Reviving the Cherokee language is a full-time job – literally

by Kristi Eaton, Next City: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/reviving-the-cherokee-language-is-a-full-time-job-literally

A Cherokee language class in pre-COVID times (Photo credit: Cherokee Nation)

Though Jacob Chavez grew up around family members who spoke Cherokee - his grandmother was fluent and his father could understand the language - the 23-year-old didn’t learn it as a child.

Now, as a young adult, the Tahlequah, Oklahoma, resident is taking part in a unique program to train Cherokee Nation citizens and those interested in Cherokee culture to become highly proficient in the language by paying them to study it. It’s one that is quickly disappearing.

“It’s in my family and I would like to kind of like, build it back and strengthen it back amongst some of our younger generation that we have and then, it’s just a passion that I’ve had — probably since senior year of high school,” Chavez says. “I just wanted to have that part of my identity and I’ve just been working on it ever since. And I took a couple classes in high school and in college and then now I’m in this program.”

The Cherokee Language Master Apprentice Program is an immersion program for adult Cherokee language learners. The program is geared for novice language enthusiasts, and it is intense: The 40-hour-per-week program runs for two years. Participants are paid $10 per hour, says Howard Paden, Cherokee Nation Language Department executive director.

“It’s not a whole lot, but what we have learned is people who have been really dedicated to learn the language—you have to have that many consecutive hours so they have to have the ability to live and continue to put some groceries on the table and that sort of thing,” he says. “So, it’s worked out really well. You know, we haven’t expected to make them be rich by any means, but we do want them to survive while they learn the language. And so that incentive has allowed people to focus just on the language instead of other things.”

The program, which started about six years ago, has grown. It went from having four students per year to 16, so at any given time, there will be 32 participants taking part in the two-year program when fully filled, Paden says.

For the Cherokee Nation — the largest tribe in the United States by population with more than 380,000 citizens worldwide — the program is taking on extra importance. There are about 2,000 fluent Cherokee speakers, according to Paden, and in the last year, more than 100 have died, some due to COVID-19-related illnesses.

“Right now, we’re losing roughly 5% of our speakers per year,” Paden says. “But we know that it takes quite a bit of time [to learn the language] and it’s not happening organically in our communities anymore.”

Losing so many fluent elders is one reason that the tribe placed them among the top of their COVID-19 vaccination list. According to the tribe, since receiving the first distribution of vaccines on Dec. 14, the Cherokee Nation administered more than 6,500 vaccines, including about 900 Cherokee speakers, as of Jan. 19.

Due to the pandemic, the coursework for the Master Apprentice Program is taught online, something that Chavez says has been difficult but he is making work.

“I’m a very in-person type of learner,” he said. “I can’t really do this technology interface kind of stuff, but I’ve had to adapt and I’m willing to do that. I want to do whatever I’ve got to do to learn and so it’s just kind of a means to an end, really. If I’ve got to use a laptop and get on Zoom, I’ll do that. But I’d much rather be in a classroom. I think we all would. But this is the world we live in and it is what it is.”

The Cherokee Nation looked to several different initiatives to help guide them when creating the Master Apprentice Program. They looked at a program within the Sac and Fox Nation, also based in Oklahoma, as well as the Euchee (Yuchi) and even the Māori from New Zealand.

The Cherokee Nation’s reservation encompasses 14 countries in northeastern Oklahoma, including parts of Tulsa County. There are ongoing discussions to possibly host a class at one Tulsa high school, though Paden is unsure where that stands now with the pandemic — both the high school and the tribe are doing most things online now.

Chavez believes that a tribe can’t have culture without language, and so that’s why he focuses on the future and learning the language.

“Those two things are just kind of joined, and if you lose our language and you still have culture, it’s kind of just a history, almost, because language is so ingrained inside of a culture,” he said. “You know, there’s names for all this stuff like games and ceremonies and things like that. You need the language to use all that. And so it’s vital for our nation and other nations that struggle with their languages … we’ve lost that connection between our elders and our youth because mainly they didn’t want to pass on language. [T]he consensus is that we’re losing it, so we’re trying to build it back now. It’s really important for us.”

Kristi Eaton is a freelance journalist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Associated Press, The Washington Post and elsewhere. Visit her website at KristiEaton.com or follow her on Twitter @KristiEaton.

Malcolm X is still misunderstood – and misused. Fifty-five years after his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom in New York, we still get much wrong about Malcolm X

by Omar Suleiman, Al Jazeera:  https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/2/21/malcolm-x-is-still-misunderstood-and-misused

Image: Al Jazeera

Every semester in which I teach a course on Muslims in the Civil Rights Movement at Southern Methodist University, I give my students a selection of quotes from both Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X and ask them to guess who said what. So for example, I will posit the following two quotes and ask for their proper ascription:

“Ignorance of each other is what has made unity impossible in the past. Therefore, we need enlightenment. We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity. Once we have more knowledge (light) about each other, we will stop condemning each other and a United front will be brought about.”

“The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”

And every single time, they have been unable to identify the first quote as belonging to Malcolm, and the second to Martin. But it is not just a few students that have gotten it wrong. The American education system and most mainstream portrayals of Martin and Malcolm have been simplistic and sanitising.

Martin is the perfect hero who preached non-violence and love, and Malcolm the perfect villain who served as his violent counterpart, preaching hate and militancy. The result is not just a dishonest reading of history, but a dichotomy that allows for Dr King to be curated to make us more comfortable, and Malcolm X to be demonised as a demagogue from whom we must all flee. Reducing these men to such simplistic symbols allows us to filter political programmes according to how “King-like” they are. Hence, illegitimate forms of reconciliation are legitimised through King and legitimate forms of resistance are delegitimised through Malcolm X.

Malcolm was never violent, not as a member of the Nation of Islam, nor as a Sunni Muslim. But Malcolm did find it hypocritical to demand that black people in the United States commit to non-violence when they were perpetually on the receiving end of state violence. He believed that black people in the US had a right to defend themselves, and charged that the US was inconsistent in referencing its founding fathers’ defence of liberty for everyone but them.

Malcolm knew that his insistence on this principle would cause him to be demonised even further and ultimately benefit the movement of Dr King, which is exactly what he had intended. Just weeks before his assassination, he went to Selma to support Dr King and willingly embraced his role as the scary alternative. In every interview, in his meeting with Dr Coretta Scott King, and elsewhere, he vocalised that the US would do well to give the good reverend what he was asking for, or else.

But he never actually said what the “or else” was, placing a greater urgency on America to cede to King’s demands. Malcolm had no problem playing the villain, so long as it led to his people no longer being treated like animals. And while King may have been steadfast in his commitment to non-violence, the thrust of Malcolm fully served its purpose.

As Colin Morris, the author of Unyoung, Uncolored, Unpoor wrote, “I am not denying passive resistance its due place in the freedom struggle, or belittling the contribution to it of men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Both have a secure place in history. I merely want to show that however much the disciples of passive resistance detest violence, they are politically impotent without it. American Negroes needed both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X …”.

But it was not just that Malcolm and Martin had complementary strategies to achieve black freedom, they also spoke to different realities. Malcolm spoke more to the Northern reality of black Americans who were only superficially integrated, whereas Martin spoke to the Southern reality where even that was not possible.

Malcolm also spoke to the internalised racism of black people that was essential to overcome for true liberation. As the late James Cone states, “King was a political revolutionary. Malcolm was a cultural revolutionary. Malcolm changed how black people thought about themselves. Before Malcolm came along, we were all Negroes. After Malcolm, he helped us become black.”

That is why, despite the diminishing of Malcolm in textbooks and holidays, he has been consistently revived through protest movements and the arts. He has lived through the activism of the likes of Muhammad Ali and Colin Kaepernick, inspired the black power movement, and been an icon for American Muslims on how to exist with dignity and faith in a hostile environment.

And even in those claims to Malcolm as a symbol, Malcolm himself in the fullness of his identity is erased. In championing his movement’s philosophy, some seek to secularise him, intentionally erasing his Muslim identity. And in championing his religious identity, others seek to depoliticise him. This was a tension that Malcolm noted in his own life, saying: “For the Muslims, I’m too worldly. For other groups, I’m too religious. For militants, I’m too moderate, for moderates I’m too militant. I feel like I’m on a tightrope.”

Muslims too should be cautious not to sanitise Malcolm, as the US has sanitised Dr King. To restrict Malcolm solely to his Hajj experience is similar to restricting King solely to his “I have a dream” speech. Malcolm was a proud Muslim who never stopped being black. And while he no longer subscribed to a condemnation of the entire white race, he was unrelenting in his critique of global white supremacy.

Malcolm was consistently growing in a way that allowed him to not only champion his own people’s plight more effectively but to tackle a broader set of interconnected issues. And while history seems to posit Malcolm as his polar opposite, Dr King had begun to articulate many of the same positions that made Malcolm so unpopular.

In the words of the great James Baldwin, “As concerns Malcolm and Martin, I watched two men, coming from unimaginably different backgrounds, whose positions, originally, were poles apart, driven closer and closer together. By the time each died, their positions had become virtually the same position. It can be said, indeed, that Martin picked up Malcolm’s burden, articulated the vision which Malcolm had begun to see, and for which he paid with his life. And that Malcolm was one of the people Martin saw on the mountaintop.”

Perhaps it is time we ask why we only seem to celebrate one of them.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.