[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, Matt Podolsky here, host and producer of Common Land.

[SPEAKER_00]: We released our last episode of Season 2 just a few weeks ago, but I'm here to let you know that we'll be dropping occasional bonus episodes here in our podcast feed over the course of the next several months.

[SPEAKER_00]: First up, we're sharing an episode from our friends at the Broadside.

[SPEAKER_00]: The Broadside produced by North Carolina Public Radio explores stories from the American South, focusing on topics that might not be on the front page, but deserve a closer look.

[SPEAKER_00]: Earlier this year, the team behind the broadside released an episode that I think will be a particular interest to listeners of Common Land.

[SPEAKER_00]: This episode called the Race to Save the Cherokee Language, features the work of a small group of Cherokee language teachers.

[SPEAKER_00]: One of these teachers is Gil Jackson, also known as Do-E, who throughhiked the Appalachian Trail and was also featured in Episode 2 of Common Land's second season.

[SPEAKER_08]: around the world, indigenous languages are declining at an alarming rate.

[SPEAKER_08]: Some studies have estimated that one dies out every two weeks.

[SPEAKER_08]: And the United States is no different.

[SPEAKER_08]: Of the 197 living indigenous languages spoken in this country, 193 are endangered.

[SPEAKER_08]: But one in particular has experienced a shocking downturn.

[SPEAKER_05]: We've been speaking Cherokee language for millennia at this point.

[SPEAKER_05]: We have gone through, you know, attempted genocides, multiple pandemics, the illegality of speaking our own language, right?

[SPEAKER_05]: So we face all of this, and yes, it has had incredibly detrimental consequences.

[SPEAKER_08]: Cherokee, the traditional language of the largest group with Native Americans, is in serious danger of dying out.

[SPEAKER_08]: But a coalition of tribes and institutions are working hard to make sure that doesn't happen.

[SPEAKER_05]: These languages can be reclaimed.

[SPEAKER_05]: It does take work, and it does take support.

[SPEAKER_05]: I'm Anisa Khalifa.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is the broadside, where we tell stories from our home in North Carolina at the Crossroads of the South.

[SPEAKER_08]: This week, we follow the race to save one of America's richest linguistic cultures.

[SPEAKER_02]: My name is Brooks Bennett, I'm a Emmy Award-winning documentarian cinematographer, director, producer, and a lover of culture and stories.

[SPEAKER_08]: Brooks is also a huge fan of the outdoors, so back in 2017 when a once-in-a-generation solar clips was set to hit parts of the U.S., he and his wife found themselves scrambling for a place to stay along the path of totality.

[SPEAKER_02]: We were looking for the perfect spot to view Edm, as nature lovers and buyers of the mountains [SPEAKER_08]: But clear skies weren't the only thing they found in this isolated corner of Appalachia.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's one of the most beautiful parts of the world, one of the three temperate rainforests in the United States, and just this untouched beauty that I've only seen in a few parts of the country, and we travel a lot.

[SPEAKER_08]: And as they wandered around the region, they began to notice something else unique about this place.

[SPEAKER_08]: Science.

[SPEAKER_08]: Everywhere.

[SPEAKER_08]: Written in a language that Brooks had never seen before.

[SPEAKER_02]: When we left the eclipse, we were headed out of town and saw this sign for a native wood carper.

[SPEAKER_02]: Come to find out his name is Billy Welch.

[SPEAKER_02]: Stopped in a shop, started talking shop with them.

[SPEAKER_02]: He kind of filled me in on why those signs were there and that we were in Cherokee territory, but in an area that not many people knew was Cherokee.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's called Snobford.

[SPEAKER_08]: Brooks had inadvertently stumbled on to one of the most isolated portions of the Kuala boundary, the territory of the eastern band of Cherokee Indians.

[SPEAKER_08]: Here, in the rainforests of Graham County, the snowboard community had resisted Indian removal, and in the following centuries, that seclusion helped them keep parts of their unique culture largely intact.

[SPEAKER_08]: This chance encounter made a lasting impression, so much so that years later, Brooks would relocate to the region and begin work on a documentary film about the community struggle to preserve its traditions in the modern day.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's called a sacred thread and a debuted in July on PBS North Carolina.

[SPEAKER_02]: So I think every day in Snover cultural preservation is at the forefront of everyone's mind.

[SPEAKER_02]: Anyone that has a unique skill set in Snowbird is working with that skill set to pass on things before they're gone forever.

[SPEAKER_08]: and Brooks quickly found out that there's nothing quite as urgent as the fight to save the Cherokee language itself.

[SPEAKER_08]: Cherokee.

[SPEAKER_08]: At one point, one of the most well-documented and commonly spoken languages in North America is now critically endangered.

[SPEAKER_08]: And Tiny Snowbird is home to one of the last concentrations of first language speakers in the world.

[SPEAKER_08]: So, as they are, you know, making these efforts, what are the big challenges that the Snowbird Cherokee are facing?

[SPEAKER_02]: I think within Snover there are 30 fluent speakers or less than 30 right now who are kind of tasked with passing that on to the next generation.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I think the main challenge is the clock is ticking.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's now or never.

[SPEAKER_02]: And without everyone doing their part within their own world, that culture could cease to be.

[SPEAKER_08]: So first I'm going to ask you the same question that I ask everyone with but with a little bit of a twist.

[SPEAKER_08]: Can you please introduce yourself in both Cherokee and English?

[SPEAKER_04]: My Cherokee name is Do Yee, my English name is Gilliam Jackson.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm presently 73 years old, and I was born in a cabin back here in the mountains in this community that we call to TE are translated into his number.

[SPEAKER_08]: Gil Jackson is one of the language teachers featured in a sacred thread.

[SPEAKER_08]: He grew up speaking Cherokee at home and at Snowbird Day School, which he later found out was incredibly rare.

[SPEAKER_08]: Because at the time, it was against the policy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which ran the day school.

[SPEAKER_04]: When our started school, 95% of us spoke the language and we communicated the language and even in the classroom.

[SPEAKER_04]: I had no knowledge about English language.

[SPEAKER_08]: Well, that's not entirely true.

[SPEAKER_04]: I knew how to say Coca-Cola, and I knew how to say ice cream.

[SPEAKER_07]: They only ones you really need to know, honestly.

[SPEAKER_04]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_04]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_08]: So I mean, compared to when you were growing up, how many people in North Carolina speak the language now?

[SPEAKER_04]: There are about 139 fluent speakers.

[SPEAKER_04]: There are first language speakers.

[SPEAKER_04]: And that's a drop in the book.

[SPEAKER_04]: And I think we have a total population of tribal members around 17,000 people.

[SPEAKER_04]: That's less than a half a person.

[SPEAKER_08]: Those numbers become even more distressing when you include all three federally recognized Cherokee tribes.

[SPEAKER_08]: There are about half a million enrolled members living mostly in North Carolina and Oklahoma, but it's estimated that only around 2,000 speak the language fluently.

[SPEAKER_08]: So what's behind this huge decline?

[SPEAKER_08]: Gail says the Indian boarding schools of the 1800s and early 1900s are mostly to blame.

[SPEAKER_04]: I often said that the really one of the reasons that people that may have chosen not to teach their children the language is because they experience such a brutal experience in the boarding schools because at one time, some of them [SPEAKER_04]: or maybe most of them went to a boarding school where they were not treated well for using the language or practice in any part of our culture.

[SPEAKER_04]: So that's a factor, the other factors.

[SPEAKER_04]: We either married outside the tribe, or if we married inside the tribe, within the tribe, we probably married somebody who was not a speaker.

[SPEAKER_04]: You become strong, you have to learn it as a child, or even as a newborn.

[SPEAKER_08]: What are some of the different things that the Snowbird community has been doing to try to hold on to the language and bring it back?

[SPEAKER_04]: They started the language camp, which would be they would do that in the summer.

[SPEAKER_08]: But teachers quickly found out that a 10-week program simply wouldn't cut it.

[SPEAKER_04]: Because...

Cherokee is a very complicated language.

[SPEAKER_04]: Extremely complicated.

[SPEAKER_04]: It's probably one of the 10 hardest languages to learn in this world.

[SPEAKER_08]: Wow.

[SPEAKER_04]: It is extremely difficult language to learn.

[SPEAKER_08]: Cherokee is a polysynthetic language, which means complex words can be created by combining smaller linguistic units.

[SPEAKER_08]: As a result, many long Cherokee words can express as much as a whole sentence in English.

[SPEAKER_08]: Cherokee also uses fundamentally different word orders and verb conjugations, making it particularly hard to learn for English speakers.

[SPEAKER_04]: It's so opposite from English.

[SPEAKER_08]: And English is the first language of most Cherokee people living today.

[SPEAKER_08]: So with that in mind, Gilles says they expanded local programming to include regular after-school lessons.

[SPEAKER_04]: And recently, our tribes started funding on Delta Language Learning Center, where adults can come in 40 hours a week, and they receive a salary, [SPEAKER_04]: But they have to be committed to learn and to language and to have to be committed to passing the language down.

[SPEAKER_08]: As a language instructor and community leader, Gill has been at the forefront of this movement.

[SPEAKER_08]: There are now Cherokee tribal language schools in both North Carolina and Oklahoma.

[SPEAKER_08]: But the efforts to save the language aren't just confined to places like the Kuala boundary.

[SPEAKER_05]: Honestly, it has been kind of shockingly overwhelmingly positive.

[SPEAKER_05]: I did not anticipate this sheer volume of response and at how positive it was.

[SPEAKER_05]: More on that after a short break.

[UNKNOWN]: You [SPEAKER_05]: I see you on a guide, a professor, a Courtney Lewis, Doug Wooddock, Jude Jalla G.

I am professor, Courtney Lewis.

[SPEAKER_05]: I am a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

[SPEAKER_05]: I am the Crandel Family Associate Professor here at Duke University in the Department of Culture and Anthropology.

[SPEAKER_08]: A few years ago, Courtney joined the faculty at Duke as part of a wider student-led push to improve the university's Native American coursework offerings.

[SPEAKER_05]: Part of the understanding of my job was to program build when I came here, which is exactly what I wanted to do.

[SPEAKER_05]: And one of the first things that I requested was specifically that Cherokee language be taught at Duke as the first American Indian language to be offered to Duke University.

[SPEAKER_08]: It made some geographic sense.

[SPEAKER_08]: Duke's campus is only about four hours east of the Kuala boundary.

[SPEAKER_08]: The Courtney had another more personal motivation.

[SPEAKER_05]: And that's because from 1882 to 1887, Trinity College, so the founding college for Duke University ran a federally funded Cherokee industrial and the importing school, which enrolled about 20 children of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

[SPEAKER_05]: really, yes, absolutely.

[SPEAKER_05]: And the direct purpose of these boarding schools was a simulation, and one of the most important things was to erase American Indian languages.

[SPEAKER_05]: So for me, this was a part of Duke's broader responsibility specifically to Cherokee people to rectify [SPEAKER_05]: their part in these assimilation policies.

[SPEAKER_05]: So it's not just a language horse.

[SPEAKER_05]: It's really about kind of an ethical and moral responsibility to help with the reclaiming and rebuilding of the Cherokee language.

[SPEAKER_08]: As you were building this program and you were building this language course specifically, what were the challenges that you faced?

[SPEAKER_05]: One of the biggest challenges is that when you are working to rebuild endangered languages is finding teachers, finding folks who are either fluent or have been through master apprentice programs that have the capability to teach these languages and we also don't want to take these people away from working with the community.

[SPEAKER_08]: University language programs like the one at Duke allow people who don't live near a reservation to learn the language and Courtney says more students means eventually more teachers.

[SPEAKER_05]: So it's kind of doing two things one it is.

[SPEAKER_05]: both during the efforts for language reclamation on a broader level.

[SPEAKER_05]: So the students can go on.

[SPEAKER_05]: They can get masters.

[SPEAKER_05]: They can get PhDs.

[SPEAKER_05]: They can take that back to their community with the language.

[SPEAKER_05]: But even more broadly for other students, we're providing a more robust education for them to find out, hey, what does it look like to come from a different perspective?

[SPEAKER_08]: And these aren't just hypothetical scenarios.

[SPEAKER_08]: I recently spoke to two graduates living here in North Carolina, who were inspired to teach Cherokee after completing college courses.

[SPEAKER_08]: My name is Anisa, I'm the host of the Broadside.

[SPEAKER_03]: Nice to meet you.

[SPEAKER_08]: Hi, nice to meet you.

[SPEAKER_08]: Tessa Dalman learned to speak the language while attending UNC Asheville and is currently a teaching assistant at Duke.

[SPEAKER_08]: She is not Native American, [SPEAKER_06]: In the classes that I took in college, it was actually primarily non-indigenous.

[SPEAKER_08]: So really.

[SPEAKER_06]: And same thing with Duke, most of the students in my Duke classes are not indigenous.

[SPEAKER_06]: At UNC Asheville, a big motivator for taking the course was a lot of people were really curious about, you know, the history of the area and being more culturally responsive and responsible.

[SPEAKER_08]: Jack Cooper is a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and an instructor for a community program at Western Carolina University.

[SPEAKER_08]: He fell in love with the language while he was studying at Stanford.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's allowed me to reconnect with people that, you know, I didn't know about or hadn't known growing up because the last speaker in my family was my great-grandmother.

[SPEAKER_03]: So my grandma didn't speak my dad didn't speak, but I had cousins still living who are speakers.

[SPEAKER_03]: So I've recently been able to connect with them and kind of rekindle that relationship through the language which has been really incredible.

[SPEAKER_08]: Where do you each see your place in this intergenerational picture of Cherokee language learning and preservation?

[SPEAKER_06]: I think for me it'll be to continue teaching, teaching is what I love to do, and I'm very passionate about it.

[SPEAKER_06]: So being able to continue to help in this way is something I'd love to do.

[SPEAKER_03]: My education formally is in like film and media and that's really where I want to engage the language and kind of help open that door because that's one of the things that makes Cherokee and other Indigenous languages so difficult to learn.

[SPEAKER_03]: He said if we were learning English or Spanish, it's just so accessible kind of everywhere.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like turning on the radio or turning on a movie, it's you can hear it everywhere.

[SPEAKER_03]: So I'd like to start making stuff from the language and kind of having a hand in that.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is just one small part of a multi-generational project that will likely take decades to bear significant fruit.

[SPEAKER_08]: And while that may seem daunting, back in snowbird, Gil Jackson, who's taught in both tribal programs and at universities like Stanford and Duke, has high hopes for the languages future.

[SPEAKER_04]: I guess I'm very hopeful.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm optimistic if we can continue to have the ability to light a fire under people out Jack and Tessing.

[SPEAKER_04]: I can probably name 30 young people who have that fire.

[SPEAKER_04]: We just need to fuel it a little bit more.

[SPEAKER_08]: up's good to know.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's good to hear.

[SPEAKER_08]: Can I ask you one last question for me is do you have like a favorite phrase or word in Cherokee that can't really be translated into English and it just expresses something really special that you could share?

[SPEAKER_04]: The word that I would probably say is God do do, which is what growing up when somebody had a misfortune, the community would come together and whatever that person needed.

[SPEAKER_04]: The women would come together, they would socialize, they would cook, [SPEAKER_08]: As if, right on cue, just as Gil was telling me this, a community volunteer knocked on the door.

[SPEAKER_08]: Gil had surgery a few weeks ago and currently has limited mobility.

[SPEAKER_04]: Seeing your citizens bring them in the lounge.

[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, lovely.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm glad you can cut this out, but anyway.

[SPEAKER_08]: So you know, like there's a need and then the community just comes together to do whatever is needed.

[SPEAKER_04]: Mm-hmm.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, kind of like what happened in the last World North Carolina after Helene, you know, people just came together and, um, tons of people, tons of food, tons of water, surprise, baby diapers.

[SPEAKER_08]: Although it may not be hurricane relief, we asked Gill if the effort to save the Cherokee language could also be considered a form of goddoo ghee.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think so, I think so, and it's been such an honor to work with these young adults.

[SPEAKER_04]: They're so respectful, yes, I definitely think so, it's just a beautiful spirit.

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[SPEAKER_08]: This episode of The Broadside was produced and edited by Jared Walker.

[SPEAKER_08]: The rest of our team includes producer Charlie Shelton Ormond, an executive producer Wilson Sair.

[SPEAKER_08]: Be sure to check out Brooke Spendett's beautiful documentary A Sacred Thread from PBS North Carolina.

[SPEAKER_08]: We've dropped a link to it in this week's show notes.

[SPEAKER_08]: And there, you'll also find information about Duke University's ever-expanding Indigenous Programming.

[SPEAKER_08]: Special thanks this week goes out to Cliff Bungartner at PBS North Carolina.

[SPEAKER_08]: The broadside is a production of WUNC North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network.

[SPEAKER_08]: If you have feedback or a story idea, you can email us at broadside at wunc.org.

[SPEAKER_08]: If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'm Anisa Khalifa.

[SPEAKER_08]: Thanks for listening, y'all.