The envelope from J.T. Vann’s law office was postmarked Sept. 8 and reached Troy Littledeer on Sept. 11, the day he sued to get back on the Flint District Tribal Council ballot. Vann is the attorney for the Election Board of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma. The papers inside named Littledeer as a respondent in “Kristie Bradley v. Troy Littledeer and United Keetoowah Band Election Board,” No. 2026-CONTEST-01, a case Littledeer said he had not been told about. The certificate of service carried the printed line “Justin T. Vann/Staff” with no signature above it.

The board had removed Littledeer from the ballot Sept. 8, ruling he did not meet a five-year membership requirement. On Oct. 13, UKB District Judge Charles Tripp dismissed Littledeer’s lawsuit and upheld the board without ruling on what that requirement means. Littledeer has expressed he may file a notice of appeal to the UKB Supreme Court. The UKB regular election is Nov. 2.

WHAT THE LAW SAYS

The UKB Constitution, ratified Oct. 3, 1950, sets the qualifications for council members in its bylaws. A council member must be “not less than twenty-one years of age, a resident of the district he represents and a member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma.” The constitution does not mention exclusive membership, blood quantum or a five-year period. Article IV gives the council power to “prescribe rules and regulations governing future membership.”

The council adopted the current election ordinance in 2025. Section 501(A)(3)(b) requires a district representative candidate to “be an exclusive member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma for a period of not less than five (5) years prior to filing.” Section 104(G) defines an exclusive member as a tribal member “who can prove ¼ degree or more of Cherokee Indian blood and is not an enrolled member of any other Tribe/Band.”

Littledeer enrolled in the UKB in 2005. He applied for Cherokee Nation citizenship in October 2012 and relinquished it through a Cherokee Nation District Court order entered Sept. 4, 2024, and amended in March 2025. He filed for the Flint District seat Aug. 14, the last day of the filing period. The 13-member council has nine district representatives and four officers elected at large.

The board’s Sept. 8 decision says Littledeer did not meet the five-year requirement. It gives no dates and no calculation.

Littledeer says Section 501(A)(3)(b) does not expressly state that the five years must be continuous or must end immediately before filing, and that his UKB-only years from 2005 to 2012 should count. He points to other parts of the ordinance where the council spelled out time periods. Section 501(B)(1) bars candidates with a felony conviction “within the past ten (10) years.” Section 403(A) lets an eligible voter vote in the district where that person “has resided for the six (6) months prior to the election,” and a voter who moves during those six months cannot vote in the new district until the next election. Section 203 requires Election Board members to be exclusive members but sets no length of membership.

“The law has to be followed the way it’s written,” Littledeer said in an Oct. 14 interview. “If the council wanted five years in a row right before filing, it knew how to say so. The board can’t enforce a requirement that isn’t in the text and call it interpretation.”

The board reads it differently. In a Sept. 25 court filing, it said the “legislative intent and plain and ordinary reading” of the provision require exclusive membership that is “continuous and direct in time with the filing.” The filing says Littledeer “stipulated that he was a member of the Cherokee Nation tribe within the last couple of years.”

Littledeer’s petition asks the court to determine under Section 715 of the UKB Courts Act whether Section 501(A)(3) of the ordinance, “in whole or in part, or the Board’s interpretation and application of it, is authorized by the Constitution and tribal law.” Before taking office, each Election Board member swears under Section 205 of the ordinance to “support, protect, and defend the Constitution and By-laws” of the UKB and to conduct elections “fairly, impartially, and in accordance with the laws” of the band. “The constitution says a council member has to be a member of the band,” Littledeer said. “It doesn’t say exclusive member, and it doesn’t say five years.”

THE DEADLINE

Section 508 requires a challenge to a candidate to be filed “within three (3) business days of the closing of the filing period.” Filing closed Aug. 14, putting the deadline at Aug. 19. On Aug. 17, the board announced it was moving the deadline to Aug. 20. It gave Littledeer until 5 p.m. that day to answer the challenge filed by Kristie Bradley, the UKB tribal court administrator.

Littledeer said he asked the board Sept. 4 when it received Bradley’s challenge and has not received an answer. The board’s Sept. 25 filing does not cite authority for the extension. It argues Littledeer did not raise the issue at his Sept. 2 hearing. But Littledeer’s emails to the Election Board chair woman Wyanetta Springwater show he did ask.

THE HEARING

The board’s hearing notice, signed by Chairwoman Springwater, said the board would “stand as a neutral participant only” and that it “has an obligation to investigate any candidate’s qualifications on its own accord.” At the Sept. 2 hearing at the John Hair Cultural Center in Tahlequah, Littledeer said, Bradley’s challenge took about 15 minutes before she was dismissed from the room. Vann then questioned Littledeer for about an hour and 35 minutes, he said.

WHO MAY BRING A CHALLENGE

Section 508 allows “any candidate or eligible voter” to challenge a candidate. Under Section 401(A)(2), an eligible voter must have been an exclusive member for at least six months before the election, which under Section 104(G) means proving one-quarter degree or more of Cherokee Indian blood and not being enrolled in another tribe.

The board’s Sept. 8 decision does not say whether the board determined that Bradley met those requirements before it accepted her challenge. Littledeer said he raised the question in a Sept. 3 email to Vann. Bradley’s name appears on a June 2 Flint District voter list filed as an exhibit in the case. The court reporter’s transcript shows the question was asked but interrupted by the court reporter and never resolved. Littledeer said he is not alleging that Bradley is ineligible.

“They held me to a requirement the law doesn’t state, and nobody has shown me that they checked the person who challenged me against the requirements the law does state,” Littledeer said. “Before you remove a candidate, you have to know the challenge was brought by someone the law allows to bring it.”

SOURCES

UKB Constitution, Article IV, Article V and Bylaws, Article II, Section 3. UKB 2025 Election Ordinance, Sections 104(G), 401, 501(A)(3)(b), 501(B)(1), 503 and 508. Election Board Notice of Hearing, signed by Chairwoman Wyanetta Springwater. Petitioner’s Amended Complaint and Exhibits, CV-2026-04, UKB District Court, including Exhibit R. Notice of Newly Received Evidence and Exhibits X-Z, CV-2026-04. Respondent Election Board’s Response and Motion to Strike and Motion to Dismiss, Sept. 25, 2026. Decision on Election Board Challenge, filed Oct. 13, 2026. Littledeer email to J.T. Vann, Sept. 3, 2026. UKB Tribal Enrollment Card. Cherokee Nation Application for Citizenship, Oct. 22, 2012. Cherokee Nation District Court Order of Relinquishment, CV-2024-722, Sept. 4, 2024, and amended order, March 2025. Littledeer interview, Oct. 14, 2026. Littledeer’s account of the Sept. 2 hearing.

The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma’s district representative election is less than a month away. That makes it a good time to know how the Band’s government is set up. The Constitution says who holds the power. The By-laws say what each office is supposed to do. Both are worth keeping in mind as you look at the people asking for your vote and think about what to ask them.

The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma is run by its Council. Not the chief. The Council.

The Band’s Constitution calls the Council the tribe’s highest governing body. It has 13 seats. Nine are district representatives. Four are officers elected by voters across the whole Band: the chief, assistant chief, secretary and treasurer. All four sit on the Council. They don’t sit above it.

The Constitution gives the Council wide power to do business and speak or act for the Band. The Council can also hire staff, set up committees, name representatives and hand off some of its powers, as long as it follows the law and its own rules.

The By-laws spell out what the four officers do.

The chief runs the meetings. The chief leads Council meetings and membership meetings, oversees the Council’s business and does the job of a chairman. The chief only votes when there’s a tie.

The assistant chief fills in when the chief is gone. If the chief’s office comes open, the assistant chief takes over until it’s filled in the regular way.

The secretary keeps the records. The secretary works under the Council’s instructions and keeps an accurate record of what happens at Council and membership meetings. The secretary handles the Council’s mail, keeps the membership records, signs off on Council accounts and orders, and turns in a written report at the yearly Council meeting. Council members have the right to look at the secretary’s official records, with the secretary present.

The treasurer keeps the money. The treasurer is in charge of all money the Council holds, no matter where it came from, and has to keep an accurate record of it. The treasurer can only pay out money when the Council votes to do it. Band money has to be kept in a special account. Once that account goes over $50, the treasurer has to be bonded, which works like insurance against loss, and the Band pays for it. The treasurer gives a written report at the yearly Council meeting and any time the Council asks for one.

What it means for members and readers

UKB members elect their district representative and the four officers. The Constitution says members 21 and older can vote. In district races, only voters who live in that district or are signed up with it can vote. Today’s election rules may add other requirements for certain races, but the Constitution sets the voting age at 21.

After the election, the Council holds the power the Constitution and By-laws give it. That means it can do business for the Band, set election rules, set rules for who can become a member, fill empty offices and set up a process for looking into complaints and removing Council members or officers.

That power has limits. The Council has to follow the Constitution, the By-laws and the law. The Constitution makes the Council the top governing body, but it also lays out how the government works and puts rules on some of the Council’s powers.

Members can’t call a Band membership meeting on their own. The chief can call one and has to call one when seven Council members ask in writing. When a membership meeting is called, members have to get at least 10 days’ notice of the time, place and reason for it.

There’s no recall in the Constitution. Instead, Article IX lets the Council set rules for looking into complaints of misconduct and removing a Council member or officer. The person accused has to get a hearing, and it takes a two-thirds vote of the Council to remove them.

Records work differently. The By-laws say Council members can look at the secretary’s official records with the secretary present. They don’t say the same thing for everyday members. That doesn’t settle every question about getting UKB records under other laws or current policies. It’s just what the 1950 By-laws say.

The Constitution also has a Bill of Rights. Article XI says members are free to worship, think, speak, publish, gather and associate without interference. It also says the Constitution can’t take away members’ rights as citizens of Oklahoma or the United States, and it can’t take away a member’s property rights without that member’s consent.

Members have a way to change the Constitution. A change can be proposed by a majority vote of the Council or by a petition signed by 30% of the Band’s eligible voters and sent to the secretary of the Interior. If the secretary approves, the change goes to a vote of the people. It passes if a majority votes yes and at least 30% of eligible voters cast ballots.

With the election less than a month away, these rules are more than old words on paper. They show what the people running for office would actually be responsible for if they win.

So when the campaign signs go up and the promises start, members have something solid to measure them against. Who’s responsible for what? Who has the power to make the call? Who has to keep the records? Who controls the spending? Who answers to the Council? And who answers to the people who elected them?

The Constitution tells us how the government is supposed to work. What that government actually does is something members can check for themselves.

The question isn’t just who’s talking. It’s who’s doing the work the office requires, what the Council is getting done with the power it has, and whether that work is paying off for you and other members.

This guide is based on the Constitution and By-laws of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, ratified Oct. 3, 1950. The UKB government website still publishes that document as the Band’s Constitution and By-laws. Current ordinances, resolutions and other actions may affect how some parts are carried out, so any claim of a later amendment or change should be checked against the official record.

SOURCES

Constitution and By-laws of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, ratified Oct. 3, 1950: Constitution Arts. IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, XI and XII; By-laws Arts. I-V.

United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, Constitution and By-laws.

The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma has two sets of rules for who gets to vote, and they don’t say the same thing. One is the UKB Constitution. The other is the election ordinance the Tribal Council passed Dec. 6, 2025. The constitution lets every member who’s 21 vote. The ordinance only lets members vote if they can prove they’re at least a quarter Cherokee by blood and don’t belong to any other tribe.

Start with the constitution. It was ratified Oct. 3, 1950, and it says the band’s members are the people named on a roll approved April 19, 1949. Now my great-grandfather Sam Littledeer is on that base roll. The constitution lets the council write rules for “future membership,” meaning who can join after that. On voting, Article VII, Section 2 says: “All members of the Band, twenty-one (21) years of age and over, shall be eligible to vote in any election.” If you’re a member and you’re 21, you can vote. To run for a council seat, Bylaws Article II, Section 3 says you have to be 21, live in the district and be “a member.” The word “exclusive” isn’t in the 1950 constitution, and neither is blood quantum.

The council did write rules for who could join. The Membership Ordinance of 1990 says everyone “of Indian blood” on the 1949 roll is a full member, with no fraction attached. New applicants needed at least one-quarter Cherokee blood, or 25%, to be full members, and they could prove it with sworn statements from three elders and a two-thirds council vote. The same ordinance let people under a quarter in as associate members. They got a card, but the ordinance called their membership “non-voting,” and they couldn’t hold office. In June 1994, the council stopped taking associate members and started requiring new applicants to show a Certificate Degree of Indian Blood, the federal card most people know as a CDIB, at a quarter or more. A note printed in the ordinance says that change “did not affect any previous membership decisions.”

A year and a half before that, on Jan. 9, 1993, the council passed Resolution 93-UKB-01. According to the tribe’s compiled copy of the ordinance, it says being on the 1986 roll of full members, or enrolling later as a full member, is a “final determination” that you meet the quarter-blood minimum. It also says the blood degree printed on your UKB enrollment card counts as the tribe’s blood certificate “for all purposes,” and a federal CDIB showing the same degree works too. The tribe settled the blood question when it enrolled you.

The election ordinance, adopted by Resolution 25-UKB-132, works off its own definitions. Section 104(G) says an “Exclusive Member” is a member who “can prove ¼ degree or more of Cherokee Indian blood” and isn’t enrolled in another tribe. Section 104(I) says “Member” means Exclusive Members only. You have to be an exclusive member for six months to vote under Section 401 and five years to run for office under Section 501, and Section 104(J) holds precinct workers to the same standard. Being a UKB member isn’t enough under the ordinance. You have to be an Exclusive Member. That word isn’t brand new, though I haven’t seen a document showing whether earlier ordinances tied it to a quarter. A 2018 petition filed in UKB District Court quotes an Election Board letter saying the 2012 Election Ordinance required candidates to be exclusive members.

So the constitution says every member who’s 21 can vote, and the ordinance says only members who can prove a quarter blood degree and belong to no other tribe can vote. Some of that lines up. Under the 1990 Membership Ordinance, a UKB member who enrolls in another tribe gives up UKB membership, so that person isn’t a member under either document. Associate members never had the vote under the 1990 rules, and the 2025 ordinance doesn’t appear to change that. The tribal secretary builds the list of eligible voters under Section 404 of the election ordinance. That section tells a member how to get a name added, and Section 405 lets that member go to court if the secretary says no. Nothing in either section gives anyone a way to question a name already on the list, and Section 408 makes the list confidential.

The split comes with the blood requirement. If you’re a UKB member under the constitution and the membership ordinance, but you can’t prove a quarter the way the election ordinance requires, the two documents give different answers to whether you can vote. The council has a real case for its side. Article VII, Section 1 lets it write “rules and regulations” for elections, and the voting clause limits district races to “qualified electors,” a phrase the constitution never defines. Article IV, Section 2 gives it power over future membership, and the tribe has required a quarter for full enrollment since at least 1990. The ordinance also adds residency time, a driver’s license and a high school diploma for candidates, so the council clearly sets some election rules.

Members have a case too. Writing rules for how an election runs, and for who can join the tribe, is one thing. Deciding that people who are already members can’t vote is another. The 1990 Membership Ordinance says enrolled members hold every right the constitution gives them. UKB Attorney General Opinion 2013-01, which is advisory, says “Enrolled Member” covers both original members and people who enrolled later, with the right to vote and hold office. And the constitution has its own way to change who votes, spelled out in Article XII as a proposal, approval from the secretary of the interior and a referendum where at least 30% of eligible voters cast ballots.

Then there’s the word “prove.” Section 104(G) says you must be able to prove a quarter, but it doesn’t say what counts as proof. If your UKB enrollment card counts, the way the 1993 resolution says it should, then a full member whose card shows a qualifying blood degree already has the tribe’s proof. If the Election Board wants something else, like a federal CDIB, then a full member whose CDIB reads under a quarter could lose the vote while keeping the membership. The ordinance doesn’t say which, and I haven’t seen a record of the board turning anyone away on blood quantum, whether by UKB card, by CDIB or by any other paper.

Under Article III, Section 2, one of the band’s stated objectives is securing federal benefits for members through “relief,” “welfare, education, health and other programs,” and under Bylaws Article I, Section 4, tribal money is paid out “in accordance with the vote of the Council.” The people UKB members elect make those calls. A person can be 21, enrolled and carrying a UKB card, and under the ordinance’s words still not count as a voter if they can’t prove a quarter the way the board decides it wants it proved. That person would still live with every council decision on programs and money and have no say in who makes them. Section 104(G) has been tribal law since Dec. 6, 2025, and it doesn’t say what a member has to show to prove a quarter.

SOURCES

UKB Constitution and By-laws, ratified Oct. 3, 1950: Art. III, Sec. 2; Art. IV, Secs. 1-2; Art. V, Sec. 1; Art. VII, Secs. 1-2; Art. XII; Bylaws Art. I, Sec. 4; Bylaws Art. II, Sec. 3.

UKB Membership Ordinance of 1990, Res. 90 UKB 9-4: Secs. 1(B), 1(K), 2(A)(1), 2(A)(3)(c), 2(B), 3(A)-(B); note on June 1994 CDIB requirement and Res. 93-UKB-01 as quoted in the compiled ordinance.

UKB Attorney General Opinion No. 2013-01, Feb. 13, 2013.

UKB Election Ordinance of 2025: Secs. 104(G), 104(I), 104(J), 401(A), 404, 405, 408, 501(A).

UKB Resolution 25-UKB-132, Dec. 6, 2025.

Petition, Tidwell v. UKB Election Board, No. C-2018-2, UKB District Court, 2018.

The seats filled first. Then people started standing.

Cyndi Munson was already speaking Saturday evening, Sept. 19, at the KCS Train Depot when people kept coming through the door, and they kept coming as she wrapped up. Roughly 55 to 60 were inside by the end, every seat taken and about two handfuls on their feet.

Two former legislators were among them. Larry Adair of Stilwell, speaker of the Oklahoma House from 2001 to 2004, was there. So was former state Rep. John Auffet, who represented House District 86 from 2004 to 2010.

Munson, the Democratic nominee for governor, told the crowd about a hospital. The chief executive of a rural hospital took her to the boiler room first, she said. The building’s infrastructure had not been substantially updated since 1959, she said, and its last major capital investment came in the 1970s. Then he took her upstairs to see what the boiler keeps running.

“I don’t think that you should have to live in Oklahoma City or Tulsa or a larger metro area in order to get basic services,” Munson said in an interview. “I hear more and more from Oklahomans in rural communities who do have to drive many, many miles just to get basic services like primary care or seeing their doctor.”

On the budget, Munson said she would redirect tax dollars toward what she calls core government functions: public education, health care and infrastructure, which she defines to include water treatment and broadband along with roads and bridges. She said she would protect Medicaid expansion under the state constitution and pursue more federal Medicaid money for Oklahoma.

On schools, Munson said Oklahoma ranks near the bottom nationally in teacher pay and that districts lean on emergency-certified teachers, who are not required to complete traditional teacher training, because pay makes recruiting through the traditional pathway harder. She cited roughly 4,000 emergency-certified teachers in Oklahoma classrooms. That figure is hers. Kituwah Press has not independently confirmed it.

She tied behavior problems that parents and teachers report to unmet mental health needs and too few school counselors, and criticized state education leadership, without naming names, for not addressing why emergency certifications keep rising.

Asked directly in the interview about a widely circulated claim that she supports litter boxes in classrooms, Munson said she does not.

“I do not support litter boxes in our classrooms,” she said. “What I do support is certified teachers in our classrooms, standing in front of our students, teaching them the basic subjects that they need to be taught. Students need access to free breakfast, free lunch, so that they’re not worried about being hungry, and instead they’re prepared and ready to learn.”

Munson repeated her criticism of Gov. Kevin Stitt’s approach to tribal relations and said she has met with tribal leaders throughout her campaign. She named housing, education, infrastructure, child care and food-access programs as areas where she says state and tribal governments should be working more closely together.

Asked about her plan to restore a Cabinet-level Secretary of Native American Affairs, she said she wants the position made permanent through legislation. She said the office would consult tribal governments before state decisions are made.

“That also means working together in consultation with tribes as decisions are being made, having those conversations ahead of time as opposed to after,” Munson said.

She closed by telling the room that Republicans, Democrats and independents want the same basic things from state government, even if they disagree about how to get there.

Munson won the Democratic primary June 16 with 75% of the vote, according to The Associated Press. She faces Republican Mike Mazzei in the general election Nov. 3.

Photos: Cyndi Munson, at the KCS Train Depot in Stilwell on Saturday, Sept. 19 by Troy Littledeer/@kituwahpunk.

By Troy Littledeer. Troy is an Indigenous journalist and photographer and a member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. A longtime tribal media reporter, he has covered tribal governments, sovereignty, education, sports and community issues for more than two decades. His work has appeared in publications including the Cherokee Phoenix, Osage News and NDNSports.com. Littledeer is a lifetime member of the Indigenous Journalists Association and a 2025 recipient of the Tim Giago Free Press Award.

Editor’s note: Troy Littledeer, the candidate discussed in this story, is the publisher of Candy Mink Springs Media LLC, which publishes this report.

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma Election Board found Troy Littledeer ineligible for the Flint District Tribal Council race Sept. 8 and excluded him from the ballot under a five-year “Exclusive Member” requirement contained in the tribe’s 2025 Election Ordinance.

Kristie Bradley, the UKB Tribal Court Administrator, filed the eligibility challenge that led to the ruling. Bradley’s challenge alleged Littledeer had not met the requirement in Election Ordinance Section 501(A)(3)(b) that a candidate be an Exclusive Member “for a period of not less than five years prior to filing.” The Election Board sustained the challenge and found Littledeer ineligible.

Enrollment records attached to Littledeer’s subsequent court filing show he held Exclusive Member status from late 2005 to October 2012, then again from March 2025 to the present. The ordinance does not specify how a period of interrupted Exclusive Member status is to be calculated toward the five-year requirement.

The Election Board did not write the five-year requirement. The UKB Council enacted it as part of the 2025 Election Ordinance. Under Election Ordinance Sections 210 and 211, Board rulemaking authority is limited to procedures “consistent with” the ordinance or matters the ordinance does not otherwise address. Littledeer’s petition for judicial review argues those sections did not give the Board authority to resolve the ordinance’s calculation gap the way it did.

The UKB Constitution and attached Bylaws set out separate provisions bearing on the dispute. Bylaws Article II, Section 3, lists three qualifications for Council office: candidates must be at least 21 years old, reside in the district they seek to represent and be a UKB member. Constitution Article VII, Section 1, separately gives the Council authority to hold elections “under rules and regulations to be prescribed by the Council.” Littledeer’s petition argues that authority does not extend to creating a new substantive candidacy qualification beyond what the Bylaws require, and that any such addition would need to go through the constitutional amendment process set out in Article XII, which requires Council or member-petition initiation, Secretary of the Interior approval and a membership referendum.

Littledeer’s petition also points to the UKB Corporate Charter, which authorizes the Council to “regulate the manner of holding Band elections” and “the procedure of the officers and membership,” and separately states that rights and powers not expressly addressed in the Constitution, Bylaws or Charter “shall not be abridged, but may be exercised by the people of the United Keetoowah Band ... through the adoption of appropriate additions and amendments” to those documents. The petition argues that provision supports requiring a constitutional amendment, rather than an ordinance, to add a new candidacy qualification.

The UKB Courts Act of 2022, Section 715, authorizes the UKB District Court to review final action by the Council or a tribal agency to determine whether that action is constitutional under the Tribal Constitution, authorized by tribal law, and not prohibited by the Indian Civil Rights Act or other federal law.

Littledeer filed a petition for judicial review in UKB District Court on Sept. 11, later amended Sept. 14, captioned Littledeer v. UKB Election Board, Case No. CV-2026-04.

“The Board enforced what the Council wrote,” Littledeer said.

The case remains pending before the UKB District Court, which has been asked to determine how the five-year requirement should be calculated when Exclusive Member status has been interrupted, and separately, whether the Council had authority under the Constitution and Corporate Charter to impose that requirement through an ordinance rather than through the constitutional amendment process.

Congress didn’t make Native American citizenship universal until June 2, 1924, when it passed the Indian Citizenship Act — the Snyder Act. That date wasn’t the starting line for everyone: Congress had already granted citizenship to Native veterans of World War I in 1919, and a patchwork of treaties, land allotments and marriages to citizens had covered roughly two-thirds of Native people before 1924. The Snyder Act swept up the rest in one sentence. Citizenship on paper still didn’t put a ballot in anyone’s hand, because the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause had already been read narrowly against Native people — the Supreme Court ruled in 1884’s Elk v. Wilkins that a man born into a tribe wasn’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore wasn’t a citizen at all. New Mexico’s constitution ran a version of the same play at the state level, barring anyone counted as an “Indian not taxed” from voting — the identical phrase the Constitution uses to exclude untaxed Indians from the apportionment count, repurposed as a voting ban. States kept finding excuses: too “under guardianship” to vote, still tribal, still on trust land. Arizona and New Mexico rode the guardianship excuse into the late 1940s — meaning Native veterans who’d just come home from fighting the Axis powers in World War II still couldn’t register to vote in the states that sent them there.

It took people, not gratitude from the government, to break that. Miguel Trujillo, a member of Isleta Pueblo and a Marine Corps veteran, walked into the Valencia County clerk’s office in Los Lunas on June 14, 1948, and got turned away by registrar Eloy Garley under that same “Indians not taxed” clause. Trujillo sued. On August 3, 1948, a three-judge federal panel struck the clause down as a 14th and 15th Amendment violation. In Arizona, Frank Harrison, a World War II veteran and member of the Mohave-Apache Indian Tribe — known today as the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation — and Harry Austin sued Maricopa County recorder Roger Laveen over the guardianship excuse. Harrison v. Laveen, decided by the Arizona Supreme Court on July 15, 1948, unanimously rejected the theory that living on a reservation made a man a ward of the state. Utah held out longest: a state law defined anyone living on a reservation as not a “resident” for voting purposes, the Utah Supreme Court upheld that in December 1956, and the legislature only repealed it in 1957, with a U.S. Supreme Court challenge bearing down on it. Some states kept literacy tests and poll taxes running on Native voters the same way they ran them on Black voters, past 1948 and past 1957, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 put federal teeth behind the right.

And it’s not history. North Dakota’s legislature tightened its voter ID law after Heidi Heitkamp won a U.S. Senate seat by fewer than 3,000 votes in 2012 — Republican lawmakers said the changes were about fraud prevention, not that race. The new rule required an ID with a residential street address, on reservations the state itself never assigned street addresses to, where people rely on P.O. boxes because that’s what the mail system gave them. NPR reported that tribal IDs lacking a street address had been accepted at a Bismarck precinct in North Dakota’s 2018 primary — and would not be accepted in that November’s general election. Tribes spent the weeks before Election Day printing thousands of new IDs so their own members could vote. That’s not 1948. That’s less than a decade ago. Arizona State University historian Maurice Crandall put the earlier version of this plainly: officials in the states with the largest Native populations didn’t want, in his words, “a large group of Native people who can swing elections.” Nobody has to prove every clerk and every legislature since shared that exact motive for the pattern to hold — a rule that happens to keep the people most likely to vote a certain way off the rolls doesn’t need a signed confession to be worth naming for what it does.

Here’s why it matters: nobody handed us this. Trujillo didn’t get a ballot because Congress felt generous. Harrison and Austin didn’t get one because Arizona had a change of heart. They got it because they forced a court to rule and a state to comply. Staying home does the work of every one of those barriers for them, for free. Every UKB, Cherokee Nation, Osage, Navajo, Lakota, Choctaw vote cast is a Trujillo, a Harrison, an Austin still making good on what it cost to get here. Vote like your ancestors died for it, because a lot of them did, and it wasn’t that long ago.

BARBER, OKLA. — Jakub Michael Wilden would have turned 30 Saturday. Instead, his mother stood among family and friends at the cemetery where he’s buried and asked for something else: a favorite memory of him.

About 25 people came out Saturday night. Family. Friends. People who’d known Jakub at different points in his 20 years — from Sept. 12, 1996, to June 12, 2017. One by one, they stood in a circle and told what they remembered, after the family lit paper lanterns and sent them up over the headstones.

Roxana Wilden went last.

“Tonight I asked everyone for a favorite memory of you, Jakub, and I heard some great ones!” she said. “Except the one of [him] texting and driving my Camaro! I hate that there will never be any new memories with him but I’m happy that I got to hear new ones that others have.”

Nine years after losing her son to suicide, the night held two things at once: gratitude for a memory she’d never heard and grief that the supply of memories stopped growing in 2017 and isn’t coming back. Her husband, Mike, and their daughters, Pretty Sky and Kalia, and their son, Robert, stood with her and shared memories of their own.

This year, the family asked a family friend to stand in the circle with them and report it all. They said they’ve decided that remembering Jakub privately isn’t enough anymore. What they hope this story does, the family said, is reach someone who still has time to get help before it’s too late.

That hope has real numbers behind it. American Indians and Alaska Natives had the highest age-adjusted suicide rate of any racial or ethnic group in the country in 2022, according to a fact sheet the National Indian Health Board published in January 2025 using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, and suicide was the second-leading cause of death for Native people ages 15 to 24 — Jakub’s age bracket.

None of those numbers were in the air Saturday night. What was in the air was a mother laughing about a Camaro story in the same breath she said she’ll never get another new memory of her son.

The lanterns went up one at a time until the sky over the cemetery held more light than dark for a little while. Nobody there needed it explained, and for a while nobody said anything at all, just watched until the last one went too high to see.

Jakub Michael Wilden would have turned 30 Saturday.

If you or someone you know is struggling:

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. Free, confidential, available 24/7. Veterans and service members can press 1 after dialing.

Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741, available 24/7.

You are not required to be in crisis to call. Talking to someone before things get worse isn’t a burden on them, whatever it feels like from where you’re standing.

Go to the Cherokee County Clerk’s office and pull the deeds yourself. In 2025, the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma bought land worth more than thirteen million dollars. It’s all on file, in a cabinet anybody can walk up to. The deeds don’t even agree with each other on the exact number.

Now go find the paper that says the Band was allowed to buy any of it.

One purchase has that paper, like for sure. Diamondhead, 63 acres, closed Jan. 24, 2025, for $3.3 million. Council voted on it, 7-2, behind closed doors, and that vote is in the minutes from Dec. 7, 2024.

The rest don’t have that paper, at least not one we’ve found yet. Highway 82, $5.8 million, closed Jan. 3, 2025, signed by Chief Joe Bunch on his way out of office. Willis Road, $900,000, and Park Hill Road, $2.8 million, both signed after Wacoche took over. A tract off Highway 51 Spur, $350,000, filed Feb. 4, 2025, also under Wacoche — this one doesn’t even show up in earlier counts of these purchases. Mimosa Lane, $130,000, lists the Band as the buyer in real estate listing records, though we haven’t pulled the actual deed yet.

Add up every deed on file and the total changes depending on which ones you count, and which ones you’re only trusting secondhand instead of the real filed paper. The county clerk’s office can’t hand you one clean number for what a tribal government spent on land in a single year.

Federal rule 2 CFR § 200.317 lets a tribe use its own buying rules instead of the government’s competitive-bidding process. But there’s a catch: the tribe needs a written policy, and it has to use that same policy for its own money, not just federal money. If there’s no written policy on file, federal rules take over automatically. UKB members haven’t seen a written policy. They haven’t seen bid records either.

Then there’s 2 CFR § 200.439. It says if ARPA money pays for land, the federal government has to approve it in writing first, every time, no matter the price.

According to a source with direct knowledge of UKB financial operations, ARPA funds ran out in December 2025. That source says directors were told back in July 2025 that the Band was short almost $3 million, and that by late fall, staff were told to use ARPA codes for purchases instead of returning the leftover money. A person who worked in UKB accounting, in a written account reviewed for this story, described weekly transfers of $60,000 to $100,000 out of the general fund just to cover accounts that were coming up short, and payroll pulling $120,000 to $150,000 every two weeks out of a $250,000 general fund account to make it work.

The Constitution’s By-Laws spell out the Chief’s job: preside over Council, keep an eye on Council’s business, do the duties of the office. Nothing in there about signing off on land deals.

Council met in August 2025, in the open, streamed live for anyone to watch, and voted to move money from the Corporate Board to each representative’s personal spending account. District Representatives got their share. About a week and a half later, one of those representatives told an Adair County family — hit by storm damage and no power — that he had no money to help them. A representative from a different district stepped in instead.

Here’s something most UKB members probably don’t know: the Band already has a law for this.

Section 406 of the UKB Crimes and Punishment Act makes it a crime for anyone in charge of public money to handle it “in a reckless or wasteful manner which significantly risks loss,” or “in a manner not authorized by law.” If you break it, you have to pay the money back. Section 405 covers any public official who, trying to gain something or hurt someone, “performs an act in excess of their lawful authority.” Both laws have been sitting there the whole time.

You don’t even need a criminal conviction to remove someone from office over this. The Constitution’s Article IX lets Council remove any officer for misconduct, after a hearing, with a two-thirds vote. Articles of Impeachment were filed against former Treasurer Sonja Gourd this year, over the same kind of financial recordkeeping problems this story keeps running into. She resigned before it went any further.

Nobody’s said whether Section 406 applies here. Nobody’s said it doesn’t.

That’s worth asking about at the next Council meeting, or next time you run into your district rep at the store, and it’s a smaller question than whether the Chief spent too much. The Band already used this tool once this year, against one person, over recordkeeping. It hasn’t been picked up over five purchases of tribal land worth thirteen million dollars, some of them signed by a Chief on his way out and some by the one who came in after him, none of them with a council resolution anybody’s found yet.

This story was updated Sept. 3, 2026. The original version, published Aug. 29, 2026, listed Mimosa Lane as one of five properties and did not include a fifth deed, a $350,000 tract off Highway 51 Spur recorded Feb. 4, 2025. Both properties now appear above. The Highway 82, Willis Road, and Park Hill Road figures and dates are unchanged.

SOURCES

Cherokee County Clerk, deed filings, United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma property acquisitions, 2025 (Diamondhead, Highway 82, Willis Road, Highway 51 Spur — recorded deeds reviewed for this story). CoreLogic/MLS property records, Park Hill Road and Mimosa Lane (secondary source; recorded deeds not yet reviewed for this story). United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma Constitution and By-Laws, Art. I, §§ 1, 4; Art. IX. 2 CFR § 200.317, Uniform Guidance. 2 CFR § 200.439, Uniform Guidance. United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma Crimes and Punishment Act, §§ 405–406. Articles of Impeachment against former Treasurer Sonja Rae Gourd, filed July 15, 2026. Video recording of the August 2025 UKB Council meeting, livestreamed publicly, reviewed for this story. Anonymous source with direct knowledge of UKB financial operations. Written account from a former UKB accounting employee, reviewed for this story.

ROSE, Okla. — The wastewater doesn’t ask permission. It moves downhill, off a contract grower’s land in Adair County, into a creek, into the Illinois River watershed, past families who didn’t sign anything.

Oklahoma sued the poultry industry over that water in 2005. Hannah Cole, the Democratic nominee for House District 86, draws a careful line on who’s actually responsible.

“My opponent is widely known as the poultry farmer’s friend,” she said. “I would like to reframe that. My opponent is Big Ag’s friend.”

In her account, contract growers are the ones absorbing the risk in that arrangement — processors like Tyson, Pilgrim’s and George’s setting tournament-style pay that pits neighboring farmers against each other, requiring upgrades before a contract renews, and in at least one case she cited, threatening not to renew a contract before reversing course.

“Tyson and the likes do not provide benefits for farmers,” she said. “No healthcare. No retirement funds. Nothing.”

Rep. David Hardin, R-Stilwell, has held the House District 86 seat since 2018 and is now defending it against Cole. He urged Attorney General Gentner Drummond to withdraw the lawsuit outright after a federal judge rejected the state’s first settlement offer in April. In August, the Tenth Circuit stayed the underlying judgment in light of a new settlement Drummond struck with all six poultry companies, sending the case back to district court. Under that settlement, the companies will pay $41.671 million into an environmental relief fund, $420,000 in penalties to the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality and $1.9 million for an independent compliance monitor, while phasing down litter application in the watershed over seven years.

Cole doesn’t locate the failure in a missing law.

“We have the laws that say you cannot do this,” she said, “but we do not have any form of enforcing said law.”

She’d have voted no on HB 4118, the 2024 bill Hardin authored that would have granted poultry operators immunity from nuisance liability for waste application under an approved management plan; that immunity language ultimately passed as part of a separate measure, SB 1424, which Gov. Kevin Stitt signed into law that May. Her fix: make the companies pay for containment, not the growers.

She names a similar imbalance as the reason she filed to run for office.

“When I became aware of the school voucher program and how it is mostly utilized by wealthy individuals is what solidified my decision to run for elected office,” Cole said. “Witnessing that transfer of wealth from Oklahoma’s bottom to the top was when I decided enough was enough.”

On taxes, she draws a distinction.

“I do not believe in burdensome taxes, but I do believe in fair taxes,” she said. “When productive members of society pay their fair share, we all benefit.”

She’s a licensed practical nurse — has been since she was 19, and still practices today — trained in home health and phlebotomy while she was a junior in high school through the Indian Capital Technology Center. Families in District 86 travel long distances just to see a doctor. Cole doesn’t have a bill number yet for closing that gap.

District 86 runs through Adair, Cherokee, Delaware and Mayes counties. Adair County’s poverty rate is 21.5%, according to 2024 Census Bureau estimates, against 15.3% statewide. Cole says that’s exactly where her first bill would start — funding rural schools well enough that a diploma actually means something on the other side of it.

“Remember school house rock? Knowledge is power,” she said.

She’s also shown up at community meetings opposing the proposed aluminum smelter in Inola and the data center planned for Okmulgee County, neither project inside her own district. She’s shown concern for students outside a campaign stop, too, answering questions from a 10-year-old at Rocky Mountain School — a kid who raises and sells his own eggs and wanted to know what happens to his setup if the poultry industry takes a hit.

Hardin ran unopposed in 2020 and 2022. In 2024, he defeated Democrat Anne Fite in the general election. Cole says the district didn’t get more competitive by accident.

“Folks across our state are realizing just how important being engaged in local government truly is,” she said. “District 86 is now competitive due to the real hardships everyday Oklahomans are facing. They are ready for true change, not lip service.”

She and Hardin have met — cordial, she says, surface-level, the kind of thing where his wife jokes about wanting one of Cole’s campaign t-shirts and he tells her she can have one, after the election.

She didn’t expect company on the primary ballot, either.

“I constantly asked others if they had heard of anyone wanting to run,” she said. “All I heard was crickets.”

Sally’s List found her instead — an Oklahoma group that backs Democratic women candidates. She met their Rena Cook at a Panera in Tulsa, got a “candidate check off list,” and their support, without anything asked in return beyond her positions on women’s rights.

Like Hardin, Cole is a Cherokee Nation citizen, born in Tahlequah at the Nation’s own W.W. Hastings Hospital. She hasn’t sat down directly with tribal government, but she’s precise about the question she keeps fielding versus the one she wishes she got.

“Do you have the support of the Nation” isn’t “do you have the support of the Native communities,” she said, and that’s a big difference.

On McGirt v. Oklahoma, the 2020 ruling that found the Muscogee (Creek) reservation was never disestablished by Congress and remains Indian country for purposes of federal major crimes jurisdiction, she’s specific about where she’d focus: emergency services and policing.

“Those in law enforcement who provide this public service should also be held to a higher standard if being cross deputized to patrol and protect us in Indian Country,” she said.

If she loses in November, she says she’ll keep advocating for elders, disabled people and kids regardless. She also plans to go to law school, so she can help elderly Oklahomans safeguard what they spent a lifetime accumulating.

When the final school bell rings in Adair County, a working parent’s day isn’t over — it just moves to whatever the school district can afford to run after 3 p.m.

Adair County sits in the far eastern corner of Oklahoma, along the Arkansas border, home to small towns most of the country has never had reason to learn: Watts, Westville, Zion. For families there, the gap between the end of the instructional day and the end of a work shift is bridged by whatever after-school infrastructure the district can keep the doors open for. On August 18, 2026, that infrastructure got a five-year boost when the Oklahoma State Department of Education distributed more than $3.2 million in 21st Century Community Learning Center grants.

Three local districts split $719,286 of that total. Watts Public Schools received $196,000. Westville Public Schools received $251,689. Zion Public Schools received $271,597, the largest share among the three, spread across a district that stretches deep into the county’s rural east.

Without federal out-of-school funding channeled through Title IV, rural districts face a choice: cut academic tutoring programs, or leave working families without supervision for kids ranging from pre-kindergarten to high school.

The grants come with requirements attached — tutoring in reading and math, plus robotics, art, music, health education, and adult literacy classes for parents. It’s a federal award routed through a state agency, landing in classrooms where the lights stay on long after the buses have already gone home.

BARON, Okla. — Statewide and legislative candidates met Monday night with Adair County residents at the Mid-County Community Organization in the Baron community, where discussions focused on health care access, broadband, environmental protection and poultry industry regulation.

Brandon Wade, the Democratic candidate for Oklahoma’s 2nd Congressional District, framed broadband, health care access and paved roads as baseline infrastructure for rural communities rather than separate public services.

Hannah Cole, a health care worker running for Oklahoma House District 86, centered her remarks on rural health care availability and public school funding across a district that includes Adair County and portions of Cherokee and Delaware counties.

Dr. Kelly Forbes, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, addressed rural economic issues and questions about mental health services, while Troy Green attended the forum representing U.S. Senate candidate Jim Priest.

Adair County has roughly 20,000 residents. About 42% of the population identifies as American Indian or Alaska Native, and more than one in five residents lives below the federal poverty line, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Access to emergency medical care in the county changed following the closure of Stilwell Memorial Hospital in June 2025. The closure left the county without an inpatient hospital, requiring residents to travel outside the county for hospital care.

Broadband access remains limited in the area. About 29% of households lacked a broadband internet subscription during the 2020-2024 period, according to census data.

Agricultural runoff in the Illinois River Watershed formed another focus of the meeting. The watershed crosses northeastern Oklahoma and northwestern Arkansas, where phosphorus runoff associated with poultry litter has been the subject of decades of legal and regulatory disputes.

Oklahoma’s long-running federal environmental litigation against six poultry companies concluded in July 2026 with a settlement providing nearly $44 million for watershed monitoring, stewardship programs and limits on poultry litter application.

For residents in a rural county where health care, internet access, roads and agriculture all shape daily life, the issues discussed Monday extended beyond individual programs to questions about how state and federal policies reach communities such as Baron.

Troy Littledeer is an award-winning Indigenous writer, photographer and researcher based in Stilwell, Oklahoma. A member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, Littledeer has more than 20 years of experience covering tribal governments, education, sports, public policy and rural communities.

Littledeer received the 2025 Tim Giago Free Press Award from the Indigenous Journalists Association for his work defending tribal press freedom and received a first-place photography award from the Oklahoma Press Association in 2019.

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma Tribal Council met Aug. 14 to consider impeaching Treasurer Sonja Gourd. Hours of executive session later, the council voted 6-5 to dismiss the articles and accept her resignation instead. That’s according to UKB attorney Victoria Holland, who gave the account to the Tahlequah Daily Press.

Six to five out of how many eligible voters is still an open question.

The UKB Constitution builds a 13-member council: nine district reps, four officers. The Canadian District seat’s been empty since this council was sworn in Jan. 4, 2025. No one filed for it in 2024. The Constitution lets the council fill a vacancy for the unexpired term, but it doesn’t require one.

The Impeachment Code seats a hearing panel of nine district reps and four officers, minus the accused. It takes two-thirds to convict. Article IX of the Constitution says the same thing: two-thirds of the council removes an officer.

Here’s where the math splits. Pull the vacant seat and the accused officer, and 11 members are left standing. Two-thirds of 11 is 7⅓, so eight votes convict under that count. But the Constitution doesn’t say however many members happen to be seated — it says the council is 13. Two-thirds of 13 is 8⅔, which means nine votes.

Did anyone produce the document that says which number governs when a seat sits empty and the accused steps out of the room?

The 6-5 vote wasn’t an impeachment vote, and it wasn’t a clean majority either. By Holland’s account, it was a motion to dismiss the articles and accept a resignation. The underlying council vote split 5-5. Chief Jeff Wacoche cast the sixth and deciding vote. UKB bylaws give the chief a vote only to break a tie, and a 5-5 split among council members is a tie.

That squares the earlier math. Nine district reps plus four officers is 13, minus the vacant Canadian seat is 12, minus Gourd herself is 11. If the chief votes only to break ties, 10 members voted first. Ten voting 5-5 is the tie the bylaws require before the chief’s vote counts.

Before any of that, Assistant Chief Amos Ketcher moved to clear the room of non-UKB members and non-family, a category that included people enrolled in both the United Keetoowah Band and the Cherokee Nation. It passed 10-0 among the council members present.

David Cornsilk didn’t leave quietly. He’s a UKB member and a Cherokee Nation citizen, and he told the room his UKB membership entitled him to stay, arguing that removing him over his Cherokee Nation citizenship violated the UKB Constitution.

Article IV puts membership on the roll and hands the governing body authority to set future membership rules. It doesn’t define “Exclusive Member.” Article XI says all members enjoy freedom of worship, conscience, speech, press, assembly and association without hindrance. Neither article says dual enrollment ends UKB membership, and neither spells out an unconditional right to sit in every council meeting.

“Exclusive Member” isn’t a Constitution term. It’s a 2025 Election Ordinance term, one-fourth Cherokee blood minimum, not enrolled in another tribe or band, and it governs election eligibility. The ordinance doesn’t say failing that definition strips someone’s UKB membership for every other purpose of tribal government.

We don’t have the enrollment ordinance or the individual enrollment records that would settle whether Cornsilk and others like him remain UKB members under the roll the council actually uses. Whether the exclusion order violated Article XI remains an open legal question.

Holland told the Tahlequah Daily Press impeachment carries removal, banishment, and disqualification from running for years or for life, and said people can “be banished from UKB property, typically.” UKB law treats banishment and exclusion as two different things: banishment hits a person’s membership rights, exclusion bars someone from UKB jurisdiction and its enterprises. Her phrase isn’t the legal definition of either one without another UKB source backing it up.

What the record shows: the council took up Gourd’s impeachment, split 5-5, watched Chief Wacoche break the tie to dismiss the articles and accept her resignation, and cleared the room of people it called nonmembers, some of them dual-enrolled. What the record doesn’t show: which two-thirds threshold governs when a seat sits empty, whether clearing that room squares with Article XI, and whether UKB law says anything about an officer voting on a colleague’s impeachment while facing articles of his own.

The documents that would close those gaps exist somewhere on UKB letterhead. They just haven’t been produced.

INOLA, Okla. — Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond asked a federal judge Tuesday to stop construction of a proposed aluminum smelter near Inola, a small town in Rogers County about 25 miles east of Tulsa. A smelter is an industrial plant that melts raw material — in this case, aluminum ore — at extremely high temperatures to turn it into usable metal, a process that burns large amounts of energy and can release pollutants into the air.

Drummond’s motion, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, states the proposed facility would sit on 633 acres along the Verdigris River. That’s more than double what Drummond’s original petition said in June, when he filed suit in Rogers County District Court and described the same project as covering about 350 acres. The new filing doesn’t explain the 283-acre gap between the two numbers.

Drummond first sued in Rogers County District Court in June to try to block the project. Attorneys for Century Aluminum Co. moved the case to federal court in July, and Drummond’s Tuesday motion asks the federal judge to send it back to Rogers County, where it started.

The proposed plant, called Oklahoma Primary Aluminum, is a joint venture between Emirates Global Aluminium, a state-owned aluminum producer controlled by the government of the United Arab Emirates, and Century Aluminum Co., a publicly traded American company based in Chicago — with EGA holding 60% of the venture and Century Aluminum holding the remaining 40%, according to Drummond’s filing.

Drummond’s filing states that Century Aluminum’s largest shareholder is Glencore, a global commodities trading company that is also Century’s biggest customer. According to Drummond, Century told the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — the federal agency that regulates publicly traded companies — that non-U.S. affiliates of Glencore had entered into agricultural-product sales contracts involving entities wholly or majority owned by the government of Iran. That’s Drummond’s characterization of the disclosure; the underlying SEC filing was not independently reviewed for this report.

Drummond’s motion includes a sworn statement from Ranajit Sahu, an environmental engineer. Sahu states the smelter’s air-quality permit application projects annual emissions of 87,182 tons of carbon monoxide, 731 tons of particulate matter and 425 tons of total fluoride compounds, and that actual emissions would likely run higher than those projections. Sahu also states that if the facility is built as proposed, it would emit more fluoride than any of the seven primary aluminum plants tracked in the most recent National Emissions Inventory — and, by his own comparison, more than any industrial facility of any kind in the country. Sahu draws that comparison himself, and it hasn’t been independently verified for this report.

Fluoride emissions can settle on hay and other crops grown nearby. Cattle that eat contaminated hay over time can develop fluorosis, a condition that damages their teeth and can make it harder for them to graze. Inola holds an annual hay festival and calls itself the Hay Capital of the World.

The Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, the state agency that reviews industrial air-quality permits, has not approved the smelter’s construction permit. According to Drummond’s release announcing the motion, DEQ has paused its review, citing findings that the company’s own emissions calculations exceed the fluoride limits listed in its permit application.

Drummond’s filing states the project includes a federal award worth up to $500 million and about $255 million in state performance-based incentives.

Inola’s temporary ban on new construction approvals at the site is set to expire Aug. 28.

A feather touched the ground at Bell Saturday night, and the dancing stopped.

That’s not custom. That’s a first response nine generations deep. Elders and veterans moved in to gather it, and the crowd went quiet in the particular way a community goes quiet when it already knows what to do. Dr. Kelly Forbes, the Democratic nominee for Oklahoma Lieutenant Governor, stood at the edge of it, watching, not talking. He’d spent that same day finalizing campaign logistics. He came anyway, without a podium, without a press line.

Bell sits in the far southern tip of Adair County, close enough to Arkansas to touch it. If you’re looking for the farthest a place in Oklahoma can get from Oklahoma City and still be Oklahoma, Bell is a good candidate. Most people in this state couldn’t point to it on a map. That’s where the 39th Annual Bell Powwow happened Friday night.

Bell has done this before. In the late 1970s, roughly 200 families here had no running water. Wilma Mankiller made it her first project with the Cherokee Nation — residents built a 16-mile waterline themselves, over 14 months, with the tribe supplying equipment. The Cherokee Nation later named a water-infrastructure law after Mankiller and Charlie Soap. A movie got made about it. Bell already fought this fight once.

The Census shows what happened after. 602 people in 2000. 535 in 2010. 191 in 2020 — a two-thirds collapse in twenty years, and not because the map shrank. The boundary stayed the same size the whole time. Of the people still counted there, 74.3% are American Indian or Alaska Native, well above the county’s 42.5%. Bell is more Cherokee than Adair County itself, and it’s been getting smaller for two decades while staying exactly that.

The county numbers explain the rest. Per capita income is $23,710, while median household income is $48,041. The poverty rate is 22.4%, and just 12.3% of adults 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Only 71.1% of households have a broadband subscription, and 55.1% of people 16 and older are in the civilian labor force. (U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2020-2024 5-year estimates.)

Forbes says the Lieutenant Governor holds a seat on the Oklahoma Broadband Governing Board, and he wants that seat to keep asking whether broadband money is actually reaching the places a map says it reaches. Bell had no cell service Friday night. Vendors ran cash-only.

One Facebook follower who grew up near Bell commented after the powwow, describing generations of family who stayed on that ground since Cherokee removal. She named what she said Forbes drove past on his way in — homes without running water, substance abuse, domestic violence, missing and murdered Indigenous people, unemployment, suicide. Bell has heard the first one before.

Nobody in Bell asked Forbes to fix anything Friday night. They watched him watch them. Trace and Leah Whitley worked behind the scenes to make sure Forbes knew the powwow was happening at all. Hannah Cole, running for Oklahoma House District 86, showed up again, the way she’s made a habit of doing and communities like Bell are noticing.Others took a year and a primary runoff to find their way to Adair County. They probably still haven’t heard of Bell. In a community that built its own waterline because nobody else would, that distinction is the whole story.

Troy Littledeer is an award-winning journalist, photographer and researcher from Adair County, Oklahoma. A member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, Littledeer grew up at Candy Mink Springs, a rural community neighboring Bell, in Adair County, Oklahoma. He has spent more than two decades covering the people, sports, and communities of northeastern Oklahoma.

His work now focuses on tribal sovereignty, government accountability, education and the everyday realities of rural and Indigenous communities. His reporting and photography have appeared in tribal, Oklahoma and national publications. He is a lifetime member of the Indigenous Journalists Association and a 2025 recipient of the Tim Giago Free Press Award.

Littledeer writes commentary through Kituwah Punk.

The 1950 Constitution of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma asks three things of a Member who wants a Council seat. Be 21. Live in the district. Be a Member. That’s the whole list, and it hasn’t been amended.

The 2025 UKB Election Ordinance, Resolution 25-UKB-132, adds six more.

Filing opens Aug. 3 and closes Aug. 14. Only Council seats are on this year’s ballot, two-year terms. Chief, Assistant Chief, Secretary and Treasurer run four-year terms and aren’t up this cycle.

Section 501 requires two years living in the district before filing — longer than the Constitution’s residency language. Five years of exclusive Band membership. No prior service as an elected official of another federally recognized tribe. A valid driver’s license. A high school diploma or equivalent. A criminal background check, with a felony conviction inside the last 10 years enough to keep a candidate off the ballot. None of it is in the Constitution.

The Constitution gives the Council power to hold elections “under rules and regulations to be prescribed by the Council.” The 1950 Corporate Charter gives the Band power to “regulate the manner of holding Band elections.” Neither document says whether that authority covers adding new qualifications for candidates, or just covers running the vote itself.

Article XII lays out how the Constitution actually gets changed: a Council majority vote or a petition signed by 30 percent of eligible voters, then approval from the Secretary of the Interior, then a Membership vote with at least 30 percent turnout.

Section 501 didn’t go through Article XII. Nobody’s produced a document saying why.

A candidate disqualified after the background check has 10 business days to appeal in writing.

Meeting the Constitution’s three qualifications gets a candidate nothing under the current ordinance. Section 501 has to clear too, or the Election Board keeps the name off the ballot.

SOURCES

United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, Constitution and Bylaws (1950), Articles V, VI, VII, XII, XL.

United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, Corporate Charter (1950).

2025 UKB Election Ordinance, Resolution 25-UKB-132, Sections 501-502.

By .

“We, as Council, have failed you.”

Not “they.” Not the Treasurer. Not one office. He said “we,” because he was standing in the wreckage same as they were, and he wasn’t going to pretend it belonged to somebody else.

That’s what accountability sounds like.

This Band wasn’t built by people who agreed on everything. It was built around kitchen tables, in churches, at stomp grounds, by people who believed what belonged to all of us mattered more than what belonged to any one of us. Thirty-two furloughed employees were counting on that when they showed up to work every day, expecting a government that kept its books straight.

It didn’t.

Twenty-nine million, eight hundred thousand dollars sits unreconciled. Sixteen million, six hundred thousand is the number the Band is chasing just to get back to zero. Comptroller Meosha Rambo took roughly 10,000 unposted accounting entries and got them down to about 1,100.

According to a source granted anonymity, weekly transfers of $60,000 to $100,000 moved out of restricted grant accounts and into the General Fund to cover payroll, at times covering $120,000 to $150,000 of a $250,000 payroll. A second source, also anonymous, described open legal invoices as high as $800,000, with additional spending going toward travel, and named the General Fund as where that money came from. No ledger or invoice has been produced to confirm the second account.

Treasurer Sonja Gourd faces five articles of impeachment over it, with a hearing set for Aug. 14. At the June 6 Council meeting, Chief Jeff Wacoche told her the problems had been going on for six years. He asked how long the Band had gone without drawing down money it was owed.

He’s held the answer to that question the entire time he’s been asking it.

By-Laws Article I, Section 1 makes the chief the chairman of the Council. He presides at every meeting. He holds general supervision of the Council’s affairs. Article III, Section 2 lets him call a special meeting whenever he decides to, no vote, no permission, no waiting on anybody. Four years as assistant chief, then chief since Jan. 4, 2025. The same six years he named at that table are the six years he had the gavel in his hand.

He didn’t need a camera to ask a single one of these questions. He waited for one anyway.

A Member’s own representative tried to ask questions in that same meeting. The chairman didn’t answer him either. Adair raised Members’ concerns about travel spending — who approves it, what it costs, where the reports are. Wacoche cut him off. Told him “we get your point.” Sent him to Facebook posts and email summaries instead of a number.

Band travel runs on Band money. A Member who can’t get a straight answer can’t see where that money went. For a household deciding between the light bill and the gas tank, that’s not a small question.

Four properties purchased during Wacoche’s tenure carry a similar gap. County deed records list only nominal consideration; the purchase amounts come from the documentary stamp tax paid on each recorded deed. On three of the four, Wacoche personally signed a sworn affidavit stating he was authorized to bind the Band to the deal. Tribal law requires Corporate Board approval for any single expenditure over $10,000 from the fund used. Wacoche sits on that board himself, as a nonvoting member by virtue of holding the chief’s office. No Corporate Board resolution and no Council resolution approving price or terms has been produced for any of the four.

Five weeks after the June 6 meeting, Wacoche and Adair were face to face again, this time outside a meeting of the furloughed employees Adair had just apologized to. According to Adair’s sworn petition and three witnesses, Wacoche confronted him, directed profanity at him, and challenged him outside before Lighthorse officers stepped in. Adair filed for a protective order that day. A judge denied the motion to dismiss it and took the matter under advisement. Whether the court grants that order is the court’s to decide.

Inside the Council, the story’s already being denied. Not by name. Not on record. Just denied.

But Members don’t need a judge to see the pattern. The man asking why nobody answered for six years is the same man who wouldn’t answer a district representative’s questions in the same room, who spent Band money without the sign-off his own tribal law requires, and who showed up in another representative’s face weeks later instead of answering for any of it.

That’s leadership avoiding accountability while it points at everybody else.

Our grandparents and great-grandparents didn’t build this Band so one office could hold all the power and none of the answers. They built a government where the chairman’s job was to make sure the questions got asked and the answers got given, not to decide which ones he felt like hearing.

The filing period is open now, through Aug. 14. If this Council isn’t going to hold its own leadership to the standard it demands of everyone else, Members have the power to build a new one. Run, or vote for someone who will.

Troy Littledeer is a Member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma and a 2025 Indigenous Journalists Association Tim Giago Free Press Award recipient. He has covered tribal governance, sovereignty, and regional affairs in Adair County and across Indian Country for more than two decades.

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians Tribal Council approved five resolutions during its Aug. 1 regular monthly meeting, four of which were not listed as agenda items on the meeting’s printed agenda, according to the agenda document and an audio recording of the proceedings.

Chief Jeff Wacoche called the meeting to order at 10 a.m. at the Wellness Center at UKB headquarters in Tahlequah.

The printed agenda listed two items under New Business: authorizing the Department of Indian Child Welfare to apply for a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services grant, and authorizing the addition of signatories to the UKB Tax Commission’s bank account. The agenda’s executive session entry did not name any items.

The council voted 9-1 with no abstentions to amend and approve the Tax Commission signatory resolution. The measure adds Joyce Hawk, listed as Tax Commission chairwoman, and Charles Deason, listed as vice chairman, as authorized signatories on the commission’s Business, Finance and Regulatory Committee bank account. The motion was made by Treasurer Sonja Gourd and seconded by Goingsnake District Representative Willie Christie.

Following executive session, the council took up four additional measures not named on the printed agenda. Each passed 8-1 with one abstention:

The council appropriated $45,000 from a corporate board lease payments account, established under Resolution 26-UKB-58, to the Department of Human Services. The resolution allocates $5,000 to each of the tribe’s nine district representatives for discretionary district use, provided expenditures comply with tribal law and Department of Human Services procedures. The motion was made by Illinois District Representative Janelle Adair.

The council authorized creation of UKB Fedcom LLC as a tribally chartered entity under Section 3U of the UKB Federal Corporate Charter and directed the chief to file articles of organization.

The council voted to request that the UKB Gaming Commission convene. The resolution names Jamie Hummingbird, Tracey Burris and Jared Swimmer as current commissioners.

The council voted to move its September regular meeting from the first weekend of the month to Sept. 12, citing the Labor Day holiday and Keetoowah ceremonial observances.

Gourd abstained on all four votes, stating on the record each time that the item was not on the original agenda.

Resolution numbers for the four executive session items were not stated during the meeting and have not been independently obtained.

The council did not publicly address or condemn allegations that Wacoche threatened a council member during a July 13 confrontation — the subject of a pending protective order petition in Cherokee County District Court — during the portions of the meeting captured in the materials reviewed for this report.

The council also announced an Aug. 14 special meeting for an impeachment hearing.

STILWELL, Okla. — N’Kiyla Jasmine Thomas wants Oklahoma’s open U.S. Senate seat. In a clip from an interview conducted by YouTuber and podcast host Mr. Beat for his series Project No Cap, she talks like someone running for the state Capitol instead.

“Our literacy, right? We are 50th in education right now,” she said. She’s not wrong about the number. WalletHub’s 2025 education ranking put Oklahoma dead last among the 50 states, ahead of only New Mexico.

She’s talking about the wrong building.

K-12 curriculum, teacher pay, literacy standards — that’s the Oklahoma Capitol’s job. A U.S. senator votes on Title I funding and IDEA reauthorization. A senator doesn’t set Oklahoma’s reading benchmarks. That work happens at 23rd and Lincoln, not in Washington.

Same problem shows up when she goes after legislators for “worrying about saving child marriage” instead of bigger priorities. There’s a real story buried in that line. Senate Bill 504 banned marriage under 18 in Oklahoma with no exceptions. It became law May 13, 2026, without Gov. Kevin Stitt’s signature. It passed the Senate unanimously and barely survived the House, 51-36, with every no vote coming from a Republican. Thomas is criticizing a state marriage statute debated and passed by state lawmakers. That’s a legitimate target. It’s just not a target a U.S. senator has any authority over.

Two places in the clip she does sound like she’s running for the right office. Childcare is one. She said she struggled in her career without childcare while her husband deployed. Congress funds the Child Care and Development Block Grant. Congress funds military family childcare programs. That’s federal money, federal authority, federal reform if she wins.

Rural hospitals are the other. She raised a friend’s father who died after a rural hospital closure left no facility nearby. Congress sets Medicare reimbursement rates. Congress funds Critical Access Hospital programs and USDA rural health grants. Closures also come from state Medicaid policy, workforce shortages and hospital management decisions that no senator controls. She names the wound. She doesn’t name the federal fix.

One gap in this clip alone: Mr. Beat’s caption on the post says Thomas has added “Uncapping the House” to her platform — the push to lift the 1929 cap on the number of U.S. House seats. That is a federal, congressional-authority issue a senator can act on directly. It does not appear in the portion of the interview reviewed here. A fuller picture of her platform would need to include what she says about it.

None of this means the state-level issues don’t matter. A family deciding between the light bill and the prescription doesn’t care which building holds the authority. But a Senate campaign has to explain what bills she’d sponsor, what committee she’d seek, what federal reimbursement formula she’d change. Naming the wound gets a candidate on stage. Naming the federal lever gets a candidate elected to pull it.

Thomas faces Jim Priest in the Aug. 25 Democratic runoff. The winner faces U.S. Rep. Kevin Hern in November for the seat Markwayne Mullin left when he took over the Department of Homeland Security in March.

SOURCES Mr. Beat (iammrbeat), Project No Cap interview clip, Threads, posted approximately 20 hours before review WalletHub, “States with the Best and Worst School Systems,” 2025 report Oklahoma Senate, press release on Senate Bill 504, May 14, 2026 Oklahoma Voice, “Child marriage ban narrowly advanced by Oklahoma Legislature,” May 7, 2026 KFOR, “Dozens of OK lawmakers vote against child marriage ban,” May 18, 2026 NonDoc, “U.S. Senate runoff: Democrats N’kiyla Jasmine Thomas, Jim Priest clash over electability, identity,” July 2026 Oklahoma Voice, “Democrat Jasmine Thomas hopes lived experience will propel her to Oklahoma Senate seat,” July 31, 2026

STILWELL, Okla. — My son Toby is 10 years old. He raises chickens with our uncle, sells eggs, and lives with the same worries as most kids in Adair County: slow internet, a school that could use more money, and a long drive if anybody gets hurt.

So when Hannah Cole, the Democratic candidate for Oklahoma House District 86, agreed to sit down with him, Toby didn’t ask about polling numbers. He asked about creeks.

Cole, lives in Rose in neighboring Cherokee County. She’s running against incumbent Rep. David Hardin, R-Stilwell, for the District 86 seat. Toby wanted to know if she understood what it’s like out here, where the hospital closed and the roads are long. This is that interview.

TOBY: Rocky Mountain School and other schools [in Adair County] don’t have as much money as schools in bigger towns. Is that something you can help with if you’re elected?

COLE: I am very glad you asked me that, because I am a firm believer that a child’s access to quality education shouldn’t be dependent upon their zip code. I went to rural schools as a kid, and I want to see our rural schools funded, and that’s something as a legislator I can address. A big job that legislators have is allocating and appropriating money, and making sure that it’s going to public services, such as schools, and making sure that we’re staffing them and funding them, and making sure our kids are set up to succeed. And I want you to succeed.

TOBY: My family raises chickens and sells eggs. If a big poultry company comes and pollutes the creek, does that affect small setups like mine, or just big poultry farms?

COLE: Unfortunately, Toby, when waterways are polluted, it affects everybody. It’ll affect big farms, small farms, people who live in the country and live on well water. It affects everybody. And so we need to be holding the folks that are polluting our waterways accountable. But I also want to say it’s not the poultry farmers that are doing it. They’re not out there putting fertilizer into our creeks and streams. They are selling it or giving it to companies that then take it and spread it. And they’re supposed to be having guidelines and rules that they’re following to make sure that it doesn’t get into our waterways. Unfortunately, no one has been able to hold them accountable. The enforcement mechanism is not there. We have the laws, but no way to enforce it. So that is something when I get into office that I really want to tackle — making sure that the guidelines we have in place for our waterways, to keep them clean and protected, are enforced against those who take advantage of the system.

TOBY: Some kids’ parents have to drive really far for a doctor. Is that something you can help with if you’re elected?

COLE: It is sad that people have to drive so far just to get health care. And it’s a really common thing in rural areas, especially in Adair County. They’re having to drive 45 minutes for an hour to the nearest primary care doctor, or an emergency room. Stilwell’s hospital closed down, and those folks still needed care. They still needed to see their doctor. It’s just they now have a barrier placed in front of them that makes it even harder. So yeah, that is something I can do at a legislative level — make sure that we’re putting the investments into rural Oklahoma.

TOBY: Do people who make laws for Adair County actually know what it’s like to live here, or do a lot of them come from places that are easier?

COLE: I think they have their own version of what it’s like to live in Adair County, their own experiences. And we all have different experiences. Unfortunately, I believe that some of the people who represent us don’t quite understand some of the struggles that everyday working-class folks face, because they’ve come from privilege. They’ve come from money. They’ve never had to wonder about light bills being paid, food on the table, gas in the car so that they can get to work. I don’t believe that they’ve actually experienced these struggles. And the reason I say that is because the laws and policies they’ve brought forth have only put up barriers for folks who are already struggling, because they themselves have never struggled. They don’t understand it. And that’s why we need people in office who represent everyone.

TOBY: If my family can’t get good internet out here, is that something you can fix?

COLE: That’s a great question. Broadband in rural areas is a hard thing to access. I, too, live very rurally, and so I know the struggle. The lieutenant governor of Oklahoma has the role over broadband access, and I, as a legislator, can work with him and help him develop plans to try to get rural access to broadband in areas just like you and me. So yes, I can do that.

TOBY: What’s one thing you can do for a kid like me in the next two years?

COLE: So what can I do over the next two years of the legislature to help you and kids like you? First off, we’ve got to invest in education. We’ve got to invest in our kids and set them up to succeed, and I plan to do that. Another thing to help you is make sure that you can access health care in a timely manner — making sure that you stay well, making sure that you’re healthy, so you can go to school and learn and enjoy everything that a kid should be enjoying. And third, one way I can help you is protecting our natural resources. I live on the creek out here, and it’s beautiful, and I want to preserve it, take care of it, and leave it in better condition than I found it, for the next generation to be able to enjoy the bounty that comes from the wonderful natural resources our state has to offer, especially in District 86.

TOBY: Thank you for answering my questions today. Why did you want to do this interview?

COLE: The reason I wanted to do this interview is because I myself am a kid from Cherokee County, rural area just like you, and it inspires me to see young folks asking questions and holding people in leadership accountable. We need people just like you to be aware and knowledgeable of everything that’s going on, because it does affect you. And it makes me really, really proud to see folks around the state getting involved — the kids included. So keep it up.

You can see a video of this conversation on TikTok by clicking here.

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — Members who want to run for a Council seat this year will have to meet rules that are not written in the Band’s 1950 Constitution, according to a comparison of the Constitution and the election ordinance.

Council candidates file this August. The filing period opens Aug. 3 and closes Aug. 14, under the 2025 UKB Election Ordinance, Resolution 25-UKB-132.

Council seats and the offices of Chief, Assistant Chief, Secretary and Treasurer are elected on different schedules. Council members serve two-year terms. The four officers serve four-year terms. Only Council seats are up this year.

The Constitution lists three qualifications for Council candidates: be at least 21 years old, live in the district the candidate wants to represent, and be a member of the Band. It lists no others.

The ordinance adds:

Section 501 of the 2025 Election Ordinance requires several qualifications not listed in the Constitution. Candidates must have lived in the district for two years before filing. They must have been an exclusive member of the Band for five years. They cannot have served as an elected official of another federally recognized tribe. They must have a valid driver’s license and a high school diploma or equivalent.

The ordinance also requires candidates to submit to a criminal background check by the Election Board. A felony conviction within the previous 10 years disqualifies a candidate under the ordinance.

So where does the Council’s power to make these rules come from? Two documents give the Council authority over elections. The Constitution says the Council can hold elections “under rules and regulations to be prescribed by the Council.” The Corporate Charter, from 1950, says the Band can “regulate the manner of holding Band elections.” Neither document says in plain words whether that power lets the Council add new qualifications, or only lets the Council manage how the vote is run.

The Constitution does have a process for changing its own provisions. It is called an amendment. Under Article XII, an amendment can be proposed by a majority vote of the Council or by a petition signed by 30 percent of eligible voters. It then needs approval from the Secretary of the Interior and a vote of the membership, with at least 30 percent of eligible voters casting ballots.

No ruling from the UKB Tribal Court answering this question turned up in the documents reviewed for this report. Whether the Council can add those qualifications without changing the Constitution is a question the Tribal Court has not yet decided.

A candidate who is turned down after the background check can appeal in writing within 10 business days of getting the disqualification notice.

For someone thinking about running for Council, meeting the Constitution’s three qualifications is not enough under the current ordinance. A candidate also has to clear the additional requirements in Section 501, including the driver’s license, the diploma, and the background check, or the Election Board can keep that candidate off the ballot.

SOURCES

United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, Constitution and Bylaws (1950), Articles V, VI, VII, XII, XL.

United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, Corporate Charter (1950).

2025 UKB Election Ordinance, Resolution 25-UKB-132, Sections 501-502.