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“If we lose the language, if no one understands the language, if no one speaks it, then the way in which we live in the world will also disappear,” Belt said. “That doesn't mean we're going to lose a way of looking at the world, we'll now just look at the world the way everybody else does.

“The importance of sustaining our culture as a real culture is heavily dependent on how we interpret the world. We lose that, and then there's no differentiation between us and somebody else except for history.”

Thirteen-thousand years of Cherokee history, tradition and culture is holding on by the thread of just 140 language speakers in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians along with a number of others in the Cherokee Nation and United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians tribes.

However, preservation efforts are looking to turn the tide — including those at Western Carolina University. The Cherokee Language program at 91�ȱ���, others at the university and members of the EBCI are rallying to save the language through a variety of preservation efforts. 

Some of those efforts are taking place in a traditional classroom. Others are in a screen-printing shop. They’re even taking place in the choir risers, too, but the sentiment around them is the same.

The Cherokee language is more than worthy of saving.

“Preserving unique ways of seeing the world is, I think, an inherently good thing that doesn't need to be justified in some kind of scientific way or some kind of monetary way,” said Sara Snyder Hopkins, director of the Cherokee Language program.

“As human beings, that has inherent value, and we should do all that we can to give people the freedom to continue that and the skills to preserve it, the space to preserve it and when possible, the resources to preserve it.”

 

 

Hopkins’ passions extend further than the Cherokee language. She has a keen interest in music as well.

Before her time at 91�ȱ���, Hopkins was the music and arts teacher for New Kituwah Academy, a language immersion school in Cherokee, and she holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology from Columbia University.

Music and the language each hold a special place in her heart. The natural thing to do? Combine them.

In March 2023, Hopkins, along with former New Kituwah Academy music and art teacher Garrett Scholberg, started the Cherokee Language Repertory Choir.

The community-based choir, sponsored by 91�ȱ���, sings an assortment of hymns and popular music in the Cherokee language.

“In language revitalization, we treat conversational speaking as the holy grail, but all these other things are important, too, for language vitality, including performance, singing and cultural creative expression,” Hopkins said.

The choir features a diverse group of 91�ȱ��� faculty, staff and students as well as community members around Cherokee and Cullowhee. The group meets regularly between those two towns for practices and performs at various events, such as festivals.

Hopkins and EBCI member Nannie Taylor translated more modern songs like “Yellow Submarine” by The Beatles and 1963 hit “Puff the Magic Dragon” from English to Cherokee for the choir to sing.

Hopkins also pulls a lot of the choir’s songs from Cherokee hymnals, many of which are over a century old and haven’t been sung in decades.

“It's phenomenal. There are songs (Hopkins) is pulling from the hymn books, and I've never heard of them a day in my life. I mean, I've been singing since I was two pretty much,” said Dawnenna West, a member of the EBCI and a co-director for the choir.

“To know that (these songs are) kind of coming back to life after so many years of not being in use, that is just mind blowing to me.”

Like Hopkins, West holds a great adoration for music, and it’s not just important to her and Hopkins. West argues it’s important to the tribe, too.

“I remember being really young and having so many different family groups that would sing all over the reservation. They would go to each other's houses for the weekend and just sing all weekend long,” West said.

“After growing up a bit, more and more speakers have died off, so I think that it’s really important to kind of preserve that tradition that we’ve always had of being able to sing songs in our language.”

Not far from where the choir often practices at Cullowhee Baptist Church is another creative effort to conserve the Cherokee language. Inside the School of Art and Design, assistant professor Tatiana Potts teaches printmaking to students at 91�ȱ���.

One of their projects? Making children’s books written in Cherokee.

Potts works with Hartwell Francis, a curriculum developer at New Kituwah Academy and an honorary member of the EBCI, to create these books for students at the language immersion school. Francis was also the founding director of the Cherokee Language Program at 91�ȱ���.

The books feature things preschool and elementary students are familiar with, such as places around the town of Cherokee and the different seasons, to help them learn the language.

“These books are very important for generating Eastern Band voices in work that is accessible and looks professional,” Francis said. “They're also important demonstration objects to show what's possible, what can happen with the Cherokee language and Cherokee language publishing.”

Francis and Potts work with a Cherokee speaker’s group and an adult language learners group, who provide the Cherokee translations, to piece these books together.

To start off, Potts and her class get a prompt from them, and then each student picks what they’re going to work on and sketch it. The class will then pass their sketches on to the adult language learners who critique their work to make sure it's culturally appropriate and give feedback.

After that, the students respond to that feedback, make changes and Potts and the class get to work, as students learn to print make and piece together a book.

Following their creation, the books are not only distributed to New Kituwah Academy, but also 91�ȱ���’s Hunter Library and the John C. Hodges Library at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Potts’ alma mater.

Potts is originally from Slovakia and grew up speaking languages, so for her, getting to connect students with a different culture and language means a lot.

"Learning language is not only learning new words and memorization but also learning about culture, different traditions and gaining new perspectives,” Potts said.

“To me, when I am learning a new language, it feels like someone opened the door and invited me in, and I can make sense of what is going on. It is a deeper connection when I can correctly use new words in the correct context and learn.”

 

Hopkins, Belt and a host of others gaze upon letters over 100 years old in fascination. The documents, handwritten in Cherokee, offer a glimpse into Cherokee life between the middle 19th and early 20th centuries.

They haven’t been translated before — and that’s where Hopkins and her team come in to uncover that history.

“They'll be like 'Gosh, I haven't heard that word in 50 years' when you're doing it, or 'That's a new word to me. That's pretty cool,' … or you'll get 'Oh, I remember that place they're talking about,' and then they'll tell a story,” said Hopkins, the project’s editor and director.

“It kind of intersects with oral history in that way, so it's like translation, oral history, team-based learning and knowledge production. That's really exciting.”

The work’s official name is the Eastern Cherokee Histories in Translation project, which started after the late Wiggins Blackfox, who passed away in February of 2025, expressed interest in translating two sets of documents: The Inoli Letters and the journals of Will West Long.

The Inoli Letters were written by Wiggins’ great-great grandfather, Inoli Blackfox, from 1848 until his death in 1888. Inoli held a handful of positions while he was alive, according to 19th century ethnologist James Mooney, who collected the letters.

Inoli did a lot of record keeping in the letters, noting things like who was in the church choir, but he also provided valuable history of the tribe during the American Civil War.

“It’s just really interesting stuff,” said Barnes Powell ‘20, a co-investigator on the project. “We get to see something that, to my knowledge, no other Native American people in North America have, which is first-hand written accounts in their native language of this period in history.”

The second half of it is the journals of Will West Long, a Cherokee interpreter and cultural historian, which were also garnered by Mooney and written between the 1880s and 1900s. Inside the journals, Long offers a robust picture of what daily life was like in and around Cherokee.

His daily writings often included activities like going out to dance at night with friends and family and taking a wagon to Bryson City to watch a train go by. They also helped supply some of the Cherokee hymns the Hopkins’ repertory choir sings today.

While there are a lot of helping hands with this project, it does come with its hurdles. One of the biggest is the richness and complexity of the Cherokee language.

Translating words from Cherokee to English isn't as easy as translating from languages more closely related to English, such as Spanish. According to Belt, some words in Cherokee can take a paragraph’s worth of English to explain what it means.

“If you read those documents, you translate them over into the best English you can use, it really doesn't say that,” Belt said. “It does talk about that, and that's what they're addressing, but what you read in English isn't what you comprehend from it (in Cherokee).”

Why preserve the language?That’s one reason why having Cherokee speakers is important. The language isn’t just another way of communicating. It’s not a language meant to be decoded into English and then forgotten about.

It’s so much more than that.

“Language is culture, and language is history. Language is the crystallization of a community of people that have known each other for hundreds of thousands of years that have carried that with them,” Hopkins said.

All of these efforts center around what the Cherokee language actually is: a tongue of a culture that’s existed for centuries, a tradition that’s been passed down generation to generation — and ultimately, a different way of looking at the world.

“We would lose 13,000 years of human experience, and not just knowledge, but applied wisdom based on our observations of how the world works. That's what's at stake,” Belt said. “We're not doing this just to be different, we're trying to save a whole discipline of how to look at the world that I think is drastically needed.”