Cherokee speakers celebrate efforts to preserve language

“The next day she saw that we didn’t write in our paper, she lined us up and called out to us about two or three times,” Bark told an ICT+ Tulsa World reporter.

Hundreds of fluent Cherokee speakers, many with backgrounds similar to Bark’s, gathered Tuesday at the Cherokee Casino in Tahlequah for an event celebrating the tribe’s efforts to revive the language. About 1,500 people are known to speak the language fluently, with dozens of Cherokee children growing up learning the language in immersion schools.

Cherokee Nation Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. on Tuesday discussed two major language projects the tribe has launched.

Tribe recently in partnership with Amazon to finance the tribe new film institutewhich gave the tribe the opportunity to hire fluent speakers as voice actors to dub the Cherokee language in the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The dubbed episodes will be released next year. The first dubbed episode will premiere during a special screening this weekend. SkasdiCon.

In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Cherokee Nation Constitution, the Tribe is also working to translate the Cherokee Nation Constitution into the Cherokee language using the syllabary and is distributing copies to Cherokee citizens throughout the country.

The Cherokee language declined during 20th-century assimilation efforts into federally run Indian boarding schools that administered corporal punishment to children who spoke their native languages.

Bark said that in his second-grade class at Oaks Mission in Delaware County, about six or seven Cherokee students couldn’t speak English, and he was one of them. Oaks Mission was a federal Indian boarding school that became a public school in the 1930s. When Bark attended school, it was no different from any public school, but Indigenous children were still treated the same, with assimilation forced upon them.

“We didn’t know how to ask to go to the bathroom,” he said. “So we would wait for the teacher to turn around and write on the board, and we would sneak away.”

When Bark graduated from high school, he joined the army and spent 17 months in Germany.

Letting his native language languish was “scary,” he said, and by the time he returned home, his mother said he was losing his language. Since then, he has worked to regain his fluency.

The tribe has language immersion programs for Cherokee citizens of all ages, from infancy to adulthood, with a master/apprentice program. The country also recently began construction of a new immersive high school in Tahlequah.

Hoskin said the language department’s updated minimum budget is about $20 million a year. In honor of Cherokee speakers, the tribe held a drawing for several tickets to North Carolina so that winners could take a free trip to the Cherokee homeland. During the event, Cherokee speakers and singers gave speeches and performances in the Cherokee language.