Julie Reed is a Penn State professor and Native American historian. She’s an expert in Southeastern Indians and Cherokee society. Her work is featured in an episode of the PBS show “Native America” that airs on WPSU-TV Tuesday at 9 p.m.
In the episode, Reed examines Cherokee writing, called the “Cherokee Syllabary,” on the walls of a cave near Chattanooga, Tennessee. WPSU intern James Engel spoke with her about the significance of these sites and what viewers should expect from the episode.
Here's the transcript of that conversation:
James Engel
Professor Julie Reed, thank you for speaking with us.
Julie Reed
Thank you for having me.
James Engel
You're featured in “Language is Life,” an upcoming episode of PBS’ “Native America.” What's the significance of the title of the episode?
Julie Reed
I think it's layered in the sense that Indigenous languages, on the one hand, are in danger of essentially losing all of our speakers in the next several decades. And that Cherokee, even though between the three federally recognized tribes, that even collectively, we're down to less than 3000 speakers. And we're in good shape compared to a lot of smaller communities, and even our language is on the verge of extinction if we don't raise a new generation of speakers and writers.
So on the one hand, I think it's a call out to the fact that Indigenous languages are incredibly important and also incredibly fragile. And then secondly, there's a component to it that there are whole ways of knowing and Indigenous knowledge that are embedded in the language itself. And so how do you have a full appreciation for a society or a culture if you don't understand the deeper meanings that are lost through translation that can't be replicated in the English language?
The third piece of that relative to the episode is that part of the reason that we are spending time in these caves is the presence of Cherokee syllabary, which was invented and distributed by Sequoyah, who was a Cherokee language speaker and created that language in the 1820s. How most people understand the existence of the syllabaries is through the Cherokee Phoenix, which was the first bilingual Native-led newspaper in the United States. So that's how most people come to know the language. But we're in these caves seeing uses of the syllabary very early on. So just after it’s introduced by Cherokee people to do very different kinds of things with the language than what national leaders are doing to resist removal.
And so it's literally embedded on the walls of these caves, which are also much older spaces for Native peoples throughout the southeast.
James Engel
Could you give us a preview of what we should expect from the episode?
Julie Reed
Well, hopefully it won't include me army crawling into the cave. But that's a distinct possibility. There is going to be some filming that took place in the cave and a discussion of what's on the walls of the cave and a discussion of what that means to the collective team, which includes indigenous archaeologists and Cherokee archaeologists, in particular. [These are] Beau Carroll, who is Eastern Band [of Cherokee Indians], as well as Tom Belt, who is a Cherokee Nation citizen, but has lived amongst the Eastern Band for a number of decades now, but is a first language Cherokee speaker.
And so I think it's collectively the three of us as a team, walking through our process of what do we do when we go into these caves? What are we looking for? What are we seeing? How do we process this language? The syllabary that we're seeing is an older version of syllabary. Obviously, languages change and adapt over time. And so the ways that Cherokee writers and speakers write and speak today are not the same ways that Cherokee speakers wrote and spoke in the 1820s. Right?
So it's how we get to the translations that we now have for some of these writings, and also the degree to which these spaces need to be protected and preserved. So there's going to be some discussions of that. You're also going to hear from, I think, each one of us talking about what this means to us as Cherokee people. And obviously, I sit in this dual role as both a Cherokee Nation citizen and a historian of native peoples in the southeast. And so it obviously has certain kinds of meanings to me as a scholar and implications for my scholarship.
But there's also a piece of this that matters to me as a Cherokee person, in terms of the power of the spaces, the sacredness of the spaces, the activities that are going on in this moment when Cherokees are under tremendous pressure to alter their societies in all sorts of ways. That kind of abundance of creativity and kind of awe that that creates for me thinking about this moment.
James Engel
You've worked in similar sites to the cave before? What are those experiences like personally and academically? And what are the importance of these spaces?
Julie Reed
I think that this also has profoundly impacted my work [and] that my entire second book changed as a result of going into these caves. I initially anticipated writing a book on Cherokee education, which I did do, but I thought that I was going to focus on schools and traditional classrooms and really Euro-American kind of visions of what schooling should be.
And that when I went into this cave, the first cave that I went into, I realized that educational spaces are far more complex within a longer history of Cherokee people in Cherokee societies. I had to take seriously other kinds of spaces that also operated as classrooms and put those in conversation with the kinds of classrooms that most people think of — teachers, desks, missions.
James Engel
As you were saying, the Cherokee are still here. They're very present and the largest federally recognized tribe in the country. How is the current community and its language — how is it growing and evolving in the modern day?
Julie Reed
Well, the wonderful thing is, I would say that even when the three federally recognized tribes can’t agree on a lot, we tend to come together over language revitalization. And so our speakers get together amongst all three communities regularly. So there's lots of discussions about kind of coming up with shared terminology or thinking through terms that maybe we don't have terms for because the language was stymied for a very long time.
So how are we going to have a kind of culturally relevant word for something that didn't naturally develop through language? And that includes things like “computer” and “DNA,” but it also includes programs.
There's a program called Cherokee Little Seeds, which is a new program, but it includes three generations of Cherokee people. It is Cherokee speakers, many of them women in the community who grew up as first language speakers. And then there are mothers of new babies and young children. And the three generations of Cherokee people get together, and they're teaching the babies language, and they're cooking together, and they're harvesting and they're meeting with elders in the community, and attending the speakers gatherings, and they're doing it collectively, which is the only way to kind of raise a new generation of speakers.
But it's using the oldest methods of education that we know existed for how you build Cherokee speakers, and how Cherokee speakers came into the world and grew 1000 years ago, right. And so, there's also programs where you can take online language classes, which my daughter and I have done here in Pennsylvania so we can kind of continue to work on our own language skills far away from the Cherokee Nation itself.
James Engel
All right, thank you very much, Professor Reed. It was great talking with you.
Julie Reed
It was great talking with you as well.
