by George Brosi October 12, 2026 Why Columbus Day is celebrated in the United States is a good question. An Italian, financed by the Spanish monarchy, Columbus never set foot in what became the USA. As the first to plunder and exploit the land and people of the...
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“Sounds of Tohi”
Lisa Lefler wrote this jewel of Cherokee wisdom in collaboration with her longtime friend and colleague Tom Belt, citizen and beloved elder of the Cherokee Nation. The final paragraph offers up our assignment, as people of the settler-colonizer culture, to find a...
Focus on books by Benjamin Frey
Benjamin E. Frey, Ph.D. (EBCI) is Assistant Professor of Cherokee Language and Culture at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. Frey’s research interests center on sociolinguistics, with particular emphasis on language shift. “The motivation for my interest in...
A Republic Built on Native Land
Another entry in ICT's "America 250" series offers a historical timeline of the seizure of land by the European colonizers who created the United States of America while systematically ostracizing, excluding, forcibly exiling, and/or annihilating its inhabitants in...
The Battle of Greasy Grass
Young people in America are taught that US forces suffered a terrible defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 25-26, 1876. But to the descendants of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho people it was a brief moment of successful resistance to the encroachment of...
Unerasing the origins of the US Constitution
America's revisionist historians often ignore or discount the influence of the Haudenosaunee people's representative democracy on the principles and practices written into the US Constitution, ascribing them instead to the ancient Greek democracy, or to the British...
A step-by-step guide to Indigenous erasure
From Indian Country Today's "America 250" series comes this overview of the history of Turtle Island indigenous erasure. Rarely in the history of humanity has there been a genocide as sweeping in scope, as thorough, and as prolonged as this one, nor one in which the...
Cherokee Core Values
The Cherokee Preservation Foundation offers these tenets, written by members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, to help explain how the Cherokee people have been able to surmount many crises and hardships. Spirituality creates a bond among Cherokee people in...
Visit Cherokee – A website of the Eastern Band, by the Eastern Band, for the Eastern Band
As aspiring allies one of the most effective practices we can engage in is to spend time and money "on the Boundary," and the Visit Cherokee website is one of the primary means by which the people of the Eastern Band invite us to learn about their history and culture,...
The Blanket Exercise
In September of 2025, ABLA co-sponsored a visit by Paula Palmer of Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples, and participated in the presentation of the "Roots of Injustice, Seeds of Change" experiential workshop, also known as "the blanket exercise." Here is a...