"Everybody had a great-grandmother who was a Cherokee princess."

Smiling back in those photographs are faces of a Cherokee-Mexican, a Cherokee-black, a Cherokee-German, a Cherokee-Vietnamese, a Cherokee-Ecuadorian and a Cherokee-Irish.

"You know the mainstream, the majority population looks at the world as being either white or black. It is a race spectrum,"

Smith said. "But Indian communities don't look at it in that term. They look at it in terms of ancestry . . . It is the commonality of having a Cherokee ancestor."

To read the entire story click the link above.

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