At the Cherokee Immersion School's first-ever graduation, Alayna Harkeader takes a rose to her mother, Jessica Harkreader, who worried about enrolling her. "It was an experiment," she says.

thousand miles from the Cherokees' ancient homeland, the Trail of Tears ended in a shady field where two winding streams merged together.

Elders from each of the seven clans sat down in the grass to decide where to build the tribe's new capital.

It would need plenty of water, not only to drink but to carry on the age-old tradition of "going to water" for ritual blessings.

The debate dragged on, until a frustrated elder pointed at the two streams, burbling just a few steps away.

"Tah-le-quah," he declared. "Two are enough."

Today, hardly anybody in Tahlequah could understand what he said.

More people in town speak Japanese, given the number of international students at Northeastern State University.

For the nation's second-largest Indian tribe, the native tongue has become largely a curiosity, printed on street signs and billboards but indecipherable to all but a fraction of the population.

"Uy-vtlv'i kal-vgv id-id-la sga-du-gi di-det-loquasdi'i," professor Leslie Hannah reads the inscription over the main entrance to campus. "The place where they learn."



Most students can't read it. "But mine can," Hannah says.

On a sunny afternoon near the end of the spring semester, his students meet in front of a statue of Sequoyah, who created the Cherokee syllabary in the 1810s to make it a written language.

"O-si-yo," Hannah tells them. "Hello."

A short walk downhill, they wade into the chilly water, keeping their shoes on to protect against the sharp rocks.
At least once a semester, students like Josh Watie pick up trash from the creek and participate in a traditional water ceremony to learn about the Cherokee culture.

"A Cherokee goes to water the way a Christian goes to the altar," the professor explains to his students. "The water is sacred to us."

Facing east, they splash themselves as they listen to an ancient song, said to have been given to the Cherokees by the sun itself.

"I am the sun," it translates. "All that is below won't overcome me. It will lift me up."

Their ancestors would have gone to water every day, usually at dawn. Now these students are going, too, if only once a semester.

No matter how much has been lost, they're determined to bring back the old ways, starting with the language.

"NSU is ground zero," Hannah declares. "If it survives, it will survive because of what we're doing here."



'Tools of the oppressor'


When he was 12 or 13 years old, Hannah's family took a pilgrimage to North Carolina, where their branch of the tribe lived before the U.S. government forced the Cherokees to move to Indian Territory in the 1830s.

Just across the state line, his family stopped at a rest area next to a small creek, where Hannah found a rock shaped like a tomahawk.

"Keep this for me," he told his aunt, handing the rock to her, "until I become a man."

Clasping his hand, Hannah's aunt drifted into a sort of trance, gazing far off.

"Someday," she told him, "you're going to bring light to dark places. From this day forward, your name will be Dah-you-gee-juh."

Loosely translated, it means Coming Daylight.

"My Cherokee family still calls me by that name," Hannah says.

Growing up in the 1960s, he learned Cherokee first, English second. The language was still thriving in small towns like Greasy, Jay, Pumpkin Hallow and others across northeastern Oklahoma.

"You heard Cherokee everywhere," Hannah remembers. "At church, in the grocery store, on the sidewalk."

At school, kids used Cherokee on the playground.

"But not in the classroom," Hannah says. "No. Never."

One day in the third grade at Stilwell, an hour bus ride from his house in rural Adair County, Hannah came in from recess and saw his teacher in the hallway.

Kindergarten teacher Meda Nix teaches her class at the Cherokee Language Immersion School.

"O-si-yo," he waved, without thinking.

The teacher grabbed him by the ear and dragged him to the principal's office.

"He's speaking that heathen language," she said.

"Five swats," the principal decided.

"They teach Spanish a few rooms down," Hannah argued. "There's no Spaniards for thousands of miles, but you're surrounded by Cherokees. I don't understand this."

The principal glared at him: "Ten swats."

Television gets part of the blame, too, for pumping endless hours of English into Cherokee living rooms.

By the time Hannah reached college, his generation had stopped using the language, even at home.

"It was literally beaten out of us," Hannah says. "That was the mindset of the time."

After graduating from NSU, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma, where he wrote a dissertation about Cherokee folklore.

The subject became a hobby. And eventually, while teaching at Kansas State University, he published a few papers that drew attention from his alma mater.

NSU asked him to "come home" in 2010 as the director of Cherokee Programs.

"Now we're using the tools of the oppressor," he says. "We're bringing the culture and the language back the same way they took it away from us – immersion."

Surrounded by students performing a Snake Dance, Ryan Mackey sings traditional songs during an outdoor class.

'Filling the gap'


Ten years ago, the Cherokee Nation took an extensive survey about the language, and the results shocked even the most pessimistic officials.

Only 10,000 fluent speakers remained alive, almost all of them past middle-age.

"People under 30, you could count on your fingers," says Wyman Kirk, who was one of the lead researchers.

"For all practical purposes, the language would be dead within 30 or 40 years."

The tribe's solution focused on an immersion program — where pre-school and elementary students would hear and speak nothing but Cherokee all day.

"If you're going to have a school," Kirks says, "where are you going to get your teachers? We didn't have a textbook for the language itself, much less a textbook for teaching math in Cherokee."

With NSU's help, the tribe came up with an entire grade-school curriculum from scratch, "reinventing the wheel," as Kirk puts it.

Now he can have a bilingual conversation with his 6-year-old son, who recently finished first grade.

Like most immersion students, he avoids slang, which older Cherokees use with abandon. And he has the habit of putting words in the same order as English — subject, verb, object — which seems foreign to Cherokee.

"That's OK," Kirk says. "Every language evolves. Our English isn't Shakespearian English."

If anybody still speaks Cherokee a hundred years from now, it might even be an entirely new dialect, a mixture of traditional vocabulary with Anglicized grammar. Call it Immersion Cherokee.

"But there's still going to be a gap," Kirk says. "It's inevitable."

Older, native speakers will completely die off before the Immersion School can produce enough young speakers to sustain the language on their own.

"Filling the gap," he says. "That's our biggest problem."

Once a violent war game, stickball offers an afternoon of fun for Melissa Miller and other students at Northeastern State University.

'A whole different way'


On a Saturday afternoon at the Katfish Kitchen, the waitress offers two menus.

"English or Cherokee?"

"Wa-doh," professor Hannah says, taking the Cherokee version. "Thank you."

The catfish comes fresh and crispy. The strawberry dumplings taste especially sweet. And the conversation proves lively, switching back and forth between languages, often mid-sentence.

"This is my vision of the future," Hannah says. "Cherokee and English coexisting. Cherokee a normal, everyday part of life."

For now, the vision won't last past 4 o'clock, when Hannah's "Cherokee Happy Hour" will end.

Each month at a different restaurant, he brings together three different types of people.

The aging elders grew up speaking the language but don't get to use it much.

The Immersion School kids speak as fluently as the elders, but rarely talk to grown-ups outside of class.

And his college students are still struggling to learn.

"I get the drift of what everybody is talking about," says Brooke Hudson, a 21-year-old junior. "But it's all way too fast for me."

For each restaurant, NSU students translate the menu, proving how imaginative the language can be.

Cherokee doesn't have a word for ketchup. So it becomes, in literal translation, "tomato gravy."

Mustard simply means "fire yellow spicy." And cheese is "made from milk."

Even when Cherokee must have always had a name for something – a "door," for instance – the language avoids a simple noun and calls it "where you walk through."

"The language is always trying to describe what something is,"
Hudson says, "instead of just naming it."

Her face looks familiar, and Hudson blushes when her friends explain that she was Miss Cherokee 2010, earning her a place on some billboards around town.

"After I won the title," she says, "people would talk to me and want to know, ‘What does being Cherokee mean to you?'?"

She had no idea. And that's partly why she enrolled in the Language Program.

"The language makes you see the world in a whole different way," Hudson says.

"It's the Cherokee way of seeing things, and it's what makes us who we are."
Wilson Snell, a freshman at Northeastern State University, splashes himself during a going-to-water ceremony. "A Cherokee goes to water,” his professor says, "the way a Christian goes to the altar."

'Up to us'


Late one night when she was 4 years old, Alayna Harkreader disappeared from her bed.

Her dad found her in a closet, still asleep, and talking to herself.

"I couldn't understand what she was saying," Nick Harkreader
remembers. "She was dreaming in Cherokee."

Now 12, Alayna speaks English flawlessly, but for all practical purposes, as a second language.

"In my head," she says, "when I'm just thinking to myself, it's all Cherokee."

Alayna was part of the original pre-school that started the Immersion Program in 2002, when her parents agonized over the decision to send her.

"It was an experiment," Jessica Harkreader says. "Nobody knew how they were really going to learn the language, never mind math and geography and all the rest."

Surrounded by her classmates, Maggie Sourjohn adjusts the feather on her mortarboard after graduation. Sourjohn and the other students will be in seventh grade next year.

As Alayna and her classmates got older, the immersion program added one grade-level a year, keeping up with them all the way through elementary school until they became the first "graduating class" last month.

Under their robes at the commencement ceremony, the girls wore long, colorful "tear dresses," named because generations ago their ancestors didn't have the benefit of scissors.

The prayers and greetings were all in Cherokee, but Principal Chief Bill John Baker delivered the keynote in English.

"Some day," he told the students, "one of you will come back to give this commencement speech, and it will be in Cherokee."

Now, most of the immersion graduates will move across the parking lot to Sequoyah High School, where everything is English.

That's going to be the real test: Will they keep using the language even when they don't have to?

The tribe has put Cherokee on Facebook, on the iPhone, even on Google — making it as relevant and useful as possible for modern life.

But the fate of the language will depend on the kids.

"They've done everything they can," Alayna says. "Now it's up to us."



'Everyday life'


The world had 6,059 spoken languages when this century began, according to a United Nations survey.

But several have presumably gone extinct by now. The U.N. counted more than 200 languages with only a handful of speakers.

In the Atlas of the World's Languages, 2,473 are listed as "endangered," but even that's a conservative estimate.

Some experts don't consider a language "sustainable" unless it has at least 20,000 fluent speakers. And by that standard, more than half of the world's languages face a serious risk of extinction within a generation or two.

More than 50 American Indian languages have already died, including six that were once spoken in Oklahoma.

Another 126 native languages are endangered, including 14 in Oklahoma — some spoken by only dozens of people, all elderly.
Compared to them, Cherokee seems to have good odds.

But, at some point, a dying language sinks below a certain point, where the momentum of decline becomes impossible to reverse.
Linguists can't predict exactly where that line is. But it's there, somewhere.

"I think we got our toes on it," professor Hannah says. "We're losing fluent speakers daily, we know that."

And the Immersion School can't stop it alone. Only nine students graduated this year, and next year's class won't be any bigger.

"It's not enough," Hannah admits. "We've got to get the Cherokee language infused into the area — into the public school systems and into everyday life."

In the meantime, the language will keep shrinking. And nobody knows where it will bottom out.


Dianna Herschell Thompson (left) and Ella Jones laugh while trying to order during a "Cherokee Happy Hour" at the Katfish Kitchen. Ketchup, in literal translation, becomes "tomato gravy."


Michael Overall 918-581-8383
michael.overall@tulsaworld.com


Reader Comments 2 Total
HRR (4 months ago)
As a white man..I was trying to yell about (this) even back in the 80's..to no avail.
What is as disturbing..is the totally mindless Slide into allowing other bloodlines (caucasian, black in particular) to result in American Indians to look more and more un-indian.
No? When's the last time you saw some of the (GENERALLY Speaking) OldTraits...like Bowlegs, DeepCheekbones and Protruding Nose? Right now, I know of two of my Blonde-Headed friends (with BLUE EYES!!) who are on the Cherokee Role. Their 65 year old mom is Blonde (yes, she's a true blonde).
STOP ALLOWING THIS! Take-back your language(s) and BE Indians!
Meemased (3 months ago)
15 years ago, while my daughter was attending the University of Tulsa, she took Cherokee as her foreign language. She loved it. She also earned her Native American certificate from TU. She is now an art teacher and has also used the Cherokee language in one of the study skills classes she taught. The kids ate it up. She is part Cherokee and loves her heritage. I am glad more people are taking the language before it is lost.
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Quoteable





Stats

6,059 spoken languages worldwide
2,473 endangered languages worldwide
126 American Indian languages endangered
14 in Oklahoma


Endangered languages in Oklahoma / Estimated number of fluent speakers

Cherokee / 10,000
Creek / 5,000
Chickasaw / 600
Kiowa / 400
Kickapoo / 400
Shawnee / 100
Comanche / 100
Potawatomi / 50
Caddo / 25
Wichita / 10
Osage / 10
Pawnee / 10
Mescalero-Chiricahua Apache / 3
Yuchi / 5

Extinct languages in Oklahoma

Arapaho-Oklahoma
Chiwere Oto-Missouri
Kaw
Miami-Illinois
Quapaw
Huron-Wyandot

Source: U.N. Atlas of World Languages




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