issues that they had to organize and coordinate themselves. Using their own insurance and financial resources, they went out-of-state to Arkansas to obtain occupational, speech and physical therapy services. After being taught how to use a visual chart, Sequoyah’s first-ever sentence was, “I want juice,” which was a game-changer in terms of his ability to finally communicate his needs.

“We could have gone to Indian Health Service, but they have waitlists that go on for months and years, and I knew we’d be waiting a long time to even get him evaluated, much less the therapies he would need to be successful in a school setting,” says Littledeer. “But he didn’t have months and years, because at that point it would have been almost too late and he would be falling further behind”.

At first, the Littledeers were skeptical about going off the reservation to seek help, due in part to a sense of leeriness with non-Native service providers who may not understand them and their particular cultural needs and values. “One of our first thoughts was: ‘How are they going to treat us?’” says Littledeer. Today, however, their fears have been assuaged by Sequoyah’s ongoing progress.

But the legally-mandated services he was supposed to receive at school tell a different story. Now five-years-old, Sequoyah has had an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) at Dahlonegah for two years that specifies 90 minutes of services per week, which has been spotty and inconsistent, according to Littledeer.
“He started his second year of pre-K in August 2023, but he wasn’t pulled out for speech therapy until October,” says Littledeer. “So he had 12 weeks of no services and we were never notified... some of what was suggested included watching YouTube videos—not one-on-one therapy”.

The Littledeers’ story is a familiar refrain for thousands of Native American families who say their children are not being provided mandated services required under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). An Early Learning Nation investigation has revealed a systemic breakdown—from the federal level to local school districts—in failing to provide services to Native American students with disabilities.

Native Americans represent roughly 2.6 percent of the total population in the United States, yet they have the highest percentage of students served under IDEA of any racial group at 19 percent.

Diana Cournoyer, executive director of the National Indian Education Association (NIEA), believes the challenges include delayed identification of disabilities and a shortage of qualified providers. “We’ve had these problems for a very long time, and there’s a growing sense of frustration because it makes no sense,” says Cournoyer. “Therefore, we’ve got to change the system to address the unique needs of our special needs students... there has to be a way to take back control of our education”.

Now a rambunctious and very verbal five-year-old, Littledeer reports that most of Sequoyah’s issues have either begun to resolve or have been substantially reduced. “He has definitely come a long way from where we began,” says Littledeer. “It’s been a lot of work and sacrifice, but we also believe in him”.

This story comes to Giduwa Cherokee News from Suzette Brewer through their reporting work with Early Learning Nation. Originally posted on Early Learning; May 24, 2024.