THE RIVER
A Cherokee Principal Chief's Fight for Family, Truth, and Vindication
In September 2015, Patrick H. Lambert was elected Principal Chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians with 71 percent of the vote - the largest margin in modern tribal history. Twenty months later, he was impeached.
This is a story of resilience, integrity, and one man's refusal to be erased.
Born on the Qualla Boundary in Western North Carolina, Lambert grew up in a cinder block house where two mountain creeks met, the son of a roadside chief who posed for tourist photographs and a mother whose quiet faith held the family together. He dropped out of high school, worked as an underground miner, earned his GED, and eventually put himself through law school at the University of NC at Chapel Hill. He returned home to serve his people.
For twenty-one years, Lambert built and led the Cherokee Tribal Gaming Commission, building one of the most successful tribal casino gaming enterprises in the United States. He drafted the gaming regulations, negotiated the management agreement with Harrah's Cherokee Casino, and established the regulatory credibility that made it all possible.
When he finally ran for Principal Chief, he won overwhelmingly on a platform of government transparency, accountability, and anti-corruption reform. He ordered forensic audits that uncovered millions in mismanaged tribal funds and referred findings to the FBI. The federal investigation that followed threatened powerful interests - and those interests struck back.
Lambert was impeached in a proceeding conducted without formal rules, by Tribal Council members who served simultaneously as accusers, witnesses, prosecutors and judges.
What followed was an eight-year journey through political exile, personal rebuilding, and legal battle. In July 2025, the Cherokee Supreme Court unanimously restored Lambert's civil rights, ruling that the lifetime ban imposed on him violated the Cherokee Charter.
The River is a memoir about Native American leadership, tribal sovereignty, Indigenous rights, and the cost of fighting corruption in Indian Country. It is also a love story - marriage, family, and one man's unbroken connection to the ancestral land and people who made him.
