<h1>Cherokee for Beginners: the Long Road Back, Starting on Campus</h1>
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<img src="http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/photo_9323_wide_large.jpg" alt="Cherokee for Beginners: the Long Road Back, Starting on Campus 1">
<div class="cred-wrap"><p class="credits">Mike Simons for The Chronicle</p></div><p class="caption">Chris
Smith, a senior at Northeastern State U., handles multimedia at the
campus's Center for Tribal Studies. The statue is of Sequoyah, creator
of the Cherokee syllabary.</p>
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<p class="byline">By Lawrence Biemiller</p> <p class="dateline">Tahlequah, Okla.</p>
<p>Rebecca Carey-Drywater learned Cherokee the easy way, by
growing up in a home where it was spoken all day long. Her mother knew
almost no English, in fact, and while Ms. Carey-Drywater was still a
child she became her mother's translator. "She depended on me to read
the street names on buses and the directions at the Laundromat, and to
speak on the telephone," Ms. Carey-Drywater told me when I stopped here
to visit Northeastern State University. "I was very shy, but I would do
all her communicating."</p>
<p>There were awkward moments, she recalled—"I wanted my
English-speaking friends to come visit, but my mom didn't understand
them"—but her parents' language has stuck with her through the decades,
and now she's putting it to a new use in a Cherokee-immersion school
that the Cherokee Nation opened with help from the university. The
school aims to give Cherokee kids—almost all of them from families where
English is the primary language—the kind of fluency that Ms.
Carey-Drywater grew up with.</p>
<p>She was among several Northeastern State students, faculty members,
and administrators who got together one afternoon to tell me about a
series of efforts to promote a revival of the Cherokee language. The
efforts began after a 2002 survey found that the number of fluent
Cherokee speakers had dropped to about 10,000—most of them older than
50—among the nearly 290,000 members of the Cherokee Nation who live in
14 Oklahoma counties and elsewhere in the United States. "The situation
was much worse than people had anticipated," said Wyman Kirk, an
assistant professor of Cherokee language at the university, which
usually enrolls about two dozen students in Cherokee studies and
Cherokee education programs. "The language doesn't exist under the age
of 40"—at least not in the sense of people having real conversations
with each other. Even Cherokee church congregations have almost all
switched to English—only two still offer services in Cherokee.</p>
<p>"The baby boomers were our main resources, and I've lost five in my
family in the past five years," added Travis Wolfe, a student majoring
in Cherokee education. He said only about 140 American Indian languages
remain, among 565 tribes. "Once you lose your language, you lose your
culture."</p>
<p>Their language has long been a matter of particular pride for
Cherokee people. Mr. Wolfe told me that Cherokee is part of the family
of Iroquoian languages and is believed to be around 6,000 years old. In
the early 19th century, a Cherokee man named Sequoyah spent about a
decade creating a writing system, known as the Cherokee syllabary, in
which 85 characters represent the language's basic sounds. Sequoyah
invented some character shapes and borrowed others from a variety of
alphabets, including Roman and Greek, but in Cherokee the borrowed
characters represent entirely different sounds—"W" sounds like "la," for
instance, and ß—the Greek beta—is pronounced "yay<em>."</em></p>
<p>The syllabary was adopted for printing presses in 1828, the year the Cherokee Nation began publishing a newspaper, called the <em>Cherokee Phoenix, </em>in New Echota, which was in northwest Georgia and was the Cherokee capital<em>.</em>
But in 1838 the federal government forced thousands of Cherokees off of
their land in Georgia and western North Carolina and onto the Trail of
Tears, which led them to what's now northeastern Oklahoma. Hundreds died
of starvation and disease along the way.</p>
<p>From the 1870s well into the 20th century, Cherokee and other native
languages were suppressed by the federal government, which—among other
tactics—sent some American Indian children away to boarding schools, at
which they were to be assimilated into American society. When the
Oklahoma Territory became a state, in 1906, the Cherokee Nation
surrendered control of local schools here (including the Cherokee Female
Seminary, which the state purchased and transformed into the normal
school that became Northeastern State University).</p>
<p>"My mother still has scars on her hands" from being punished for
speaking Cherokee as a schoolgirl, Mr. Wolfe said. Because of such
policies, he said, "a couple of generations grew up without the
language." Among his 60 or so first cousins, he is the only one who's
worked to learn more than the rudiments of the language.</p>
<p>Mr. Kirk, the professor of Cherokee, said the 2002 survey found that
"people thought the language was crucial." That led Cherokee Nation
officials to establish the school where Ms. Carey-Drywater works, and to
work with the university to set up a program for preparing
Cherokee-speaking teachers. The university, where about 30 percent of
students are American Indian, "got the program mapped out and approved
in about a year and a half," Mr. Kirk said. The immersion school,
meanwhile, has been adding one grade a year, and now offers
full-immersion programs for just over 100 kids from age 3 through fifth
grade.</p>
<p>The school here in Tahlequah, the modern Cherokee Nation capital,
isn't the only effort at making the language more relevant. In western
North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians—descendants of
those who refused to take part in the move to Oklahoma—have also set up a
Cherokee immersion school, although the eastern dialect differs from
the language spoken here. "Their negation is a little different," said
Chris Smith, a Northeastern State senior who is the multimedia
specialist at the university's Center for Tribal Studies. "And out here
we like to cut things off—we slang it up a lot."</p>
<p>Mr. Smith pulled out his iPhone to show me how the Cherokee Nation is
turning to new technology to create uses for the language that will
attract younger users. Apple, which has included Cherokee in its
computer operating system for several years, now puts it on phones as
well—which means Cherokee speakers with iPhones can text one another
using Sequoyah's syllabary. They can also consult an application called
iSyllabary to check the pronunciation of less-familiar characters, and
beginners can practice basic vocabulary with an app called iCherokee.</p>
<p>As easy as Mr. Smith made Cherokee look when he offered me my first lesson—texting me the characters for <em>o si yo,</em>
or "hello"—it's actually a very difficult language for English speakers
to learn, Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Kirk told me. For starters, it's a tonal
language, although the tones are not reflected in the syllabary, and it
has a grammar entirely unlike European languages. Mr. Wolfe said
Cherokee is probably as difficult for the average English speaker to
learn as Chinese.</p>
<p>That's where the immersion-school students have a big advantage. "The
older kids surpass me in the language," said Mr. Smith. "It's very
difficult because my mind is an English mind."</p>
<p>Ms. Carey-Drywater—who earned her third Northeastern State degree
last month, this one in school administration—is working to make sure
her students have as easy a time as possible as they use Cherokee to
learn, talk, write, and play. Recently, she said, she's been going from
class to class and teaching students songs with Cherokee words set to
familiar tunes, like "Three Blind Mice" and "Frosty the Snowman." She
even went out on a limb with a song set to the Drifters' hit "Under the
Boardwalk."</p>
<p>She's been working at the school four years now, she told me, and
it's been "an absolutely fantastic experience." Or, in Cherokee, <img src="http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/0601-5719-fa-chertext.jpg" alt="Chronicle of Higher Education" height="24 width="></p>
<hr>
<p><strong>'I'm Hungry': Agi Yosi Ha </strong></p>
<p>Chris Smith, a senior at Northeastern State University, agreed to
give me a quick introduction to Cherokee. The syllabary that Sequoyah
created early in the 19th century represents 85 sounds that, combined
one way and another, make up the language. (They can also be represented
phonetically.) Verbs are its basic building blocks, but each has
prefixes and suffixes.</p>
<p>To say "I'm hungry," for instance, start with the root for hunger, <em>yosi. </em>To that, add a first-person prefix, <em>agi,</em> and a marker for the present tense, <em>ha.</em> You end up with: <em>Agi yosi ha.</em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em> </em>To ask "Are you hungry?" keep the same <em>yosi</em> root, but instead of <em>agi</em> use <em>tsa,</em> for "you," with the same present-tense marker, <em>ha,</em> and an <em>s</em>, indicating a question: <em>Tsa yosi has.</em></p>
<p><em> </em>To say "I will be hungry," change the present-tense marker, <em>ha,</em> to the future tense, <em>hesdi</em>: <em>Agi yosi hesdi.</em></p>
<p><img src="http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/0601-5719-fa-cherbox.jpg" alt="Chronicle of Higher Education" width="300" height="70"></p><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Cherokee-for-Beginners-the/125881/">http://chronicle.com/article/Cherokee-for-Beginners-the/125881/</a><p>
<br></p>
</div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>
University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br>
<a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------<br>