Leadership Lessons from the Cherokee Nation: Learn from All I Observe

INTRODUCTION

My father grew up in the heart of the Cherokee Nation during the Depression in Oklahoma and had 10 half-siblings. He helped raise the family by hunting, farming, and working. He was a full-blood Cherokee and graduated from Sequoyah High School, a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. There he learned discipline and mechanics as a trade. He was handsome, athletic, and spoke Cherokee as a first language. He married my mom, who lived 10 miles away from where he grew up, after World War II. She was non-Indian and had 10 siblings also. He was a tail gunner in the Army Air Corp, and she was a “Rosie the Riveter” during that war. They were married in 1947, and I was born in 1950. Because of the desperate economy in eastern Oklahoma, ...