Cherokee Heritage Center

I enjoy museums and having studied anthropology, I’m always interested in other cultures. This place is nice but it still needs some work. They have a museum, and the displays are good but they only concern the Trail of Tears. That’s something that I do feel everyone should know about but it would have been nice to broaden the museum to other aspects of the Cherokee life.
Outside there are two different areas. One is set up as a rustic town, much like the Cherokees would have been living in after the white people moved in. The other is set up to be an authentic Cherokee village pre-​invasion period. The town is nice and quite interesting. We had a good time going through it. The village, however, was a huge disappointment. The tours were only being conducted on the hour and we had just missed the last one. Rather than wait for the next tour (a 50 minute wait in 90+ degrees), we decided to just walk around on our own. We were stopped and told that we could not do that.
I paid my money to visit the museum and village but did not get to experience all of it. We were not told that we could ONLY visit the village as part of the tour. I don’t see any reason why it’s okay to wander on your own through the town but not through the village. Whoever is in charge of this place needs to pull their head out of their butt and get with it.
I probably won’t return to this place. It’s a fairly long drive from Tulsa and I could spend my time doing better things. If they ever fix it up to where I can view it at my own pace, then maybe. As it stands, it’s just not worth the effort.

Go get some necessary history nestled in a quiet corner of our world. Hidden gem.

I am Native American as well and I love checking out other cultural centers to see how other tribes live. This place was beautiful, very green and totally away from town. I was not able to tour the whole thing, we mainly looked around for bit and shopped at the gift shop. We were short on time. I would like to definitely go back and do the whole thing. All of it looked very interesting. I seen there was a village and other scenes set up to show how they used to live. The gift shop had tons a nice things, I bought shirts and small baskets for my family.