Although campus security was called, Jacob returned to his studio near NSU without further incident.

Jacob’s letter stated there were many more pressing issues facing the Cherokee Nation than the one he raised, specifically mentioning statements by Cowan Watts calling him a “wannabe” and a “fake Indian.”

Contacted at his studio later, Jacob wanted to make no further comment on what happened in the call.

“I was told 20 years ago that if they persisted in calling me a fraud I could take them to district court right now,” he said. “If they persist I will have them in district court and they will have to prove I am a fake.”

Jacob has said he has Kentucky Cherokee ancestry through his Ironically, several speakers during the afternoon discussed people who claimed Indian descent from a grandmother, sometimes a “Cherokee princess,” sometimes a woman of an uncertain tribe.

And there are many of those rather uncertain tribes, and certainly unrecognized by the federal government.

Dr. Carol Morrow of Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau became interested in who was, and wasn’t, Indian when she learned about various Missouri tribes claiming to be Cherokee, including the Northern Cherokee Nation of Old Louisiana Territory, based in her area. She spent a decade researching these tribes and their various claims of Cherokee heritage.

“There are lots and lots of Cherokee groups in Missouri and Arkansas,” she said.

“These are just self-identified groups. Many of them have split from parent groups, gone off and set up their own. Many of the groups from Missouri claim heritage of people who left the Trail of Tears and settled in the area.”

Demographics show there is no basis for those claims, she said.

Some Missouri Cherokee groups claim descent from a group of Cherokees who left North Carolina in 1721 and moved west; others from those who sided with the British, left their homelands in the 1780s, and settled in southeast Missouri.

Others claim to be part of the western Cherokees who settled in Arkansas between 1818 and 1828, before the Cherokee removal.

“But if you get into the historic documents they are invisible in Missouri,” she said.

Those documents from the early 1800s list a number of tribes living in Missouri, but no Cherokees.

She presented a list of 15 tribes claiming some form of Cherokee descent that have applied for federal recognition. Many also have achieved nonprofit, tax-exempt status. People can pay to become members of many of these groups.