Hey, Jessica - The Potawatomis are actually the tribe of natives from which I am descended, which puts this topic very near to me as a person and is the reason why I chose it.

Regarding the Cherokee and Choctaw, I actually have not found anything that puts those tribes in direct contact with each other, at least not in any major way, within the purview of the history books that I have been reading. The Potawatomis were, at their height, a dominant tribe in the Green Bay area and around the Great Lakes, along with their allies, the Ottawa and Chippewa. The Cherokee were a few hundred miles to the south of them - they probably traded together, but they spoke different languages and had different cultural norms. The Choctaw are even more distant from them, though they may have been the source of shells that the Potawatomis traded for with furs.

Regarding any similarities, I do know that the Cherokee were very receptive to customs such as agriculture from the Americans - while this was not wholly true of the Potawatomis, they did have a model that they adopted when dealing with Europeans - the Potawatomis were fascinated by the image of the French trader, and many of them shared some degree of French descent. Before their removal, they also made deals with the government to have government laborers farm their land for them.

I also have been told that both the Cherokee nation and the Citizen Band of the Potawatomis have both had quite a bit more success since their movement to the reservations, when compared to some other tribes. I'm not as sure of these statistics, but I was told a couple of years ago that the Citizen Potawatomi Nation was the second wealthiest native American nation, and that the Cherokees were the wealthiest.