List of Principal Chiefs of the Cherokee
the title of the chief executive of the Cherokee Nation
Principal Chief is today the title of the chief executives of the Cherokee Nation, of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, the three federally recognized tribes of Cherokee. In the eighteenth century, when the people were primarily organized by clans and towns, they would appoint a leader for negotiations with the Europeans. They called him Uku, or "First Beloved Man".
The title of "Principal Chief" was created in 1794, when the Cherokee began to formalize a more centralized political structure. They founded the original Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee Nation–East adopted a written constitution in 1827, creating a government with three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. The Principal Chief was elected by the National Council, which was the legislature of the Nation. The Cherokee Nation–West adopted a similar constitution in 1833. In 1839 most of the reunited nation was reunited in Indian Territory, after forced removal from the Southeast. There they adopted one constitution.
“List of Principal Chiefs of the Cherokee” enters the record as the title of the chief executive of the Cherokee Nation. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what List, Principal and Chiefs can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7245055. VIAF identifies the subject as 14158548801516352304. The Library of Congress control number is no2025110664. None of the 4 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1794, 1827, 1833 and 1839.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of Principal Chiefs of the Cherokee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.