East High School in Kansas City will offer Cherokee this fall to help pass an endangered language on to the next generation.
Like many other Indigenous languages, the Cherokee language is at risk of dying out after centuries of forced assimilation. Just 2,000 people speak Cherokee as a first language and most are over the age of 70.
That’s why Tanya Fuller said she’s honored to teach the Cherokee class at East High, but she also feels the weight of the responsibility.
“I just really don't want to mess it up. That was my own fear, my own nervousness that I would mess it up,” Fuller said. “But I felt so honored to be able to help continue something that could be lost, and I didn't want it to be lost.”
A cohort of school administrators and members of the KC Indian Center worked to add it to Kansas City Public Schools’ curriculum.
Carole Cadue-Blackwood, a social worker with the KC Indian Center, says she first pushed to add the Cherokee language to schools in Kansas. As a school board member for Lawrence Public Schools, one of her promises was to bring Indigenous languages to public schools.
She said it was difficult to find an Indigenous language program that met the requirements to be taught in schools, but found a successful Cherokee program in Oklahoma to use as an example to local school districts and universities.
“Because of systemic barriers, racism, if you will, the system is designed from the boarding school era for language erasure,” Cadue-Blackwood said. “Parents sent their kids away to boarding schools, they came home and they were ashamed of their culture, lost their language, lost their religion.”
However, the schools Cadue-Blackwood spoke with weren’t interested in a program or told her it would cost too much. Then she met Diane Bosilevac, the world language coordinator for Kansas City Public Schools, who was enthusiastic about bringing Cherokee to the district.
Gaylene Crouser, executive director of the KC Indian Center, said Cherokee was chosen in part because it is the most populous tribe in the Kansas City area. She says students need to learn about who Indigenous people are now.
“You need to start teaching about us as contemporary people, because the majority of curriculum stops the Indian wars, like we are erased from the face of the planet at that point,” Crouser said. “We're still here, so we need people to grow up being educated about who we are today and about the languages that have survived all of the oppression.”
Bosilevac said she thinks it’s perfect to introduce Cherokee as a language class in Kansas City Public Schools, where the curriculum revolves around identity and culture. She said not teaching Indigenous languages is a form of systemic racism in the United States.
“We have to tell the stories, and we have to still tell them correctly. We want our students to analyze what is being taught in our textbooks,” Bosilevac said. “OK, why was that written in that way? Let's talk about that. And why are we where we are today with almost eradicating this language?”
The school secured videos teaching the language from the Cherokee Nation since there are so few native speakers. Fuller, who is part Blackfoot and Choctaw, said she’ll be learning the language along with her students while teaching them the history behind it.
"We need people to grow up being educated about who we are today and about the languages that have survived all of the oppression.”Gaylene Crouser
She envisions a collaborative class with room for field trips, guest speakers and input from students.
“I want to be able to, when they walk in, ᎣᏏᏲ,” Fuller said. “Welcome them, ‘Hello, how are you?’”
Crouser said it may be hard for older people who were denied their own native language to see it taught to a younger generation.
“There's almost that little pang of jealousy and there's all these feelings of trauma that come out from being denied something so basic as who you were created to be, but then just to have it offered to other people,” Crouser said. “That's why it's so important that we do this right so that the kids that are here that are Indigenous can have that piece of themselves back.”
Cadue-Blackwood, a member of the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas and the Prairie Band Potawatomi Tribe said incidents of mistreatment of children at boarding schools that stripped them of their culture are burned into her mind.
“I would love to be in the room when some child out there says ‘ᏥᏣᎳᎩ, I'm a Cherokee,’” Cadue-Blackwood said. “I want them to sit up with pride, to know their history, their culture.”
Bryan VanOsdale, East High’s vice principal, said he's personally invested in bringing Cherokee to the school’s curriculum because of his own Native ancestry and his enthusiasm about keeping the language alive.
“This is maybe just one little tiny thing that's helping to heal that, and bringing honor back to them, to say, we're not going to strip away who you are,” VanOsdale said. “We're going to embrace it, and we're going to bring it out, and we're gonna let it be alive and well in 2023 and beyond at East High School.”
The KC Indian Center said it hasn’t heard of any other public schools in Kansas or Missouri that teach Indigenous languages. There are few Native language programs nationally, leading the White House to consider a decade-long plan to revitalize Native languages.
Geoffrey Talboy, principal at East High, said he’s already looking into opportunities to make his class a model for schools around the country.
VanOsdale says he hopes the Cherokee language class will change his students’ perspectives.
“It's not a ‘dead’ culture. It's not a ‘dead’ society. It's not a ‘dead’ language. It is still a vibrant language. It's still an important language,” VanOsdale said. “It has every bit the right to be at the forefront as any other culture, language, people out there.”
