Cherokee Heritage Center: Before and After the Trail

The Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill, just south of Tahlequah, occupies wooded grounds that sit within the original Cherokee Nation territory in Indian Territory , the land the Cherokee people were forced to rebuild their civilization on after the Trail of Tears of eighteen thirty-eight and thirty-nine. Tahlequah became the capital of the reconstituted Cherokee Nation, and this area became the cultural and intellectual center of that recovery.

The Heritage Center holds a reconstructed eighteenth-century Cherokee village called Diligwa, where interpreters demonstrate traditional life before European disruption , flintknapping, blowgun making, stickball, basket weaving. A permanent Trail of Tears exhibit traces the forced removal and its aftermath. The Cherokee Family Research Center maintains one of the most comprehensive archives of Cherokee genealogical records in the country. Founded in nineteen sixty-two, the center is a leading institution for preserving and teaching centuries of Cherokee history on this continent.