Business View Magazine - January 2024

economic development, which provides support services for the nation, McMillan said. “We are making sure to keep Cherokee cultural tourism as a premier asset for this group. We handle a lot of communication, marketing, and things like economic development that we support the Cherokee Nation through this unit of the business.” The Cherokee tribal capital is in Tahlequah, and nearby is Cherokee Springs Plaza. “That was a piece of property that was essentially in the city, but was underdeveloped, so we were able to acquire that as well as the golf course that abuts it, and begin the process of developing that,” McMillan said. A Ford dealership moved to the area, and the first phase was a strip center CNB put together, but the COVID hit, so space was difficult to fill. “But the nation continued to have growth and needs, so actually in that space is a gallery now that Cultural Tourism operates,” McMillan said. There is also a Cherokee National Research Center for archives and archival research. That center attracted a TRU by Hilton Hotel.“We did a land lease with a third-party developer, and they put in the hotel that helped meet some needs there in the marketplace,”McMillan said.“And we built out a new Tahlequah casino that has a big event space, as well as a casino and restaurants and such.” The adjacent Cherokee Springs Golf Club is an 18-hole championship course. The importance of telling Native American stories has led to the development of the Cherokee Nation FilmOffice,whose mission is to increase the presence of Native Americans in every level of the film and television industries, while creating economic development and jobs in the Cherokee Nation. McMillan explained how it grew out of the Nation’s own in-house production of content on OsiyoTV. “‘Osiyo’ is how you say hello in Cherokee. It grew out of a venue to tell Cherokee history, Cherokee stories, to highlight current events and talk about arts and culture. And then it became, well we’re producing this thing, what else could we do? We began looking at how the state of Oklahoma and other states and regions were embracing more localized film and TV, streaming content production.” Currently, the film office is headquartered in Tulsa, with the 27,000-square-foot Cherokee Film Studios in nearby Owasso. It also manages a 200+ acre backlot at a former Boy Scout camp in Welling, near the Nation’s tribal headquarters. “Everybody likes to look at Atlanta as the example,” McMillan said. “That’s a humongous city with a humongous film presence.We’re paying attention to that and looking for opportunities to both build that industry here, and then support Native storytellers, Native actors and Native representation in film and TV.” UP IN THE AIR Osage LLC, a tribally owned holding company of the Osage Nation, is looking to the future and up in the air with the Skyway36, an autonomous flight technology center located adjacent to its Osage Casino and Hotel, outside Tulsa.The entire drone park and technology facility includes a renovated hanger and office space, along with a 3,000-foot runway and helipad space for unmanned aerial systems (UAS). Skyway36 is the Osage Nation’s Aerospace Technology Innovation Zone and is a node on the Skyway Range (formerly the Tulsa Regional Advanced Mobility Corridor (TRAM)), a coalition project between Osage LLC, Oklahoma State University (OSU) and the Tulsa Innovation Labs. The TRAM project was the winner of a $38.2 million Build Back Better Regional Challenge grant from the Biden Administration in 2022. “We have been working on establishing the corridor and establishing the entry for that corridor, with one of them being Skyway36.We’re anticipating that will be one of the major ports of entry, if you will, into the corridor,” said Russell Goff, CEO of Osage LLC. “We’ve established a location on the Osage Nation Ranch, which is a 43,000-acre cattle ranch in Osage County, our remote side, we’re calling that Skyway North. That represents two of the four nodes for the 114 nautical mile corridor that we are developing as part of that grant with OSU.” According to Goff, they have been working infrastructure and working with OSU to submit variances for the FAA and waivers that would allow them to operate drones beyond the visual line of sight (BVLoS). “That’s the whole idea, that you don’t 9 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 11, ISSUE 01 OPENING LINES