Cherokee Nation Ties Economic Growth to Cultural Continuity

For the Cherokee Nation, prosperity means more than jobs, revenue, or economic impact. It also means whether Cherokee communities, language, and ways of life can endure. Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin says the Nation measures economic progress in familiar terms—whether jobs are available and good—but those measures are incomplete if the gains do not reach communities where Cherokee culture is carried forward.

That connection has a long history. The Cherokee people were in the southeastern United States before the formation of the country, and their history, Hoskin says, shapes how they understand both government and survival. In the early 19th century, Cherokee leaders faced an existential choice about how to hold on to their people and their land. They chose democratic government and the written rule of law rather than leaning into violence. Their ancestors, he stresses, were radicals: they moved from decentralized forms of governance toward a more centralized system with an elected chief executive, an independent judiciary, and a separate legislature.

Survival was a central reason for that design. Hoskin says the Cherokee wanted a government that looked enough like the United States’ government to be understood by it, and that could stand as its peer. At the time, the design was a consequential change in how the Cherokee governed themselves. Today, the Nation still has an elected chief, a separate and equal legislative council, and a judiciary. Hoskin says the structure has continued to serve the Nation, while acknowledging that its government is not perfect. He sees the Cherokee system not as a symbolic inheritance but as a working institution that supports the Nation’s ability to make decisions and build its economy.

The same emphasis on continuity informs how he talks about wealth. Cherokee prosperity should include “dollars and cents” and jobs, but not at the cost of cultural impoverishment. The Nation, he says, wants to be prosperous in this century while sustaining a vibrant culture.

Hoskin puts the Cherokee Nation’s annual economic impact at about $3 billion, a figure the Nation measures every couple of years. He describes the past 50 years as a period of growth: the Nation has moved from a few operations creating a limited number of jobs to an economy that includes gaming and entertainment, federal contracting, and a government that operates the largest health system in Indian Country. The health system employs thousands of people in what Hoskin describes as good-paying jobs, making it both a major public service and an important part of the Nation’s economic activity.

That growth took place after a period in which, Hoskin says, the United States suppressed the Cherokee Nation. For much of his grandfather’s life in the 20th century, his grandfather and other Cherokees could not vote for a chief. Hoskin describes this as an effort by the U.S. government to dismantle Cherokee democracy. He uses that history to place the Nation’s recent economic expansion in perspective: the growth he describes has occurred over roughly the last half-century, not across an uninterrupted period of self-government.

But a large impact figure does not answer whether prosperity is shared. Some Cherokee communities, particularly rural ones, remain physically isolated from jobs and have seen little private investment. Hoskin says the Nation is trying to change that by encouraging entrepreneurship and setting up opportunity zones in places with pockets of poverty. He presents these efforts as an attempt to draw investment toward communities that have not benefited sufficiently from the broader growth. The test, he argues, is not simply whether economic activity increases, but whether its benefits become equitable: whether people have a chance to succeed regardless of where they live.

The Nation is also investing in people’s ability to take jobs that need to remain in the region. Hoskin says it will spend about $25 million in a year to send roughly five or six thousand Cherokees to college, while spending millions more on non-college career paths for people who want them. Those investments are intended to prepare people for work, including jobs that need to stay in the region. Hoskin also raises uncertainty about AI without presenting it as either a solution or a settled threat. It could eliminate jobs and deepen the distance between isolated communities and opportunity. Or, if people are equipped for the work, it could allow someone to remain in a small community while doing work that reaches across the globe.

For Hoskin, the stakes of that investment are not captured in an economic-impact study. A small town in northeastern Oklahoma might disappear without moving the region’s headline numbers. But if the community is one where Cherokee language is spoken and cultural practices are passed down, its loss could matter profoundly to the Nation’s future. The challenge is to make economic opportunity reachable without treating the survival of those places as a secondary concern.

Hoskin points to Bell, a community in Adair County, as a concrete example. Its public school has closed, and the community already faces substantial economic difficulties. Yet Bell is also home to first-language Cherokee speakers and people learning the language. If the community deteriorates, he says, a generation that should be able to get an education, find good work, and live where it wants while carrying on Cherokee traditions may lose that possibility.

The Nation is discussing whether it can replace some of what the school’s closure took away with a community investment: a place for children to learn language or a vocation, and to have something to do. Hoskin connects school closures and consolidation in Oklahoma to the viability of communities that government and the broader country may overlook. He says Cherokee leaders have gone into communities that feel forgotten to consider what might sustain them.

William Brangham puts the underlying idea this way: a nation’s wealth cannot be reduced to its balance sheet, GDP, or output. Economic resources matter, but so does transmitting the past into the future—and neither can be sustained without the other. Hoskin agrees. Bell may be marginal in population or economic studies, he says, but its significance to Cherokee language and culture makes its future consequential.

Brangham asks how a leader can know, near the end of a term, whether he has done enough for generations still to come. Hoskin says he cannot know: the future is elusive. But he argues that governments should invest in durable foundations for long-term growth rather than concentrate on incentives intended to attract a company quickly.

He points to healthcare, early-childhood education and daycare, schools, and housing as conditions that affect whether capital comes to a region. He says he has seen investment bypass parts of the country because healthcare access is inadequate, education ranks poorly, or families lack safe childcare and housing. Tax incentives can matter, he allows, but he has not heard them described as a recipe for long-term growth on their own. Without an educated workforce, care for children, and healthcare access, he says, there is a low ceiling on what a region can build.

Hoskin connects this approach to the work of his predecessors, particularly Wilma Mankiller. He credits Mankiller with pushing the Cherokee Nation to take control of its healthcare system and build it up. Hoskin was born in 1975 in a federally run Indian hospital, which he describes as staffed by capable people but part of a “rotten system.” The Cherokee system is not perfect, he says, but it now records three million patient visits a year. The Nation recently opened a $470 million hospital in Tahlequah and plans a $400 million health campus in Claremore. For Hoskin, those investments offer a measure of whether the Nation is building capacity that can serve its people over time. The system’s scale also means that this public investment supports thousands of jobs, connecting the provision of healthcare with the Nation’s economic role as an employer.

He sees the same logic in housing, higher education, career and technical training, and job creation. These investments may benefit generations long after the current administration is gone. His hope is that they will help produce full employment, keep communities like Bell alive, and support a renaissance in Cherokee language and culture. Those are forecasts and aspirations, not outcomes he claims are assured. He says he cannot guarantee that they will happen, but believes current investments can make them possible.

Hoskin invokes the image of planting a tree whose shade the planter may never enjoy. He also looks further back, to the period after removal, when Cherokee people had been displaced, politically divided, and devastated by the loss of a quarter of their population. In his account, they responded by putting 70 cents of every dollar into public education—an investment he sees as evidence of optimism about the future. He also credits earlier Cherokee business leaders with taking risks, including in gaming, and describes that development as part of a longer effort to assert that the Cherokee belong in their homeland and can help make it a great home.