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www.quickcaption.com ♪♪ [rushing water] >> WaaaHoooo! >> WaaaHoooo! [distant cheering] [Cherokee phrase] they say [Cherokee word] The ball was picked up
by the hand and it is called [Cherokee word] A lot of Cherokee
language was used and it was all used in the games
when I played back in the 50s and 60s on both teams, both sides. Whether it's Bird Town
or Wolf Town or Paint Town, we all spoke the Cherokee
language and we talked Cherokee in a ball game. (Speaking in Cherokee). >> They did speak in Cherokee,
mostly all of them, way back when I was growing up. There wasn't too many people
that speak in English, just a few of them. And you'd go to the home and
they'd all speak in Cherokee, everywhere you went. And now you can't go
nowhere and they'd say, "I don't know how to speak it." >> We were not allowed to speak
our language in school, we were banned from it. And that was that come
from the federal government. They had their ways of
punishing us if we spoke if we were caught speaking
the language. >> Growing up I heard stories from my grandparents
about the boarding school and the push for assimilation. Grandpa said he learned enough
English in the first six months to keep from getting
a whipping every day. And but they'd only
use Cherokee at home. And so it was traumatic for him. >> I'm not so sure that
language was the only reason that the children
were encouraged to speak English
and not Cherokee. I think it probably had a lot to do with Americanizing
the Cherokee children. >> When we were growing up
when, we were real young that was all that they talked
was the Cherokee language, very little English. Even my mother she was she had
a hard time pronouncing a lot of English words. And she talked to us
in the Cherokee language, but there was a bigger
interest in the English because that's the way
we were living. >> I remember in the early 60s
as a little girl going to a community meeting and there was some people
that came from the government, the BIA, and came
to our community meeting and they were telling
our parents how important it was that their
children learn English. It was going to better their lives and they
were going to be able to go to town and get a job. So I think because our
parents wanted what was good for us or better things for us, they encouraged us
to speak English. >> People would tell us, you know, you have to learn
the white man's way and that's even
including the language, because they'd say
this is a white man's world and you're going to be going out and you're going to have
to learn some of the things. Had they said, it's okay
if you speak English, but you need to
keep talking Cherokee, but they didn't
they just thought, well, it's the best
thing for our kids, so they encouraged us
to speak English. I think it's that time period that we started losing
the language. >> Mine and Shirley's
generation is probably the last and I'll be 59 in October and so
will Shirley be 59 in November. And I think we're it. >> This would have been
the heart of the Cherokee world. The Cherokee world kind of goes
out from this place in almost a spider web or a wagon wheel,
kind of. And we know that this is so
deep into the Cherokee world that it is unlikely that
you would have had contact with other tribal
people coming in here. So, in essence, think of Kituwah as Vatican
City with Rome around it. So your trade, your international trade would
have been at places like Keowee, Naquasi. Just over those mountains
right there, that's where you would have had, you know, all the languages you
could imagine being spoken at, but here, this would
have been purely Cherokee, purely Cherokee ceremonies
taking place here, purely Cherokee stories
taking place here. Traditionally, elders and story tellers tell us that Cherokees
have been here since the beginning; the creator put them
here specifically. Archeologically and anthropologically we believe
that Cherokees have been here for at least 12,000 years. >> A lot of these Cherokees
that lived here lived in Keowee and they had reservations,
private reservations in 1819 and North Carolina
come in and said, well, you made that treaty with the United States you
didn't make that treaty with North Carolina,
so they forced them out. So imagine every five or ten years you've got to move
and you've got to pack up whatever you can
put on your back and you're leaving
everything else at home, everything. That's what those Cherokees had
to go through year after year after year after year
and you're still here. >> In the beginning,
there were only, I'll say 1200,
I hear a different number, of how many people escaped
the Trail of Tears removal. All those people spoke the
Cherokee language in those days, 1200 of them. And today we have 14, 000
and only 200, I'll say 200, speak the language. I don't know, it might be more
it might be even less than 200 that speak the language. >> I haven't heard
the "help me" word today. [Speaking Cherokee] >> There's a few fluent
speakers, not too many, but those of us who can almost speak it try to
incorporate it and use it more in our daily lives
to preserve it. The spirit of getting together and working together
on crafts brings out the desire to use the language.
It just feels more natural. We cannot teach the children during these next
two weeks everything that there is to know
about beadwork or basketry or river cane or white oak, but we also know that
as with the corn beads, the most important
thing is to plant the seed and that's what we're doing. We're planting the seed
of beadwork and basketry and being able
to share what little we know about the Cherokee
language we're because just during the first part of
the week Jim introduced the word (speaking in Cherokee) to them when they
need help they're to say (speaking in Cherokee) and now they're using it
frequently on their own. And whatever little bit we can
help them and guide them with, that's what we're all about. [speaking Cherokee] >> We have this summer language
camp that we do every summer and it's for six weeks. They're here at 8:00 in the morning,
just like going to school. So if they were just
looking for something to do, they wouldn't be here. >> It's a little
bit hard sometimes, because you get new
students every year. So that's why we're going back
and we do the colors over, we do the numbers
and the syllabary is just an ongoing thing. Because if the children
who learn it one year, you know, they're not going to read it
the rest of the year, maybe, so when they come back
they have to be refreshed. And it's just a course to introduce them
to the language and perhaps and,
maybe, you know, what we pray is that
they'll be so interested in it that they'll
want to learn it. [speaking Cherokee] >> We know that the new
generation that's coming up that's not learning Cherokee, they're kind of
stuck in the middle. Part of them is native and part of them is trying
to survive in this world. They have to play by everybody
else's rules, you know, and try to live in a society
that doesn't make sense to them, because even if they
can't speak the language, they still are hanging
on to their culture, a piece of their culture
as much as they can, but they don't
understand it, you know? And to understand it, I think you got
to know the language. >> Right now for some of
the students in the community, some of the kids
in the community, where they don't
have that grounding in their own heritage language
and heritage culture, you see them creating their
own culture the only way that they can know how and
that would be by rejecting the mainstream culture. And so they're not going reject
television and fast food, all that stuff is too fun. They're going to
reject mainstream cultural institutions. And the only institution
that they're really exposed to on a daily basis is
the school system. And what we'd like to see more
research on is the connection between lifelong satisfaction and heritage
language maintenance. Does having your
heritage language center you and settle you
so that you're able to concentrate on
academic success? >> You know, it's interesting that we
if we look around the world there are about 7 to 8,
000 distinct languages, but something like 30 to 50
languages per year go extinct. So we're losing our
linguistic diversity at a really alarming rate. And what will happen is if you
imagine two large language communities living next
door to each other, one of those languages
is continually sort of out competing the other. So at every exchange
in a local shop, someone's got to agree
to speak the other language. Simply because English has
such an enormous head start, one would have to bet
on English being the language that's
going to be the, sort of, you know,
and this is a terrible, sort of, metaphor, the lingua
franca for the world. >> If our language dies,
it's gone forever. And a lot of people says, well, our Indian language is
not the first language in the United States, English is now. And if we let English take over,
then our language will die. >> It's not just
about the language, it's who we are and
what we believe in and how we live
every moment of our lives. >> Until we get back into understanding what
the language means to us, we're always going to be, kind of, lost just
wandering around out there not understanding
where we're going or where we came from our
where our place in life is, you know, in this society
even in America, even though we've
always been here. [car door slams] [speaking Cherokee] The new Kituwah Academy
is a total immersion program. We start with infants
and then we go all the way up to five year olds.
And then we go into elementary and we have roughly 40 students
that are in kindergarten through third grade. And as that oldest
cohort progresses, we add a grade each year. >> So those ones
that have stayed with us and blazed the trail,
they're the third graders now, so we're adding fourth
grade next year, fifth grade the year after that, and they will be ready
to go to middle school, wherever they may choose to go. >> Language revitalization
has come about from different
corners of Cherokee. There are different approaches
to it and there still. The immersion
program was probably the largest consolidated effort. It required
significant resources, significant support for its continuation
and that's a message to the community that
this is important. >> I think it's fascinating to see this kind of
process happening. This hasn't been done very much, what the eastern band of
Cherokee Indians is doing here. What you have in
the Cherokee language is this very strong feeling that the language is
a central component of who Cherokee people have been
and that there's an obligation on the current generations,
the living generations to maintain that
commitment to the past and to continue to speak
the language in their homes and in their community
and in their institutions. >> Well, it's not that we want
to be different, we are different. And it doesn't mean that, you know, we can't all live
in harmony in the States here, but, you know, again it
goes back to our language and our culture
and our traditions, you know? We're unique people
and that's okay. The United States is
about being diversified. >> Long ago in a small
town called Cherokee, lived a girl named Summer
and a boy they called Tsali. It says imagination is more
important than knowledge. Sequoyah had that imagination,
he had that vision. To me, he's an Einstein. His Cherokee name was Sequoyah. His work was destroyed
by some of the community people, even his wife. He went back and
started all over again and it was a great thing.
It was a great invention, because it's helped us
to preserve the language. >> It's a syllabary, because the characters in most
cases approximate a syllable. So (speaking in Cherokee). It's very interesting
from the perspective of the fact that you
would have literally thousands of years, say, for the writing
of European languages where you would go from
writing it to printing it. And so for this language, he finished his work
on the writing system in 1821, if I remember correctly. And then in 1828 you have
the first printing form of it in the Cherokee
Phoenix Newspaper. >> Let's see what we get here.
This will be a proof. >> And in fact that is
the second iteration of the writing system.
The original one that Sequoyah developed was
much more calligraphic. And so they converted
it rather fast from this original calligraphic writing system to one which does
look like Roman letters in a lot of cases. It was said to have been quickly
taken and used and then the papers started
printing in 1828. The first editor,
Elias Boudinot, was very intent on promoting
the need for the Cherokee to say in what is now the eastern United States
and you see that move to the place where he eventually
signed the final treaty removal and lost his life because of it.
So the newspaper, sort of, is a microcosm of the pressures
that you see one group people living under while they're
trying to deal with the loss, essentially, of their
country, their home. >> Just like this.
See how it pops out? >> So, Tuesday we went
to Hickory Tree Gap, it's an old, a very
old cemetery. We did find a couple
of tombstones that had the syllabary. >> Over at Cherokee
on the Qualla Boundary, they don't use this line.
They don't use this line. And then over here in Snowbird, sometimes they use it
and sometimes they don't. So what's a good word with lay? And then over in Cherokee they would always
say they would never say (speaking in Cherokee) they'd always say (speaking in Cherokee). >> It's so easy
to learn the syllabary. Look at all the symbols in the world that
you've memorized, like the Nike check. When you see that Nike check,
you know what it stands for. You see that peace sign,
it stands for peace, you know. All these symbols
that you've learned, didn't even know
you learned them. Well, Cherokee is the same way
as far as reading and writing, you're just learning the symbol. The alphabet, you
learn those, you know, it's a breeze. So that's the easy
part of Cherokee. I talked to a linguist
one time from Georgia, she said Cherokee is
the hardest language I've ever tried to learn.
I said, well, then it doesn't make me feel bad when
I am struggling with my students and wondering why it's taking
them so long to learn to speak. And she said, yes,
it is so hard to learn. >> The Cherokee language is
also completely different from any European language, so none of our students start
out with that kind of head start with cognates in the language or similar structures
in the language. And sometimes it's
surprising to people in the community also that they
have to come at their language now from an English
language perspective. If they haven't grown
up exposed to a lot of language in their home, then Cherokee language is just
completely new and, to me, very exciting and
quite a challenge, but to other people
very frustrating. >> There is no word
for word translation, one word could be a noun, adverb, adjective just depending
on how you say it in a sentence. >> You can take a Cherokee word and you can change your form
sometimes hundreds of ways and it changes
the meaning of that word. If we say go get something, if you're going to get
a glass of water, a liquid, it's different,
"go get" changes. Liquid is built
into the "go get". If you're going to go get
a flexible item, like a shirt, it's flexible, the flexible
is built into the word "go get". If you're going to
go get a solid object, the solid form is
built into "go get." Or go get a long and unbendable, like a fishing pole or a pencil. If you're going to go get
an animate object, something that's alive, a chicken, go get the cat,
go get the dog, "go get" changes.
So that's the hard part of teaching learners
when they're older. >> Cherokee is still
a little more, like, detailed so we would say "we",
but instead of saying, like, me and you and her, it could be just us two
and then not that person or it could be all three of us. >> And so you have
the whole sentence like, "I should go dancing," say, would be a single word
in Cherokee language, and that's difficult
for our students, sometimes, to understand. >> Reported past
and definite past, I definitely went
or I must have went. And I know you can
do that in English, because I just did it, but in Cherokee it's just
a small little "tst." >> It was our first language, that was the language
we were taught at home and it wasn't hard to learn. So nowadays it's harder
for the students to learn because it's not
their first language, it's not the first
thing they hear. >> It is a very
difficult language to learn and thank God
it's my first language. I would have I could
never learn it. >> I think that we
are getting to the children at the right time
and that is birth on. >> These little ones is the where the turnaround
is going to begin. They are going to take
the language and the culture that they're learning now and pass it on to
their children. >> Some people think
that we just sit and talk Cherokee
to the children and they think all they're
learning is Cherokee. What they don't understand is that they're learning
science, social studies, language arts,
mathematics, spelling, you name it. They're learning
all those content areas that English
speaking schools are, but it is in
the Cherokee language. >> One of the things
I really want people to understand is that
these children are bilingual, they're not monolingual.
They don't only speak English. They don't only speak Cherokee. And I want people to understand that they'll be
able to walk in both worlds. They'll be able
to understand Cherokee. They'll be able
to understand English. And they'll be able
to succeed in both worlds. >> It's in the like they're going home and not
hearing the English language or when they go to town
when they go Walmart or whenever they're hearing the
English language all the time. It's just like the Cherokee language was
when we were growing up. It's just, you know,
flipped over. >> I'm very thankful for
all my teachers. It's a great staff to work with
and they work together well. And I know it's difficult for them because they are having
we just can't go on the internet and find a worksheet
on the lifecycle of a butterfly or whatever. You have it can be found
on the internet then it has to be translated.
So it is difficult. I can't imagine having
to come up with a lesson plan that I needed that day. Sometimes you might
need something right then, and in a regular English school you can just go print
it out and it's there. >> In Cherokee there's no books out there so we're
making it up as we go. So even in our immersioin schools, we have to just try
to beat the clock and try to keep it
with the grades, because it requires
a lot of translation. >> We spend a lot of our
time working with speakers to develop the curriculum
and materials for the gradual presentation
of the language to the students so that they always feel
comfortable in the language and that they're always
learning a little bit more of the language
as they move along. >> These are all original books with native writers
and native artists and these are just first
grade readers here. You know, we didn't
have words for modem and just basic plug ins,
keyboard. I have to go to
the speakers and I say, well, what would
you say for this? And then they
describe to me, well, what does it do?
Like this one, it says (speaking in Cherokee), that means electric brain. >> Once you start learning
the language, it branches out to all other areas, history, culture, traditions.
When they're learning the language they're
learning everything about the Cherokee
people as well. >> When you are learning
the language you learn, for example (speaking in Cherokee), and that's a way
to say where I'm from. I am from such and such place. But in the nuances
of the language, what you're really saying is
my fire is at such and such. My council house is there. I am a Cherokee of where
this council fire is. And, you know, if
you ask a person, a Cherokee person, you know, what do you call
yourself as a tribal person? They would say they're Cherokee, maybe, but Cherokee is
not a Cherokee word, it has no meaning
in the Cherokee language, it's something that was applied, a name that was applied
to the Cherokee people. You would hear (speaking in Cherokee), which means the real people
or the principal people. Or you might hear (speaking in Cherokee). So you're literally saying I
am a person of Kituwah, of this place. >> My grandpa used to say (speaking in Cherokee) to me, like this, and he would maybe
have a knife, you know, and pull it away from me. And I thought he was saying
for the longest time, "Give it to me."
So I thought he was teasing me. And I took it as
the meaning of that word. And then later on I found out
that it meant lend me this. He was saying, "Lend
me this," you know, and it was much more polite. >> There's words in Cherokee
that are just so specific. The word (speaking in Cherokee) really can't
be translated into English because there's so many
things it encompasses, but it's one of the cornerstones
of our program. And the closest translation would be the right
path, the right way, but there's so many components that that encompasses that we
can't just give them a word in English. >> (Speaking in Cherokee) that's a powerful word,
it's hard to explain. Some people say it
just means straight, but to me it means so much more. It means it's a way of
being in the right way. It carries there I can't even think of how
to put that into words. >> Within the language
are values and traditions and history and ways of life. That's what speaking
Cherokee is about. And so without that,
we lose all of that. We don't just lose something
that's very difficult or something that's, oh, our elderly
people speak Cherokee, we lose who really
the heart and soul of who we are as
Cherokee people. >> This is what is so critical
and so important to our identity and our future as a people is to continue
on making this same sound that was given to us
by the creator, our language. It's a sound that hasn't
been heard here for 60 years, the sound of children
speaking our language. [speaking Cherokee] >> If we go some places and we start seeing
our friends or something, we usually, like, go up and speak
Cherokee sometimes. Then when you look around
people are just like, wow. >> My son, we actually ran
into his uncle at Family Dollar, I mean just a store,
and him and his wife was talking in the language.
They were talking about a goose, but they were referring
to it as a duck and it was on the top shelf. And the uncle was sitting
there calling it a (speaking in Cherokee). And here Jon* was, he was probably about three
or four at the time, and he's like (speaking in Cherokee). And the uncle turned
around and he looked, he looked back at his wife, and he looked back
at Jon and he's like, do you speak Cherokee? But he was talking
to him in Cherokee this whole time.
And he's like uh huh. And his wife is standing back and her eyes teared up
and my eyes teared up. It's just, my son can have
a conversation with two of our oldest fluent speakers and know what
they're talking about and respond in the language.
And seeing not only him but other kids speaking
our native language, it's amazing.
It just touches my heart. >> I like Cherokee
because it's very rare and a lot of people think
that it's just a language, but, like, if you're Cherokee
it's like your home. >> This total immersion program
is not a school, it's a home. And so from the very foundation
and the design and everything that we've put into it
is that we are not peers, your classmates are
not classmates, we are family. Your classmates are
not just your friends, they're equivalent to cousins
and brothers and sisters. It wears and tugs on your
heart every single day. There are moments of joy when
you walk into the classroom, when you hear
the babies speaking and understanding the language, and you're running
on the playground and they're speaking Cherokee, and walking into the cafeteria
and they are playing rock, paper, scissors, but they're
doing it in Cherokee. And you sit down with a pencil and paper you're trying
to figure out how you can keep this going, and it's rough work. It's hard. So you have to surround
yourself by dedicated people who feel the same way
about the language as you do. We can look at the newspaper
every week as it comes out and we circle the names of the people that we lost
that are fluent speakers and we look at how
we're going to be able to survive in
the next five years so that this program and
this language doesn't die, because if we shut our doors the language will just become
a list of vocabulary words that are taught
from dictionaries. >> They're hearing
the language all the time and they're reading
and writing it, but when they leave here it's
hard for them to continue to do that because their
parents are not bilingual. It makes it hard for
the child to continue. >> The thing is it's almost
we're running out of time, because we're losing
too many speakers. >> Thinking about the number
of native speakers who are fluent, it's a rather
sobering circumstance to think about a language
in that situation. There are many languages around the world that are facing
the same circumstance. >> You know, some people say, well,
it's your generation Lou, after you're gone it's
not going to be alive, but I think I'm making
a harder effort knowing that if it's going
to die with me then I need to do something
to preserve it and so I keep talking to these kids. And some of the high school kids
that's been in Shirley's class, if I drive to McDonald's
there's a boy there and I start talking
to him in Cherokee and he'll think about it. And he says he has
to think about it, but some of the words come back. And so I think that's how
you preserve your language. [speaking Cherokee] >> Keep talking to your kids,
your grandkids and that's the only way
we're going to get it done. You have the have the whole
community support, the majority of
the people realizing, you know, how important it is. >> I have a hard sometimes
because I live in this world, but one thing that I know is
I live on this Indian land and I have all the benefits
of being a Cherokee, not just because I live here, but because that blood
flows through me. I have a responsibility
to walk both worlds. If I don't have my
culture to ground me, then I really don't belong here. >> There has to be
an understanding and a value and the community has to embrace
the idea that Cherokee language it what makes us Cherokee, that having an enrollment card doesn't make you Cherokee it
just makes you a number within a government
within a government. >> And you'll hear that
in this work quite a bit, oh, you can't be
this kind of person unless you speak this language. And the problem with that is
languages can be so difficult to hang on to that you're saying
that you're own children, even, are not your own people. And so I think that rhetoric
is a little bit too harsh, but definitely that would
be one of the major drives for learning the Cherokee
language is your, kind of, sense of
Cherokee heritage and the language as who you
are or who you want to be. I'd like to think about it a
little bit more aspirationally. So learning
the Cherokee language now would be to say that you're
a part of the Cherokee community and it's a beautiful community. If we consider what it
actually means to be a pluralistic society, then that means we're going
to have to make space for people who speak different languages,
who think different ways, who have different cultures
inside of a national culture or a global culture. And so all the movement has
been in the opposite direction towards globalization, towards homogenization,
you know. What does it mean
to change the process and open up space for a plurality of different
small cultures working together? How can we truly accept
and respect those people and allow them some measure of autonomy with their
educational system and the language
that they speak? [speaking Cherokee] >> Yesterday I was
walking around, it was children's day, and I saw so many young
people have these tattoos and they have
the syllabary writing on them and I was amazed. I feel proud that
they are willing to celebrate their nativeness,
their Cherokee self with that, but I would hope that--
I don't want people just to put syllabarian
on their bodies, I want syllabary, not syllabary, I want the Cherokee language
to come out of their mouths. I want them to learn
how to speak. I want them to
celebrate our culture by keeping our language alive. My girls go to New Kituwah. I know that they're
learning their language and they're learning
their culture and, you know, I'm staking
their futures that they are going to be okay and that they're going
to be okay in the culture and that the culture is
going to take care of them and they're going
to be educated there. And so I don't know
where it's going to go, but I think we're moving
in a good direction. >> I resent the word now when I hear someone say it's
dying or it's a dead language, because it isn't, it's
very much still out there. I think that we can turn that
around and really turn it around by saying we're speaking it.
The children are speaking it. It's alive. >> Everyone wants to see how our children are going
to balance two languages and still be successful
in education with the English speaking world. There's a lot on these kid's
shoulders that a lot of people don't really realize. [speaking Cherokee] >> In English, that's
not my language. I speak it, but it's not mine. If I speak in Cherokee,
it's coming from the heart, because that's mine. That's my language.
00:54:59.296,00:00:00.000
[chanting]
Loss of language and overall indigenous knowledge of the enviroments in which we live is unfortunately urgent.
We lose more than we can understand in english alone with the loss of each language.
The youth of these cultures hopefully grow a life long desire to preserve their language, language is the holy grail of cultural preservation, knowledge, & wisdom.
https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures/transcript?language=en
For those that might know, what is an organization that I can support or donate to in order to help preserve Native American rights, language, and culture. Would be very grateful.