A fading language and the struggle to save it

Courtesy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A nation far flung, miles and miles of unpaved roads and a people wary of speaking with outsiders: Two storytellers faced a slew of hurdles when they set out to chronicle the dwindling Cherokee language.

Of the Cherokee Nation’s nearly half million citizens, only a couple thousand people still speak the language fluently, the Cherokee Phoenix reported in 2022, and most of them are elderly. Communities guard their speakers carefully. Outsiders’ attempts to disseminate Cherokee stories to large audiences have sometimes resulted in profit — and not for the Cherokee people.

“There are people who come into our communities — they take our stories, they make a buck off of it. And then, you just never see them again,” Schon Duncan, an Oklahomabased Cherokee language instructor, said. “They use your story, and then you turn around, and they’re on the news for it.”

Director Michael McDermit and cinematographer Jacob Koestler of Blurry Pictures disrupted that pattern when they incorporated the Cherokee community into their new film. The meticulously produced result is “Dadiwonisi: We Will Speak,” a 95-minute documentary that examines the language’s dire shrinkage and highlights the hope preservation efforts are bringing to the Cherokee. SouthArts Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers screens the film at multiple locations in Georgia, including Rome, in April.

McDermit and Koestler came to the project initially through an interest in Sequoyah, inventor of the Cherokee syllabary. In 2019, around the time the Tri-Council of Cherokee Tribes declared a state of emergency regarding the decline of fluent language speakers, the two were already in North Carolina conducting research. But interviews were not forthcoming; Cherokee citizens were cagey about cameras.

The filmmakers retooled the project around the language crisis and continued research in Oklahoma near Tahlequah, the present-day Cherokee Nation capitol. There, they met Duncan, a member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians who was, at the time, enrolled in the Cherokee Language Master Apprentice Program, a full-time, two-year immersive program for adults who learn from fluent speakers.

Duncan, 34, now teaches Cherokee language in public schools in Dahlonegah, Oklahoma. Duncan, who uses they/them pronouns, instructs students in pre-K through eighth grade.

“I often think about what it would have been like to be able to learn the things I am teaching at a younger age,” Duncan said. “When I was 8, I couldn’t even fathom the ability to read our language because nobody was teaching it. Now, I have students who can read full sentences to me and tell me what it means.”

The death of Duncan’s grandfather, a fluent speaker, was the impetus for them to learn the language.

“When the last Cherokee speaker in your family passes, it shakes you up,” they said.

Continuation of the language, they said, is integral in preserving a connection to the past.

“Language is a communicative tool at large, but more importantly, it holds knowledge and a worldview held by the culture curated by our ancestors,” they said. “If we lose that, we lose a connection to our ancestors that make us who we are.”

Back in 2019, when reluctant elders refused to speak on camera with McDermit and Koestler, Duncan decided to step in.

“I had seen a lot of documentaries, and I knew that if we wanted to save our language and we wanted people to know our story, it should come from the people that have actually lived it and have actually had that experience with this,” Duncan said.

The film begins by detailing the state of emergency surrounding the language and then pivots to revitalization efforts that include immersion schools and the master apprentice program, along with grassroots programs like community language classes. It also shows households where family members still speak Cherokee to one another.

“The film’s construction is meant to mimic the way the language and culture function, with an emphasis and importance on community over individuals, and a woven-together narrative style where we dip in and out of storylines that are occurring at the same time,” McDermit said.

Portraying hope was particularly important to Duncan.

“There’s a lot of film about Native people that we call poverty porn. It’s just, like, this exploitation of all the bad things that happened to Native Americans,” Duncan said. “There’s no agency for the people in the films. There’s nothing that they’re doing to make their situation better … Yes, bad things happen to minority communities, but often, when those things happen, there are people in those communities who rise to the occasion and do the work that needs to be done to negate that.”

McDermit and Koestler witnessed that upon their return to Oklahoma after the pandemic.

“When we were back in 2021, there was serious growth from 2019,” Koestler said. “There was money being put forward to the language revitalization program.”

In 2019, the Tribal Council passed the Durbin-Feeling Language Preservation Act, which dedicated $16 million to language preservation initiatives and resulted in the opening of the Durbin Feeling Language Center, a language immersion school and expansion of the Cherokee Language Master Apprentice Program.

And support of the effort continues to grow. In January, the Tribal Council permanently reauthorized the act, dedicating another $35 million to new language capital projects.

Like so many other creative efforts, the film project faced serious logistical complications when the pandemic began in early 2020. McDermit and Koestler, suddenly unable to travel, found a workaround when Cherokee participants agreed to film themselves.

Blurry Pictures’ approach, with Duncan’s encouragement, had finally begun attracting more Cherokee involvement. Keli Gonzales, a visual artist, helped secure interviews with fluent speakers, including her maternal grandparents. She and Duncan eventually came on as co-producer and co-director, respectively.

That type of commitment, Koestler said, helped bring the community’s distinct voice to the project and gave the film its “lived in quality.”

“All of that requires the very human element of just sitting within these situations — the backyards, the living rooms,” he said. “It never would’ve happened with just two white filmmakers having an idea.”

Etowah, Ellijay, Dahlonega, Ocoee, Nantahala, Tuckasegee. So many places across the Southeast bear Cherokee names. The meanings and sounds associated with them are often elusive in this part of the country.

“We’ve lost what their meaning is, and a lot of times, we don’t even pronounce them correctly,” said historian Olivia Cawood. “It’s whatever the white settlers decided to call them.”

On April 11, “Dadiwonisi: We Will Speak” shows in Rome, home to Chieftains Museum, once the residence of Cherokee leader Major Ridge, a wealthy landowner who signed a treaty that set the Trail of Tears in motion.

As executive director of Chieftains Museum, Cawood finds herself filling our educational system’s gaps in Native American history.

“They don’t teach it in school,” she said. “(For most students,) the Trail of Tears was a paragraph in a textbook … a lot of people just don’t get the education until they come to places like this.”

In 1835, Major Ridge, along with numerous other Cherokee who sought to stem the tide of Cherokee bloodshed at the hands of the U.S. military, signed the Treaty of New Echota ceding Native lands to the U.S. government in exchange for $5 million.” But Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross and many Cherokee citizens opposed it.

As a result of the treaty, an estimated 4,000 Cherokee people — nearly a quarter of the Cherokee population at that time — lost their lives on the perilous journey westward to Oklahoma beginning in 1838. Major Ridge and his son, John Ridge, died a short time later at the hands of fellow Cherokee who blamed the men for the loss of ancestral lands.

One group of Cherokee lived on land in North Carolina they claimed did not belong to the Cherokee Nation and therefore could not be included in the 1835 sale. North Carolina recognized their rights, and this group eventually became known as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

It’s important, Cawood said, for residents of Georgia and the Southeast to understand that Cherokee history didn’t end with the Trail of Tears. “This isn’t just a Georgia story. It’s a national story,” she said. “They’re a living, breathing people that are thriving.”