Description:
Native Cherokee speaker Gary Vann talks about the importance of the tribal language preservation.
Transcript:
SB: Today is October 29. I am Sheldon Beach with the Metropolitan Library System, and I am here today with Gary Vann to talk about Cherokee Language. Do you want to introduce yourself and talk about who you are and what you do?
GV: My Name is Gary Van and I work for the Master/Apprentice program for Cherokee Nation.
SB: Are you a native speaker?
GV: Yes I am. I’ve spoke all my life.
SB: Are you one of the ones that helped start the program?
GV: Yes. We started about 4 or 5 years ago.
SB: I don’t know anything about how to teach someone a language. What went into the process of beginning to start the program?
GV: The guys that came and approached me, Howard and Ryan, they asked if I wanted to help with this program and it was something that I had dreamed of doing for a long time because I love talking my language, and to get started on teaching, it’s kind of a process. You’ve really got to study people, get to know how to adjust to people, how they react. And it took me a little while to get to know how to do all that stuff. And I still don’t know it all. You can’t ever really. To really teach somebody you just kind of have to go into it.
SB: What was the first class like when you got everybody together?
GV: The first class when we first started the program, it was more of… I was just supposed to have been someone just sitting in there answering questions. If they needed help on a word, whenever they asked a question, “How do you say this?” we were there to clarify how to say it or to help them out with the pronunciations.
SB: You say you’ve spoken Cherokee your whole life, when people come in, is it a hard language to learn?
GV: Some people say it is. I say it’s as hard as... if you think it’s going to be hard it’s going to be hard. If you think it’s going to be easy it’s going to be easy. It’s just your mindset.
SB: So what’s the program like? If someone says, “hey, I’m thinking about doing it” how would you describe it to them?
GV: I would tell them, if your heart is into it, you need to do it. If you’re thinking you want to learn this language you need to get in here. Because it is a dying language. It is something that needs to be taught. I think we’re doing a pretty good job of keeping it going, but I think we need to extend it out and teach it in churches, schools…
SB: Do you know about how many native speakers there are?
GV: They’ve estimated about 2000 that are still left.
SB: And there are some people that are conversational, but not native speakers?
GV: Right. There are some that can say a few words.
SB: When someone says they want to do the program, what kind of commitment is it?
GV: It’s a two year commitment. Right now I think we’re going year by year contracts. So the first year, then evaluate and you get another contract after that.
SB: How good do people tend to be at the end of it, after 2 years? Can you have a conversation with them and usually understand what they’re doing and what they’re saying?
GV: They’re conversational. It usually depends on the person. You’re going to get out what you put into it. Here’s what I tell my students. You’ve got to be Cherokee 24/7. Just because you’re here 8 hours, that doesn’t mean you’re going to go home and leave Cherokee here. You’re going to have to study at home, you’re going to have to live it at home, you’ve got to be Cherokee 24/7. You’ve got to study it all the time. You’ve got to find somebody to talk to. Even if it’s going outside of the home. If you don’t have anybody in the family, find somebody and say, “Hey, can I talk to you? Can I ask you questions?” because that only helps you out, to keep Cherokee going in that situation.
SB: Why do you think it’s important to keep Cherokee going? Why is it important to learn Cherokee?
GV: I think it’s important to learn Cherokee because… How about if one of these days the federal government comes up and says, “Can You speak Cherokee?” How many people are going to be able to say, “I can.” I mean, there’s only a few of us right now that can say I can speak, out of so many of us, how many can raise their hand and say, “I’m a speaker now?” Just because you can say 10 words does that make you a speaker?
SB: As somebody that started this program, how does it feel when you see people going through it, when you see people get done with it and are able to talk in their language?
GV: I love it. To me just the joy of people getting that feeling, seeing them from day one to when they graduate, seeing them getting that feeling, “Hey, I can say this. I can go talk to Aunt, I can go talk to Uncle, I can go talk to Granny, I can go talk to Grandpa, I can go talk to Mom and Dad,” you can just see the joy. You can see the tears coming down. Some of them, they’ve been longing for that for years, and years, and years, and to me it’s a joyful feeling to see all of that.
SB: Do you see a lot of people going and talking to their families? Are some of them raising their kids now to…
GV: Yes they are. Some of them are here because they’ve got their kids in the immersion [school] so they can talk to their kids, so they can have a conversation with their kids.
SB: I talked to someone at the [Cherokee] immersion school and she said that’s kind of a problem. A lot of [the kids] can talk to their grandparents but they can’t talk to their parents. That’s cool that the parents are learning.
GV: I think it’s a necessity. I think it should start at home. If they really want this language thing to work I think it needs to start back at home. We need to start teaching amongst our families again if we really want this to work out.
SB: In addition to learning to speak, you teach them to read and write in Cherokee too, right?
GV: Not necessarily. They learn that on their own. We teach conversation. Most of them learn that by accident. Some of them already know how to read and write a little bit when they come in. Some of them don’t know how at all, but most of them learn it as they go on. It’s not that we stress it. That’s not our focal point, but they do learn it. Within two years you’re going to learn how to read some of it and write some of it.
SB: I’ve noticed around [Tahlequah] a lot of the signs will say like, “stop” and then underneath they’ll say… however you say “stop” in Cherokee.
GV: (says “stop” in Cherokee)
SB: Yeah, because all of the street signs around town, you’ll see it written.
GV: We see that more and more now and I think it needs to be done that way.
SB: Do you see more people around the area that are better speakers now?
GV: Back where I come from, around the Bunch area all of us still speak our language back home. And if you go into our local town, Stillwell, in Walmart you still hear the language still spoken there. Not as much anymore, but you can still hear it there. Now, if you’re in Tahlequah some of them will talk to you in our language, but it’s starting to come back more and more because people are starting to realize that maybe we are getting to that point, you know?
SB: I’m curious, if someone is in your program trying to learn how to speak Cherokee, what does a typical day look like for them?
GV: A typical day is, we come in and we have a song that we sing every morning, and then we follow that with a prayer, and then if there are ten students there each one of them has to come up with a little storyline. They have to say what they’ve seen, what they’ve done, driving up here, or going home the night before, or just something that’s happened within a day or two. Then if they’re having problems with the story we’ll try to figure out what word they’re having a problem with, and maybe we’ll jot that down and that day we may have ten words that we can go through. They’d say, “hey, I notice you are having problems with these words. Let’s go through them.”
SB: I know a lot of people that don’t speak another language don’t understand a lot of parts about it, but I’m told that in Cherokee the language will have a lot of information just in one word. So if you try to learn ten words, that might be a couple of sentences, or a whole paragraph worth of information.
GV: Right. That could be an all day thing. Just ten words can be an all day thing, and it could be a two day thing. It just depends on which words it is or the extent you want to go through them because Cherokee is a descriptive language.
SB: Is there anything else you want to say about the importance of the language or anything like that?
GV: I think it’s important for us to carry on our language because my age group, I’ll be 50, and my age group is probably the last age group that’s around, there may be a few that’s younger, that can still speak. After that there’s very few that can carry on a conversation. Who’s going to be here to speak the language in ten years, twenty years? So it’s very important for us to carry our language on. It is our language, so we can still be Cherokee. That’s what identifies us as Cherokee. That’s who we are.
SB: Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. If somebody hears this and wants to get involved, wants to try to go to the school, where can they find you?
GV: They can get on cherokeenation.org. It should be on the website there. You can get ahold of them that way. It should have the name and number on there.
SB: Thanks a whole bunch for taking the time to talk to me.
GV: (responds in Cherokee)