To the Editor:

I still remember September 27, 1953. That was the Sunday my brother, Greg, and I were baptized and committed our lives into following the way of Jesus Christ. From that day at Second Avenue Methodist Church in Rome, Georgia, I have attempted to live as a person of faith. 

I have been traveling through France, making my way to the tiny town of Sancerre in the Loire Valley. Here, we will stay a few weeks so that I can study French and mingle with the locals.

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Sara Snyder Hopkins, assistant professor and director of the Cherokee Language Program at Western Carolina University, a grant of $64,905 for her ongoing translation project, Eastern Cherokee Histories in Translation. 

In France, the price of service in a restaurant is included in the bill and the servers are paid roughly about 15% of your total ticket. If you feel the service was excellent and you want to add a little extra, 5% of your tab can be left on the table. I wish I had had this tidbit of information before I ate my first meal out in town. We had a discussion in class about restaurants, ordering and how the French menu is laid out. What we did not discuss was the well-known fact amongst the French that the service is always included in the price of the meal.

By Sabrina Matheny • Rumble Contributor | I used to be a French teacher. I really enjoyed working with young people. I recognized that learning a language takes courage and felt that step one in getting my students to use the language would be building their confidence.

Mary Smith Sneed was just four or five years old the day a wagon rolled up as she played outside near the family home at Mingo Falls. The wagon stopped, and a Cherokee man named John Crowe greeted her. Crowe, who also happened to be a truant officer employed by the Cherokee Boarding School, invited her to get in the wagon.

Though we are as divided as we have ever been as a country, the one thing we seemed to be able to agree on is that recent deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd were heinous, both reminders that the evil of racism still exists in America. We shared this “common ground” for about five minutes before the waves of protests and rioting began, and then the sudden abrupt shift in focus by one group from the murders to the reaction to the murders revealed that we had not, after all, reached some new level of mutual understanding.

How do you create new fluent speakers in a language that’s no longer the common tongue of its community? 

That’s the difficult question about 75 members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians faced on Friday, Jan. 31, the second day of a two-day symposium focused on saving the Cherokee language. 

Constance Owl’s master’s degree thesis is more than a means to a graduate degree in American history. It’s a portal to understanding, and perhaps saving, a disappearing language.

In the wake of a June 27 joint resolution from the three Cherokee tribes that declared the native language to be in a state of emergency, this year’s Annual Council sessions in Cherokee revealed language preservation to be a priority for tribal members of all backgrounds and political persuasions.