I'll leave it to Trish and the other Cherokees to tell you about how and why his claims are phony and what other Cherokees say about him.
http://users.pandora.be/gohiyuhi/articles/art00125.htmI had a kind of run in with some of his follwers a few years ago. There was a twinkie group in Dallas calling itself MUTTS or Multifaceted United Tribal ? Society. Sorry, I've forgotten part of the acronymn.
MUTTS were some white pagans and people with distant NDN ancestry trying to be a tribe. They invited our old enemy Harley Reagan to come do sweats for them. Harley was so ignorant about how to do a sweat that many of them wound up badly burned or dehydrated.
The secrecy and tactics surrounding this were downright surreal. They posted about it only in an unlisted invite-only yahoo group. Even though all the MUTTS were from Dallas, it was held way out in the country, location kept secret until the day before the sweat. And just to keep any of the NDNs in Dallas from protesting, they scheduled it on the same day as an important annual powwow with the Gourd Dance Society and other big names.
Where the Oukah and his followers came in was with this: At least some of them were part of MUTTS, or working with them. They tried to infiltrate into the old ORE group and some others that were thinking of protesting. They warned MUTTS. I got some email from the "Office of the Oukah" demanding to know about any protests and who was behind them.
No matter how legit or not any of his claims are, many of his people are twinkie Nuagers.
They've got their own press, Triskelion (which is a European symbol BTW).
And they teach twinkie stuff from Diane Fisher/Ywahoo and Manataka.
http://groups.msn.com/CherokeeFriendsFireCircle/traditionalspirituality.msnwSome of what they teach looks to be more pseudo Lakota stuff. Is that a Lakota name their Cherokee language teacher has chosen? The dresses sure looks to be Plains NDN imitation.
http://groups.msn.com/CherokeeFriendsFireCircle/wakaslessons1.msnw