A school banned Indigenous students from using their language. A century later, it’s teaching Cherokee

Between 1882 and 1887, some two dozen children from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians were enrolled in Trinity College’s Industrial Indian boarding school. The school, which operated about 20 miles south of Greensboro, North Carolina, alongside the college’s traditional liberal arts program, received federal funding in pursuit of its goal to assimilate Indigenous students.

The students, who ranged in age from eight to 18, were forced to work and wear western clothing, and were prohibited from speaking Cherokee or otherwise maintaining their traditions, while other students who attended Trinity College were instructed in the liberal arts.

In 1887, the boarding school closed. Trinity College eventually moved to Durham and, in 1924, it became Duke University. Now, the school at which Cherokee and other Indigenous students were forcibly stripped of their culture is being used to help revitalize the Cherokee language.

The classes are important not only because of Duke and the Cherokee people’s shared history, but also because more speakers are necessary to prevent the Cherokee language from going extinct. In 2019, the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes declared a state of emergency for the language.

“There are approximately 2,000 fluent first-language Cherokee speakers left, and each Cherokee tribe is losing fluent speakers at faster rates than new Cherokee speakers are developed,” the declaration reads.

Duke is partnering with Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and the University of Virginia for the promotion of less commonly taught languages, such as Haitian Creole, Turkish and Malagasy. The Cherokee language classes mark the first time an Indigenous American language is being taught at Duke.

Courtney Lewis, the director of Duke’s Native American Studies Initiative and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, said that Duke’s legacy made it important for Cherokee to be the first Native American language taught on the campus.

“Part of its founding was as an American Indian boarding school, whose direct purpose was to assimilate and erase language,” she said. “So when we’re thinking about what Duke needs to do to truly engage with the American Indian community, one of the first things we need to do is address their history.”

‘The reception I got was real’

In 2019, Shandiin Herrera, then president of Duke’s Native American/Indigenous Student Alliance (Naisa), wrote an open letter describing her time at Duke.

“I quickly learned that there were no classes on Native American studies, no designated space for Native students on campus, no Native professors, and no Native advisers. Most of my professors admitted that I was the first Native student they had ever knowingly taught,” she wrote.

Later, Naisa created a petition calling for the institution to support multiple Indigenous senior faculty and to establish a Native American and Indigenous studies program. The university responded by supporting some of the students’ asks. Lewis was the first hire.

Knowing she wanted to build an American Indian language program at the university, Lewis first reached out to Gilliam Jackson, known in Cherokee as “Doyi”, who was teaching at Stanford at the time, and convinced him to join her at Duke.

Now Doyi, who attended Snowbird day school, operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, teaches online Cherokee language classes at Duke. Snowbird day school was also an assimilationist school, but Doyi, whose first language is Cherokee, has said that teachers at Snowbird allowed students to speak Cherokee as long as they also learned English. He is currently teaching entry-level classes at Duke, and the program is slated to expand as students progress. There are currently 10 students in the classes, of which, Lewis said, two are Cherokee.

“From what they’ve told me, they are really having a great time, especially in accessing this language that would not have been accessible to them any other way,” Lewis said of the students.

Though Doyi primarily teaches online, he visited the campus early in the semester to teach and meet students. His in-person classes have gone so well that he is planning more visits.

“The students are incredible and my preferred way of teaching is teaching in person,” he said. “The reception I got was real.”

The students who sign up for the classes are not in for an easy time. Cherokee is considered a class IV language, which means it is incredibly difficult to learn. It uses a syllabary, not an alphabet, because each of the distinct written symbols represents a syllable or the “spectrum of sounds used to speak Cherokee”, according to the Cherokee Nation’s website.

Still, the students are undeterred – Lewis said that they were “very real about their passion to learn this challenging language”.

When she was brought in, Lewis understood that an integral part of her role would be program building. Last year, she started the Native American Studies Initiative (NASI), whose main goals are “increasing the visibility and presence of Native Americans and Native American Studies work” on campuses; supporting faculty, staff and students who are pursuing Native American studies research; and working to collaborate not only with other colleges, but also with Indigenous nations.

Saving an endangered language

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, which is in Cherokee, North Carolina, and the Cherokee Nation, in north-east Oklahoma, speak slightly different dialects, Doyi and Lewis said, but Doyi is comfortable with both. That’s essential, as the eastern Cherokee dialect had only an estimated 150 fluent speakers left in late 2019.

“I live about an hour west of Cherokee, North Carolina, which is the primary and the biggest part of the Cherokee Indian reservation,” Doyi said. “But we tend to speak, the community that I’m located in, it’s known as ‘Tuti’ or, translated, ‘Snowbird’.”

Tuti is a bit closer to the Oklahoma dialect, but speakers in Doyi’s community also use Kituwah, the dialect that is spoken in the main reservation, Doyi said. He has visited with Cherokee people in and from Oklahoma and says that the language he speaks is probably between the Kituwah dialect and the western dialect spoken in Oklahoma.

Lewis said that teachers typically instruct students in the dialects they were raised with. Because Doyi is familiar with both, he is able to teach both.

He and his former students created their own teaching material, Lewis said, which is not uncommon for instructors of languages for which traditional teaching materials are not readily available.

In addition to the classroom lessons, students in Duke’s Cherokee language program this year will also take field trips in which “they will converse with a wide variety of speakers in order to hear different ways of speaking, even within one community”, Lewis said.

Students in the Cherokee language classes, which satisfy the university’s language requirements for students, will both learn a functional language – one that was spoken for centuries on the land they now occupy – while also participating in a process of ensuring the language does not die out.

“These students are active participants in a project of rebuilding,” Lewis said. “Cherokee language is the first American Indian class that we’re offering through this partnership program, but I would like to see the Cherokee language move … There are a lot of benefits to having students come together from two different universities and be able to have this language accessible to all of them.”

Doyi likewise hopes that the classes expand, and that students are able to reach a level of fluency that allows them to help teach the language themselves. The work of revitalizing Cherokee is not limited to Duke, either – Lewis and Doyi both referenced Cherokee language programs at Western Carolina and the University of Carolina at Asheville, both of which have relationships with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

“My goal since I started teaching at the universities has been to teach enough language that some of the students would gain enough to help my community or other communities in language reclamation or revitalization,” Doyi said, noting that some of his previous students had already developed enough to teach at the university level.

Duke’s Cherokee 1 classes are ongoing. In the spring, students will begin taking Cherokee 2. In learning the language, they are not only working towards their graduation, but helping to speak life into something that wasviolently repressed.