DeLanna Studi, Cherokee performance artist, activist and winner of the 2016 Butcher Scholar Award from The Autry Museum of the American West, has written AND SO WE WALKED: An Artist’s Journey Along the Trail of Tears, a frank, heartwarming and inspiring story about a contemporary Cherokee woman and her father who embark on an incredible 900-mile journey along the Trail of Tears to truly understand her own identity and the conflicts of her nation. The play -- now showing at Portland Center Stage in Portland, Oregon -- recounts the six-week journey, which retraced the path her great-great grandparents took in the 1830s during the forced relocation of 17,000 Cherokee from their homelands.  AND SO WE WALKED is a powerful, multi-faceted dramatic memoir that draws on extraordinary interviews, historical research, and the artist’s personal experience to convey the complexities and conflicts with which the Cherokee wrestle.