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“Our language was always around, and there were always people who spoke it. You thought there was a never ending supply and it was always going to be there. Suddenly, we realized we were in a critical situation. We had no new speakers. We had no one to replace them.”
— Tom Belt, Cherokee studies professor at Western Carolina University
Sequoyah. Technically called a syllabary, the 86 characters may seem daunting to decipher, but Prarie Toineeta, a third-grader at New Kituwah, rattles through the intricate characters with ease. “It’s easy,” Prarie said. Sticking out her finger, she began writing the syllabary in the air while reciting their sounds “ga, tsa, di, li, me, na….” Despite the amazing success stories that unfold every day at New Kituwah, the challenges are enormous. The biggest is simply finding enough Cherokee speakers. Of the roughly 300 fluent speakers in the Eastern Band, many are too old or not healthy enough to be in a classroom all day, or simply lack the skills to work in early childhood development. “We have the space. The tribe has the funds. We have the waiting list,” Jackson said. “We need the speakers who are able to step up.” When Kituwah opened its doors, there were only a few classrooms for babies. But as the oldest children moved through preschool and began advancing up through the grades, the school had to keep adding a new class every year, compounding the shortage of fluent teachers. The school now goes through third grade. Lacking enough fluent speakers born into the language, the school supplements its classrooms with teachers who have undertaken 70
New Kituwah Language Academy is the frontline of language revitalization for the Eastern Band of Cherokee. Kylie Shuler (left) is elementary principal of the school. Third-graders Prarie Toineeta and Makala McGaha (right) spend free time reading and listening to a story in Cherokee on the computer.
the monumental task of learning the language as an adult. Among them is Crowe-Hernandez, a teacher at the school her children attend. She learned basic Cherokee going to school on the reservation—how to say cat and dog, the seasons, your name, and the colors—the 101 essentials. As a former Miss Cherokee, she was a cultural ambassador for the tribe, and was regularly called on to make appearances at tribal functions. One such appearance was a language symposium, where she heard a talk on the slow death of the Cherokee language as the tribe’s last fluent speakers aged. That’s when she had an epiphany, switched college majors from nursing to teaching, and dedicated herself to helping keep the language alive. Kylie Shuler, the principal of New Kituwah’s Elementary School side, is also a secondlanguage learner. It is her first year at the school and finding her way has been tough at times. Some of the first phrases she learned were “You look pretty today” or “I like your outfit” to use SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 12 • ISSUE 5
when greeting each student who walks through the front doors in the morning. Shuler grew up in Snowbird and was a high school science teacher in Robbinsville. She recently went back to school and got her masters specifically with the goal of becoming the principal at New Kituwah. Shuler’s own grandmother was fluent but had the language beaten out of her at government boarding school—the same sad but familiar story of most—and never passed it on to her own children. Ironically, learning the Cherokee language is catching on outside Cherokee itself. NonCherokee students at nearby Western Carolina University are majoring in Cherokee studies and taking it as a foreign language. A white attorney from the neighboring town of Sylva heads to Cherokee on his lunch hour once a week for free, drop-in beginner grammar classes. A white college student from Alabama spent last summer as a volunteer at Kituwah Academy. For some, it’s simply a fascinating subject. To others, the grace and wisdom encoded in the language is a path to a deeper and broader understanding of the world. Still others are learning it as a symbol of moral support for what their Cherokee neighbors are doing—a way of