Story by Ava Pukatch
The Cherokee language in North Carolina is at risk. Fewer than 200 speakers remain in the state with concern that it could be lost forever. Ava Pukatch has more on efforts to revitalize the Cherokee language.
AVA PUKATCH: For UNC professor Ben Frey, he’s not just teaching a language class, he’s trying to preserve a part of North Carolina in danger of vanishing. In a tiny classroom, Frey teaches 10 students enrolled in Cherokee 102. Today’s class Frey has the students using “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys to conjugate the different forms of “to want.”
BEN FREY: You don’t see a textbook in here, because I’m busy writing one. And so every semester, I have to make my materials from scratch. I’ve made a lot of materials, but I’m basically building the plane while I’m flying it.
PUKATCH: Frey is the only UNC professor teaching Cherokee. He’s a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, but he didn’t grow up speaking the language.
FREY: The primary reason why was because my grandmother, I’ve been told was sent to boarding school where she was punished for speaking the language.
PUKATCH: Federal Boarding schools opened in the late 1800s. The federal government forcibly removed Native American children from their families and made them assimilate to Anglo-American standards – stripping them of their tribe identity and beating them for speaking their native tongue. Because of treatment in those boarding schools, fewer people chose to teach their children the language – leading to its endangered status.
BO LOSSIAH: We have 173 fluent speakers left. I think the youngest speaker we have is probably about 38, 39.
PUKATCH: That’s Bo Lossiah. He’s a curriculum specialist at New Kituwah Academy in Cherokee, North Carolina. It’s a Cherokee immersion school running from early childhood through sixth grade. Lossiah said he would love for the school program to continue past sixth grade but there’s just not enough speakers who want to be teachers left.
LOSSIAH: The ones we did have, they got older. They started in their 60s, a lot of them. So they’re reaching 70. It’s been a tough time the past couple of years. Really tough time. 12 years ago, there were 400-something. We’re down less than half of that.
PUKATCH: Because of this decline, Frey began creating an online Cherokee to English translation tool. And that’s not a simple task. Cherokee is a relationship-based language so a one-to-one English to Cherokee dictionary would be nearly impossible to create as translation requires the context of the entire sentence. Instead Frey compiles thousands of lines of parallel English to Cherokee text to preserve the language.
FREY: We have to think multi dimensionally about the ways that we’re going to solve this problem. I don’t want to say the word salvage but part of it seems to be about salvage.
PUKATCH: He said he has serious concerns around the future of the language, saying social norms need to change to create more Cherokee speaking spaces even in the absence of tribal elders.
FREY: Our elders aren’t going to be around forever. And we want to be able to preserve their knowledge, the best we can.
PUKATCH: And that’s why Carolina Indian Circle President AJ Hunt-Briggs and UNC senior is taking Frey’s class. A member of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina, Hunt-Briggs said learning Cherokee is especially empowering as the Lumbee language was lost during colonization.
AJ HUNT-BRIGGS: If, by learning Cherokee, I can help this language from going extinct, I’m gonna do it. Also [it] speaks to the resiliency of native tribes, because hit after hit, we just keep going. And it is exhausting. But there’s no other choice but to keep going.
PUKATCH: Frey said people can learn the language from computers, but ultimately he’d rather they learn it the way the Cherokee people have for thousands of years: from their parents, grandparents, elders and the community.
In Chapel Hill, I’m Ava Pukatch.
