I hear that Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain author) is now writing about Cherokees during Civil War times.
Haven't seen that movie yet--can't get past the fact that it was filmed in Romania.
Even a cursory look at Cherokee history ought to remind readers that the tribe was rather like an Indian Roman Empire--it conquered and absorbed many other minor tribes, Creek and Catawba, Lumbee and even some Seminole and many others. They generally just enforced a tribal "assimilation" on their conquests, but the unassimilated would not survive.
Called "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" if whites do it.
Goes to show that a human being is always a human being, no matter what romance is attached to the ethnicity.
Most of the intensely southern, rural mountainous decendents are strongly Cherokee in blood--the ones with the rebel flags on pickup trucks.