Innovative Readiness Training: Cherokee Veterans Housing

The Innovative Readiness Training, or IRT, is a Department of Defense program. The military personnel, they saw that they weren't getting the training they really needed to be wartime ready or deployment ready. At the Cherokee Nation, we use that to build 21 housing units that serve our veterans. So not only did we get the benefit of the housing, but they got real-world training so that they could actually go out and be deployment ready whenever they were called up. And so they constructed 21 two- and three-bedroom housing units. I just thank God for everything that he's done for me. I moved here last May. I'm not only a veteran, but I'm an elder now, and I know everything that I have, everything that I am, it's because of him. I went during the time the Vietnam conflict was going on. I spent the summer in Twentynine Palms, and then after that I was assigned to a communications school in San Diego. Mita is a Marine Corps veteran. She worked very closely with our Durban Feeling Language Center as a speaker, teaching the next generation of fluent Cherokee speakers the language. So I got into the Cherokee degree program and was able to get my degree and started teaching at the emergency school. By the time the school year was over, these kids were singing solos. Mita's a pretty special individual, along with all of the veterans that lived up there. That housing addition is actually named after one of our former council members and also a veteran himself. To have a house like this, it was just unreal. Almost a $500 difference in what I was paying to live in a small two-bedroom apartment versus what I have here. The difference in the rent was just really amazing.