Cherokee Language Teachers Interview

Partial Transcript: There is only less than two hundred speakers, survivors here on the Boundary with the Eastern Band and total there’s -- about 2,000 – about 2,000 speakers so we don’t want to lose our language.
Cherokee is considered an extremely endangered language. There’s different levels of language loss. When you get to the highest level, it’s very rare for a language to come back from that. And every culture deserves to tell their story with their words. Telling your story through someone else’s language is telling your story through someone else’s lens. So when a culture loses that language, they lose that connection to their own history. And so that’s what we’re fighting for – is to be able to tell the Cherokee story in Cherokee way with Cherokee words.

Partial Transcript: I like what we do.
We have fun with what we do. But it’s a passion of mine. It’s a God-given language. We get our language from our Creator and with – it’s my first language so I want to give it back. It’s my way of giving back to the – our – my people, our community, and to the world. We have students from everywhere. From the other side of the United States, you know so they come from everywhere.
And its nice to be able to wake up in the morning and know that you’re making a difference in the world. That you’re not just clocking in and waiting till five or three o’clock. We come in and we’re engaging with the students. And we’ve had record-setting enrollment and you could tell that they’re passionate about learning the language. It means that every day we come in, it’s one more day the language has to survive and to thrive. And we always tell the students, “Even if you only take one word from this class, carry it with you because you may be the last person to remember that word. God forbid. But if you are, we’re happy to know that you’re there, and that you have that piece of it with you.”

Partial Transcript: Pretty overwhelmingly positive.
Yes, we had a lot of good-- We do surveys with the students and they have been glowing – yes
– glowing. And we’ve taught kids from kindergarten, or daycare, in her case, all the way through college. And we still see the kids that we taught when they were in kindergarten. Our first group just graduated. Some of them went back to teach at the immersion school where we taught them. And being in college, we’ve had students go back to the Boundary and work in teaching. They’ve worked in tutoring. They’ve worked the language programs in different ways. You know, you have to recognize your own mortality as a person and to know that you can only be effective for so long. So either you pass it on to the next generation or it’s lost. And so our job is to pass it on to that next generation. And when we see them coming back, at whatever level they are, and using language, we know we’ve met our goal. We know that we’ve sent people to walk in our place when we can’t do it anymore, which I hope is a while from now.

Partial Transcript: So Western Carolina University has a Cherokee Studies Program and within that department is the Cherokee Language Department. The Cherokee Language Program. One of the things that we do is outreach and the program Direction, Dr. Sarah Snyder Hopkins, is amazing at creating books and materials. A lot of these are used in the Immersion Program, which is the K through 6 Cherokee Language School that’s on the Boundary, which is where we used to teach. A lot of these we don’t use with our college students because they tend to be a very highly effective filter. They’re learning the language. And, actually, a five-year-old kindergartner who has Cherokee as their first language learns to read a lot faster than a 20-year-old college student who’s been reading English their whole life. So these are some of the books that our programs have made. Dr. Snyder Hopkins works with Wiggins Blackfox, who is another fluent speaker, and Tom ( ) frequently. And so these books are books that they have been working on. They take books, like for example, Charlie Brown – and very noticeable culture touchstone characters that the kids probably have seen in their daily lives with their family. And so this is a Christmas book about Charlie Brown and this book we will probably use for our fifth or sixth graders – the immersion program. And we like to use books like this that have common characters in it because it helps the children make those connections in the world of people who aren’t first-language Cherokee speakers. We also have other books about holidays. This is an informative book about Halloween. And you can see some of it has – still has the English like “All Souls Day” is still in English because it’s very difficult to translate religious terminology from other cultures into Cherokee. We want to be respectful and so it will describe what that holiday is more than give it a Cherokee name since it’s not a Cherokee holiday. And this is a great book for probably our, I would say, third to fourth graders at the Immersion School that talks about different aspects of Halloween, which is a holiday that they all celebrate. We have books – smaller books, for example – this would be a read-aloud for a second or third grade classroom. And we like to use books that have different kinds of illustration styles. You’ll see cartoon. You’ll see more realistic drawings. You’ll see photo realism. Because it let’s the kids have the same richness of culture they would at an English classroom. We have a lot of books like that. We also translate traditional stories into Cherokee. The – there’s been several books, like How the Possum Lost Its Tail is one of the stories that was translated into Cherokee. But we want them to have a mix – the traditional stories as well as stories that they’ll be learning in English anyway -- so they can understand the dichotomy of the languages. And, I’ve made a couple myself. This is one I made when I was a student here at Western before I started teaching. And this is just a little book about a little girl named ( ) – a kind of a play on Strawberry Shortcake and I wrote it for the kindergarteners that I was working with. Illustrated it myself so they’re questionable illustrations. But I wanted something that I could give to – give to who was teaching there then to say, “Here, you give this to the kindergarteners.” And it’s hand-sized. And we try to have the kids have a large plethora of books. When I came on board at the ( ) -- the Immersion School -- I think there was three books that were in the classroom and that was it for the whole school year. And if you think about it from an education perspective, we would expect 50 to 60 read-aloud, not even mentioning readers in a classroom. And so when they came to ( ), the curriculum department went into overdrive and has translated hundreds of books into Cherokee over the past decade. They have been – Bill ( ) and the people who worked in the curriculum department with him have just been amazing at translating books. The speakers have been involved in the translation process. You’ve helped translate a couple. And we’ve put them in the classroom and it gives the teachers a tool that we need to make them well-rounded, effective, effectual students. So this is the Western Carolina University contribution to that effort.
And all of them, if you notice, are wrote in the Cherokee syllabify and at the new ( ) Academy, our children are like sponges. All children are like sponges so we teach the syllabify to the children there. Not to our college students. Because I believe that in teaching language you have to take the baby steps. In any language. So we start with just conversation and sounds and then later, if they choose to, they can learn to read and write in the syllabify.
Our children at ( ) have usually had three of four years of just spoken Cherokee within the classroom because they’ve been raised since they were babies in the classroom by fluent speakers. And then when they get into kindergarten, we can start them immediately on the syllabify writing system, which was developed by Sequoyah. And the language having its own writing system is really unique, so its part of that cultural revitalization is to make sure that syllabify stays very much included in learning the language. But with college students, what we find is adult learners typically they already have English as their note-taking style, or whatever their heritage language is. Giving them the syllabify versus phonetics kind of takes them – it takes away that time – like they would have had in day care where it was just all spoken. And so we kind of recreate those first few years of the language journey with them. So you saw in class today that they had the phonetics on the board. So that’s how we utilize language in the classroom – written language.

Partial Transcript: I would like to add, David, that I thank you for coming and doing what you do. It’s another way – another outlet for us to get the language out there when you do documentaries or anyone writing books or anything, we thank you for doing that job for us.
David: Well, you’re welcome. It’s meaningful to me. You know, I do films about Yiddish culture, about Scots-Irish culture, Cherokee culture. It’s all, you know, what I think people tend to miss is that – well, you guys don’t miss it – a lot of people miss it – that we’re all connected. And so we’re all part of this amazing tapestry, and when you pull one part of it away, then the tapestry isn’t quite as strong. So how do we instill that lesson, I think, is love. Is showing the beauty of-- The film has the basket weavers, the story-tellers. It has all different aspects there. Most important to me is the nature aspect. Is that the living world is not something you see outside your window, but --
We should take him on the Forest Friday. We used to do nature walks with our kids at ( ). But you know I think there’s such a big push for globalism these days that everybody’s so insistent on developing this culture that’s immediate gratification. Everyone speaks the same language. Everyone knows the same things. And you’re losing a lot of that cultural richness. Like there’s less – shockingly less interest – in learning original indigenous dialects. And so you’ve got language loss now at an unprecedented rate. So I’m really glad that people are realizing that and working to save indigenous languages. And other languages. It’s not an indigenous-only problem. It happens all over the world every day.
David: Well, you know, my family that died in the Holocaust. The original Yiddish speakers were most killed by Nazis so the ones that survived and came to America. They finally got here. Their parents convinced them, “Well, you’ve got to speak English.” You’ve got to wear English clothes and you’ve got to act like Americans. Because people were scared. They were afraid. Just like so many cultures that have been threatened. And so it’s understandable, in one sense, that you want to assimilate and, on the other sense, you’ve lost who you are. So creating that balance is so tough. In a consumer-oriented world where everything, is, as you say, instant gratification. So my effort in the Center for Cultural Preservation and the films that we make is to try to re-connect people to what’s most important. The most authentic things, like you were talking about, that you didn’t want me to film, but what comes from the heart is what’s most important.
And that’s what I come – I wake up for. But it’s my passion, and sometimes it’s the only time that I hear the language on a daily basis.