For the past 79 years, Ella Wachacha Bird has lived a life defined by seasons and relationships rather than months and days.

Bird, the daughter of Rily Wachacha and Ancy Walkingstick, was born in a log cabin in the remote West Buffalo area of Graham County’s Snowbird community in 1939. She was delivered by her grandmother Maggie Wachacha, a midwife at the time who would later become a clerk to Tribal Council and, like Ella, a Beloved Woman in the tribe. 

If anyone ever had an excuse to leave her hometown and never return, it would be Myrtle Driver Johnson. 

Born May 21, 1944, to a mother who didn’t want her, Johnson had a hard upbringing in the Big Cove community of the Qualla Boundary. While her younger siblings — one brother and four sisters — lived with her mother and their father, Johnson, who never knew which of two men her father was, was sent to live with her grandparents. 

Shirley Jackson Oswalt can still remember the first words she said in English. 

Her older siblings had prepped her before she headed off to her first day of first grade at the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Snowbird Day School in Robbinsville, and when the teacher came over to greet her, Oswalt knew her line.

Editor’s note: This article was first published in The Smoky Mountain News in December 2003.

Tuckaseigee, Oconaluftee, Heintooga, Wayah, Cullasaja, Hiwassee, Coweeta, Stecoah, Steestachee, Skeenah, Nantahala, Aquone, Katuwah, and on and on. Our place names here in the Smokies region are graced throughout with evidence of the Cherokee culture that prevailed for over 700 years. Wouldn’t it be nice if Clingmans Dome was correctly designated as Mount Yonah (high place of the bears)?

“In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

— George Orwell

We live in an age — the relativity of truth — in which Orwell’s adage seems as dated as monocles or top hats. Just as Darwin’s theory of evolution led to Social Darwinism, a philosophy pitting one human being against another with survival of the fittest as the supreme law for success, so Einstein’s theory of relativity changed popular philosophy and cultural mores as radically as it did the study of physics.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and a quartet of musicians — one guitarist, three vocalists — stands at the front of a small room whose rows of chairs hold about twenty people. The guitarist strums a few chords, and the voices join in a familiar tune, “Amazing Grace.” 

Susan Gathers was kicked back in the student union one afternoon, her thumbs poised over her smart phone, simultaneously bantering with friends while texting — sometimes even texting the same person she was talking to.

This impressive skill to seamlessly dialogue in multiple mediums at once is nothing new for “Generation Next-ers” like Gathers. But unlike the typical truncated words and vowel-less abbreviations that permeate normal text-speak, her screen was filled with Cherokee syllables as she pushed send.

Gone are the days of students hunched over wide-ruled paper, forming endless strings of perfectly manicured cursive letters, painstakingly matching the dimensions of each loop of an L or swoop of G’s tail.

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is urging the state to formally license Cherokee language teachers, enabling Cherokee courses taught in public schools off the reservation to count toward a student’s foreign language requirement.

Earlier this month, tribal and school officials met with representatives from the N.C. Department of Public Instruction to finalize the steps in the process.

The move is part of tribe’s push to revitalize the language and preserve the Eastern Band’s cultural identity.

“Salvaging the language salvages our tribe. It continues to identify us as a unique people, and it continues to protect the sovereignty of who we are as a nation within a nation,” said Principal Chief Michell Hicks.

The tribe’s language efforts include everything from street signs in Cherokee to language emersion programs for infants — as well as required Cherokee language classes for grades K-12 school on the reservation.

However, not all enrolled members of the tribe live in Cherokee and attend school on the reservation, so the tribe hopes to offer language courses in public schools in neighboring counties as well.

Cherokee language and history classes are currently taught in the public schools in Graham County, where a small satellite portion of the reservation lies. The tribe foots the bill for the instructors’ salaries, but the classes do not fulfill the state’s language requirements.

By creating a teacher certification test that meets the standards of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, the tribe hopes to get Cherokee included on Department of Public Instruction’s list of languages for study.

“We want the language to be recognized and credit to be given in all North Carolina schools,” Hicks said. “Right now in Swain County, you can get credit in Spanish and Chinese but not in Cherokee. That’s what we want to change.”

Dr. Hartwell Francis, chair of Western Carolina University’s Cherokee language program, has taken the lead role in creating a teacher certification test that meets ACTFL as well as state education standards. The Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma went through a similar process and has proven a useful model for Francis to draw from.

Renissa Walker, director of the Kituwah Preservation and Education Program, which oversees the tribe’s language revitalization efforts, said the Eastern Band feels it’s important for the tribe to develop and administer the test themselves.

“We want to maintain ownership of the test,” Walker said.

Walker has helped organize a panel of fluent Cherokee speakers who will be trained by ACTFL and DIP to administer and grade the tests for language teachers. Once that is done, the tribe will start the work of testing its first round of 25 or more Cherokee language teachers, most of whom speak Cherokee as a second language.

Walker said the tribe hopes to have the certification process wrapped up by the end of the school year.

But there is another hurdle in the process: the status of the Cherokee language in American culture. DPI considers Cherokee a foreign language for administrative purposes, but the tribe objects to the classification.

“We’re not a foreign language like the other languages taught in the high schools,” Walker said. “It’s ironic that the oldest language in North Carolina would be the last one to get recognized by the schools.”

Walker said the tribe doesn’t blame the state, however.

“It’s not their fault. The responsibility lies on our shoulders. We’ve been aggressive over the past five years, but if we’d started this process 20 years ago, there would be fluent speakers of child-bearing age today,” Walker said.

Swain County schools have expressed interest in introducing a certified Cherokee language program in the future, and they’ll offer a language and history course this coming year that’s similar to the one offered in Graham County.

Hicks said the tribe would pay the salaries of Cherokee teachers in neighboring counties where a critical mass of enrolled members go to school once the state has approved the teacher certification process.

Walker said her department is working to get the project finished by the start of the new school year.

“We’re moving quickly,” Walker said. “The fall is our goal.”

Once the certification test is created and approved and an oversight panel is created, the process will have to be verified by a state specialist in education research methodology before being submitted for final approval to N.C. DPI.

Native American languages are unique. They came into being and evolved without the influence of writing. For scholars like Heidi Altman, a professor of linguistic sociology, that makes them fascinating.

“The thing I’m interested in is how people organize knowledge through language,” Altman said.

One of the most difficult aspects in the effort to preserve the Cherokee language and culture is how to convey the Cherokee worldview to a generation of speakers that live predominantly in an English-speaking world.

Altman said the nuances of the Cherokee language are often conveyed through the use of metaphor and context.

“When you have speakers together who are 50 and older, they’re able to talk in such a way that the language is metaphorical. It’s contextual, it’s funny, and it really encapsulates the Cherokee worldview,” Altman said. “It’s really different from how an English speaker thinks about how things work.”

Garfield Long Jr. has been the ECBI tribal linguist since 1997. One of the youngest native speakers of the Cherokee language at 42, Long struggles with how to preserve the meaning of the language as it is used by the elders.

Long believes there is no line separating language from thought or thought from experience. The oldest generation of Cherokee speakers grew up in a rural world, immersed not only in their language but also in natural surroundings.

“I think the experience outweighs the knowledge of the language,” Long said. “If you don’t go out in the woods and see the plants for yourself, you might know how to pronounce the word but you can’t go out there and find them.”

Long grew up in a Cherokee speaking household but he attended high school in Sylva. In some ways, he represents the boundary between two generations of Cherokee speakers.

“Growing up I never thought or dreamed that I would be in the position I’m in now, doing translation,” Long said. “Because in high school my world was mostly in English. It was only coming back after school that I began to realize how much I’d forgotten.”

Heavily influenced by his father and grandfather, Long considers himself a Cherokee thinker, but he concedes there is tension for anyone who lives in both worlds.

“For me I kind of think in Cherokee but again it just depends on the context of the conversation,” Long said.

In the Cherokee language the same noun will be pronounced differently depending on whether an object is a solid, a liquid, rigid or flexible. The pronunciation change involves subtle changes in tone and accent. Long said those subtle differences offer opportunities for humor, in some cases, and confusion in others.

“There was one word I was working with today and it meant ‘I will be there immediately’ but if I change one sound it meant ‘something to wipe with,’” Long said.

Long’s example may be funny but it also represents the knife’s edge facing Cherokee thought. Whether or not the younger generation can think in Cherokee may come down to how well they understand how to use their language to mediate their own experiences.

Gil Jackson, administrator at the Cherokee Language Academy, said the difference between thinking in English and thinking in Cherokee is most evident with higher order words, like love.

“The word love in our language is different. I could never describe it,” Jackson said. “It would take me half a book and I still couldn’t explain it.”

To that end, Jackson is encouraged by the way his young language immersion students express themselves.

“They run around now and tell each other ‘I love you’ in Cherokee,” Jackson said.