Why should we care about dying languages Cherokee
[Music]
in 2005
i was a senior at the university of
north carolina at chapel hill
and i enrolled in a class called native
americans
in the 20th century i went into the
class thinking
why do native americans still want to be
different
from everyone else why can’t they just
assimilate
and speak english and be the same
through that class i came to learn the
history
of native nations in this country and i
also came to learn
that the us government had its own
approaches to educating
native americans the policy
was one of assimilation where
you take native american children from
their families
and force them to attend boarding
schools
where they are not allowed they were not
allowed to speak their native languages
they were not allowed to practice their
religions
they were forced to speak english they
were forced to practice christianity
and in my own life as a child growing up
in the 80s and 90s
i was bombarded with the melting pot
metaphor
where we expected immigrants to this
country
to assimilate to abandon
their own languages and
to become american whatever that is
so these policies and attitudes that
we’ve had towards people that might be
different or perceived as different
carried forth and they come
from a long history the boarding schools
had this
ideology that one must kill the indian
in order to save the man
rebecca nagle a cherokee nation citizen
and journalist
writes that adjusted for inflation the
united states government spent
three billion dollars to support native
american boarding schools
from 1877 to 1918.
boarding schools broke the transmission
of language and culture and shared
family values
because they destroyed the bonds between
children and their elders
the last residential boarding school in
our country closed
in 1973
and then following boarding schools
many educational systems adopted
english-only policies
for education during the second half of
the 20th century
native children and the children of
immigrants were
not allowed to be taught in their
languages
they were expected to only learn and be
taught in english
the thing is is that it’s very difficult
to become fluent in a language after
childhood requires a lot of input
and it’s difficult to get that when
you’re no longer a child
so these policies of assimilation and
boarding schools were
unfortunately highly effective
in that now the vast majority
of native american people speak english
as their first and often only
language
in 2010 i was a graduate student at
columbia university in ethnomusicology
but i had continued to hold this
interest in languages
and i began to wonder what role can
music play
in language revitalization and when i
thought about where i would inquire
about this further
i realized why not come back
to my home state here in north carolina
where i can
look at how the eastern band of cherokee
indians
is working to preserve the cherokee
language so i came here and i met all
these wonderful
cherokee people and
they said oh cool you you’re a musician
and you
write songs and you’re you’re learning
the language and i said this is great
hey guess what you’re not just going to
be the person that’s
studying music used for language
revitalization
guess what we’re hiring you and you’re
going to be the music teacher at our
cherokee language immersion school
ah so i began working
for a new gadua academy which is the
cherokee language
immersion school here about 20 miles
over the mountain here in western north
carolina
and new gdua is the inversion of a
boarding school model
in that cherokee is the intended
language of instruction
and bilingualism in english is the goal
so there i taught music and i
collaborated with many wonderful
cherokee speakers including a wonderful
lady named nanny taylor who is my mentor
and she and i translated so many
children’s songs and popular songs
together
including the song the christmas song
what child is this
to the tune green sleeves
[Music]
it’s a neigh
beautiful song so i took this song that
we had translated
and recorded to my second grade class
and i was playing it and they were
sitting there in front of me
and one little boy’s eyes filled up with
tears and they started streaming down
his face
and he said i miss my grandma
and his grandmother had just recently
passed
so all the other students started
wailing
and crying and talking about the people
they had lost
that they missed so hear this song
in cherokee language a beautiful tune
it connected these students to their
community and to their elders
in a way that can’t be quantified by all
the vocabulary lists and grammars in the
world
in saving the language
these children hear the voices of their
elders and their ancestors echo
in their own words
they will carry forward the language
that has made their people unique
for thousands of years even as they’re
part of a broader american
culture where we can share green sleeves
as a beloved tune we
can be a multilingual country
and still be united today
if you drive around the koala boundary
the reservation you’ll see signs that
say
she oddsed we
are still here and the cherokee people
are still here and they’re thriving
however the cherokee language has not
been
as fortunate most recently
i was told that there are 190 first
language speakers remaining
that’s less than one percent of the
tribe
and virtually all of them are senior
citizens
the eastern band of cherokee indians has
spent millions of its own funds
mostly from casino and gaming revenues
towards language revitalization programs
this includes
the language immersion school for the
children as well as a dirt
adult immersion programs studies have
shown
that programs for reconnecting
indigenous youth
with their languages and cultures reduce
social and health ailments such as drug
abuse
so there’s value in preserving the
language beyond
just saving the language itself
so as i worked with nougadu academy
i came to see how much saving cherokee
language
mattered to the cherokee people
and then as i was in their community and
became part of their community
it mattered to me too and i realized
that i could contribute something
even though i’m not an enrolled member
of the tribe even though i’m not a
native person
i have something to offer to help
saving indigenous languages relies
on individuals to make a difference
you can throw all the money in the world
at the problem
and it won’t save the languages
because it requires individuals day in
and day out to take action
and even those of us who aren’t native
can contribute
and learn something in order to help
keep these languages alive
you might wonder why should i care
it’s not my language and there’s an
appeal to science
here as well and that multilingualism is
very powerful in that
it gives us a different way of
understanding and perceiving the world
and this can result in technological and
scientific advancement
for humankind to illustrate
do you remember the states of matter
from physics
you learn solid liquid gas and maybe
if you’re a good student you remember
plasma
we learned these in school in science
class and they are
part of the natural order of the world
in our minds that’s just how the world
is
that’s how it’s organized because that’s
what we learn in english
however cherokee has a different way
of understanding matter it uses a
classificatory verb system
with five categories to talk about the
physical properties of objects
solid flexible long rigid
liquid and living
so for instance in the cherokee language
you have five forms
of the verb for to have
so let’s say i have a jar of water
aguine ha i have a liquid
now let’s say i take an ice cube out of
that jar of water
agiha i have a solid
now let’s say i have a friendly
purring cat cat is weisha
and cherokee weisha
i have a living cat
now let’s say my cat had to go in for
surgery
and it’s lying there unconscious on the
table
and i pick it up
i have a flexible cat
god forbid my cat doesn’t make it
through surgery
and 24 hours later
his rigor mortis waysha aguaya
i have a rigid cat
less morbidly i could also just say
gonza aguera i have a
stick so cherokee
grammatically requires that whoever
speaking it
pays attention to these different
qualities of objects
that are different from what we use in
english
so it categorizes and organizes the
world
in a unique way to cherokee language
i’m now the director of the cherokee
language program at western carolina
university
and i have many non-cherokee
people like many of you that take my
cherokee language classes
both in-person classes and we also offer
online classes
many of these people are classroom
teachers from the area
who want to have a greater understanding
of cherokee culture
so they can relate better to the
cherokee students in their classrooms
or their community members who want
to have some better sense of this
indigenous language that’s unique to
this place
and to the community around them
each little bit of cherokee language
that we learn
as individuals we carry forward with us
that’s one part more part of that
survives
whether we’re fluent or not and while we
can’t
reverse our nation’s past mistakes
towards indigenous peoples we can
throw our support behind the
preservation of our country’s endangered
languages
and in doing so we also preserve some of
our lesser-known histories
knowledges and perspectives that are
unique to this place
such as junalaska
june lahoski who was a cherokee leader
from this region in the early 19th
century
and as americans all of us
as americans in preserving our country’s
indigenous languages
we also hold true to that motto a
pluribus unum
that we are out of one out of many
one not because we
eradicate our differences
but because we celebrate them as our
greatest
strength thank you
[Music]
you