In 1996, a private 309-acre tract of land within Great Smoky Mountains National Park was sold for $3.5 million. With that transaction, the buyers were able to reclaim what was rightfully theirs—and had been for 10,000 years.
The Eastern Band of the Cherokee had purchased Kituwah, the legendary birthplace of their people (Kituwah, pronounced gid-doo-wah, is also the original name of the Cherokee and their language). At Kituwah, the Creator handed down the laws and gave them the gift of fire. In the middle of Kituwah’s open fields, there is a mound that once held the hearth of the eternal flame—a fire so significant to the Cherokee people that members of distant villages would walk hundreds of miles to visit it. They would leave dirt or ash from their village on the mound before collecting the warmth and light of the flame to bring home to their family and neighbors.
The school, which enrolls children as newborns, is helping children appreciate their native language and preserve the Cherokee identity. Out of roughly 12,000 Cherokee living in Western North Carolina, only about 270 of them still speak Kituwah and the average age of native speakers is 57. The Kituwah language is literally dying out.
“Language is a part of who we are. It is part of our identity and what makes us Cherokee,” says Renissa Walker, the immersion school manager.
Walker’s son was one of the first students at New Kituwah. He started in the school’s pilot class as an infant and is now one of six first graders.
“My husband did not want me to speak Cherokee to our daughters,” says Sarah Smoker, an elder in the Cherokee community. “I would try to sneak in some Cherokee when he wasn’t listening.”
Smoker now visits New Kituwah almost daily to interact with the children.
“Being Cherokee is not only about language. It’s also about learning the dances, telling stories, and spending time outdoors.”
Smoker smiles sweetly while sitting in a rocker, with one or two children resting in her lap, telling children stories from her childhood: playing in the creek looking for crawfish, or gathering ramps, wild ginger, dandelions, and chicory from the forest. Because the school backs up to Great Smoky Mountain National Park, the children can sometimes look out their classroom window and view a visiting elk or deer, but more often they see the resident groundhog. And the most common first word for the children is yonah, the Cherokee word for ‘bear.’
“They like it the most because we say the word and then we growl afterwards,” says Kelly Murphy, the lead teacher for the two-year-old class,.
Once a week, Murphy takes her children outside to teach them how to grow vegetables in the school garden or identify medicinal herbs in the nearby woods. Murphy grew up in the Cherokee community and attended Cherokee High School. In school she took Cherokee to meet her foreign language requirement.
“The class only taught me the very basics,” said Murphy. “And I hated that I couldn’t speak to my grandmother in Cherokee. But then I started to volunteer at New Kituwah, and I decided that if the babies could learn the language, then so could I.”
At age 21, Murphy is the youngest teacher at New Kituwah and one of the very few Cherokee of her generation who can speak Cherokee.
Old traditions and new technology are woven together at New Kituwah. The hallways have posters of popular children’s movies, but the titles are in Cherokee. The computer lab has new Apple computers, but the keys each have at least two symbols to account for the 86 letters of the Cherokee syllabary. Children gather in a circle to perform the quail dance and bear dance, then Skype with students at the Oklahoma Cherokee language immersion school.
But it is not always as easy to integrate modern ideas and ancient language. For example, scientific discoveries made within the past century do not exist in Cherokee, so academy leaders meet four times a year to decide on the translations for words ranging from atom to Triceratops. At the seasonal meetings the leaders also address issues of how to present curriculum. New Kituwah Academy is held to the same state education standards as all North Carolina public schools, which means they eventually will be teaching history lessons on Columbus and the U.S. Constitution. But how do you teach the Declaration of Independence when life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness did not originally apply to the Native Americans?
Stigmas and stereotypes are additional hurdles, says Gil Jackson, head administrator at New Kituwah.
“Parents still fear that enrolling their students in Cherokee language immersion school will prevent them from functioning in the ‘real world. There is still a feeling that we are somehow holding them back.”
That is one reason why New Kituwah incorporates a 30-minute English lesson into the daily schedule. But outside of that time frame, in the hallways, on the playground, and everywhere else at New Kituwah, only Cherokee is spoken. Even the janitor, cooks, and office administrators speak Cherokee – to the children, and to each other.
“We didn’t think the language was important until we almost lost it,” says J.C. Wachacha, a Cherokee elder and instructor at New Kituwah. “Our generation failed in that respect. That’s the one regret I’ve got. Our ancestors gave us the language as a gift, and now it is our job to preserve it and pass it on.”
The ancient Kituwah fire lives on in the Cherokee’s native tongue. In a culture bombarded with tourists and technology, both elders and modern Cherokee agree that language is the primary path to reigniting and reuniting the Cherokee nation.
