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.