United Keetoowah Band

When I was thinking about whom to write my post on for this particular entry, I took a lot of things into consideration. I enjoyed meeting with both the Keetoowahs and the Freedmen, but both in very different ways. I thought that the Freedmen had an amazing story to tell, and that they gave us so much to look at, it was almost too much to take in. The Keetoowahs, I thought were a very different experience Not only from the Freedmen, but also from the Cherokees. While the Keetoowahs and the Cherokees are in a very basic sense the same tribe, they both tell very different stories, and the way in which the Keetoowahs told theirs was incredibly bothersome to me.
For starters, when people repeat things over and over, it has a tenancy of convincing me of the exact opposite. That was one of the things that really bothered me about the Keetoowahs, they continued to allude to the fact that they had documentation to prove their case. However, unlike the Freedmen and the Cherokees, they never provided us with any of this documentation. I am not suggesting that such documentation does not exist, merely that it would be much more convincing if they would have provided copies of it. There were many other things that they continued to repeat, and most of them are not worth repeating in the first place.
When I first when into the meeting with the Keetoowahs, I really tried to keep an open mind. However, the more and more I listened the more and more I became unconvinced of their story and claims. It wasn't that I didn't believe what they were saying, its just the way that they were telling their story made them sound very immature. They continued to refer to the Cherokees as "that other group," or "those people down the road." I realized soon after that whenever the Cherokees referred to the Keetoowahs, while they did disagree with them, they never referred to them in such an immature way. I thought that the way the Keetoowahs talked about the Cherokees was very discrediting to their story.
While I did think that our meeting with the Keetoowahs was interesting, it was not as eye opening as I had hoped. Hopefully next year they can have their documentation ready and waiting.