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Felix Clary
ICT + Tulsa World
TAHLEQUAH, Okla. – Clifford Bark, a fluent Cherokee language speaker, remembers in second grade when he couldn’t copy English words on his paper the teacher wrote on the board.
“The next day, she saw we didn’t write on our paper, she lined us up and whooped us about two or three times,” Bark said.
On Nov. 5, hundreds of fluent speakers, many of them with histories like Bark, gathered in the Chota Center at the Cherokee Casino in Tahlequah for a gathering of first-language Cherokee speakers. There are about 1,500 fluent speakers today, with dozens of Cherokee children growing up learning the language in their immersion schools.
Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. announced two major language projects the tribe has launched.
The tribe recently partnered with Amazon to fund the tribe’s new film institute, which allowed the tribe the opportunity to cast fluent speakers as voice actors to dub the Cherokee language over the first season of “The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power” TV series, which premiered on Amazon Prime in 2022.
In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Cherokee Nation constitution, the tribe is also working on a translation of the Cherokee Nation constitution into the Cherokee language, using the syllabary, and giving copies to Cherokee citizens all over the country.
The tribe has language immersion programs for Cherokee citizens of all ages, from infancy to adulthood, with the master and apprentice program. The nation also recently broke ground on a new immersive middle school in Tahlequah.
Hoskin said the updated minimum annual budget for the language department is around $20 million. In celebration of Cherokee language speakers, the tribe held a raffle for several tickets to North Carolina so that winners could embark on a free trip to the Cherokee homelands. Cherokee language speakers and singers delivered speeches and performances in the Cherokee language during the event.
The Cherokee language dwindled during 20th Century assimilation efforts at federally run Indian boarding schools that would issue corporal punishment to children who spoke their Native languages.
Bark said in his second-grade class at Oaks Mission in Delaware County, Okla., there were about six or seven Cherokee students who 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, the school was just like any public school, yet Native children were still treated the same way with assimilation being forced on them.
“We didn’t know how to ask for the bathroom,” he said. “So we’d wait for the teacher to turn around and write on the chalkboard and we’d sneak out.”
When Bark graduated high school, he joined the military and spent 17 months in Germany.
When you are losing your language, “it feels scary,” he said, and by the time he came home, his mother said he was losing the language. He has worked since then to rebuild his fluency.
This story is co-published by the Tulsa World and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the Oklahoma area.
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