Cherokee National Holiday, Annual Native American festival in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
The Cherokee National Holiday is an annual festival held in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, timed around Labor Day weekend each year. It takes place across several locations throughout the city and brings together performances, art exhibits, craft displays, and educational workshops.
The festival was founded in 1953 to mark the signing of the Cherokee Constitution in 1839, a document drawn up after the forced removal of the Cherokee people from their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States. Over the decades, the gathering grew from a modest local event into one of the largest annual meetings of the Cherokee Nation.
The festival features traditional Cherokee stickball games, one of the oldest team sports in North America, played on an open field where visitors can watch from the sidelines. Dance performances in traditional dress are also part of what visitors can see and hear during the event.
The holiday runs over Labor Day weekend each year, with events spread across Tahlequah, where the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band are both headquartered. The two-night intertribal powwow, stickball, marbles and cornstalk shoot tournaments, the parade and the Principal Chief's "State of the Nation" address fill the program. In 2020 the gathering went fully virtual, and the 2021 edition was a hybrid of online and smaller in-person events before the in-person format returned in 2022.
The 2020 holiday, the 68th, was held as a "virtual holiday" because of COVID-19: the Principal Chief's State of the Nation address, the art show, the Miss Cherokee pageant and traditional game demonstrations moved online, while the parade, powwow, fishing derby and food vendors were cancelled. The 69th edition in 2021 was a hybrid of virtual and smaller in-person events, and the 70th in 2022 returned to an in-person gathering.
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