The Spring River Gem and Mineral Club (SRGMC) will meet 10 a.m. May 5at Thunderbird Center, 62 N. Lakeshore Rd. in Cherokee Village.
Dr. Daniel Little-field, Co-Founder and Director of the Sequoyah National Research Center (SNRC)in Little Rock, will present “A Close-Up View of a Cherokee Family 1811-2010.” The program is taken from SNR Carchives : The James Tand Sallie Frazier Collection, which consists of documents and other items related to the descendants of Sallie Frazier’s great grand-father, Gideon Morgan, a Cherokee entrepreneur, a Cherokee national government official and an early Oklahoma political figure. The presentation follows a Cherokee family through two centuries.
Because they were Cherokee Nation citizens, the collection contains documents related to Cherokee land allotment, including allotment se-lection certificates and deeds; oil, gas, and land leases; banking and business records; Cherokee and early Oklahoma education; family history; and Cherokee and Oklahoma politics. There are affidavits of birth for Cherokee children in Tahlequah District. The Morgan papers include Tennessee land and business records and personal correspondence of Gide-on Morgan’s aunt, Cherokee America Rogers. Other family records contain correspondence, including a number of slave documents from the pre-Civil War period.
The Sequoyah National Research Center is an Arkansas gem. It is the largest assemblage of Native American expression in the world. The mission of the SNRC is to ac-quire and preserve the writings and history of Native Americans and Alaska Natives. The SNRC strives to ensure that the discussion of Native Americans accounts for the perspectives of the peoples themselves.
Drs. Littlefield and Parrins founded the American Native Press Archives in1983, later changed to the Sequoyah National Research Cen-ter. In 2005 Dr. Littlefield was named Director. He has served on the Cherokee Nation’s Great State of Sequoyah commission. In 2001 he was inducted into the Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame, andin 2014 the Arkansas Historical Assn. honored him with its lifetime achievement award for hisco-founding of the Sequoyah National Re-search Center and his promotion to Arkansas history.
The Spring River Gem & Mineral Club meets on the first Fri-day of each month, excepting June and December. Presentations are consistently presented by experts in their fields. Future programs include “Energy, the Future, Present and Past,” “The Metallic, Industrial and Critical Minerals in AR,” (can you name them?), movie clips of “The San Andreas Fault: Hollywoods’s Natural Playground,” (revealing the un-truth of Hollywood earthquake scenarios,) “Human Paleontology” and “Chinese Culture.”
Visitors are welcome to attend a meeting. For info call 901-647-1521 or 901-212-0365.
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