I am Cherokee/Choctaw and am just now learning more of my heritage. I live just outside Hot Springs National Park and was duped by one of the biggest con men I have ever known. Randy Lee" Standing Bear" Moore is good at drawing in people like myself who want to learn about their heritage and are trying to learn about their ancestors and getting their money and provide them with a bunch of hooey. I learned afterwards that he has been a promoter of concerts and other events in the past and for a while was a Fund Raiser for non profit groups. He had been hired by a group my parents helped form by his slick talking of what he would get for them and never delivered. They have sworn statements from people who donated money about how much they gave yet he never produced records showing these people donating a single cent. When we discovered that he was the same person, he and his wife were asked about this yet neither one of them could remember him even doing this kind of work. The one good thing that came from being involved with this group was meeting one who is now my brother, Raised by his grandfather on a Seneca Rez, he has been helping me to learn more of the ways even if they are not traditional Cherokee ways. My mate is a Genealogist and has been doing a lot of research into my family to help us discover who we are and were our people came from.
I know I will never be able to join the rolls due to the fact I had no relatives anywhere near where they were enrolling at the turn of the 20th century and from what I heard growing up, they would not have enrolled if they were there. My families that my bloodlines came from were in Southern Arkansas and East Texas during this time frame. My purpose in researching is not to be on any rolls but to learn more about my family history. Moore even claimed to have been at the site of a camp that the first of my grandfathers to come to Ark. had been at. He came to Ark in 1819 after signing the Turkey Town Treaty of 1817. Yeah he was one of the ones that Jackson got drunk. Moore claimed that this was the first time he had heard this was one of my gfathers even though I had told him about him a week earlier. This was when my eyes began to open to him.
If anyone wants to contact me privately, I will answer any questions that I can about him.

