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Poetics, Performance, and Translation in Eastern Cherokee Language Revitalization

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Poetics, Performance, and Translation in Eastern Cherokee Language Revitalization Poetics, Performance, and Translation in Eastern Cherokee Language Revitalization Sara L. Snyder Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Sara L. Snyder All rights reserved ABSTRACT Poetics, Performance, and Translation in Eastern Cherokee Language Revitalization Sara L. Snyder This dissertation examines the creation and performance of expressive vocal practices by Eastern Cherokees as they seek to revitalize the Cherokee language in North Carolina in the Eastern part of the United States. The Eastern Band of Cherokee of Indians is facing the impending loss of its heritage language due to a community-wide shift to English. To combat this loss, the community now operates a Cherokee language immersion school, New Kituwah Academy. This dissertation is based on ethnographic and linguistic data collected during the researcher’s five years as the music and art instructor at New Kituwah. Indigenous epistemologies of language and poetics are brought into discourse with methodological and analytical approaches in ethnomusicology and linguistic anthropology. Performative vocal practices are processes through which Eastern Cherokee speakers negotiate what it means to be “modern Kituwah citizens.” Contemporary Cherokee voices emerge from the ambiguities of poetic “language play” in speech and song. “Voice” is both a metaphorical representation of a Cherokee sovereign and an actual materiality produced by embodied, speaking, and singing subjects. The translation of new popular song texts into Cherokee is likewise explored as “working” or “playing” with language. Translation is a poetic process imbedded within broader socio-cultural systems of meaning and perception (ontologies). Translation and vocal play destabilize semantic connections and open up the possibility for alternative interpretations and meanings; they allow for sovereignty to flourish as Cherokees reimagine and reshape themselves and their world. Table of Contents List of Tables and Figures ii Orthographic Conventions iv Acknowledgements vii Dedication xii Preface xiii Introduction 1 1. Performing Eastern Cherokee Sovereignty 46 2. Functional and Aesthetic Considerations in Contemporary Cherokee Text-setting Practices 84 3. A Culturally Based Approach to Cherokee Song Production 111 4. Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance in Cherokee Song Narratives 140 5. Copyright and Consciousness: Translating Charlotte’s Web into Cherokee 162 6. Heteroglossia, Humor, and Vocal Play: Constructing Cherokee Subjectivity in Language Immersion 183 Concluding Thoughts 215 Bibliography 227 Appendices 242 !i List of Tables and Figures Table 1.1 “The Rabbit Song” 63 Table 1.2 “United Cherokee Nations Anthem” 67 Figure 1.1 Cherokee Hymnbook Page 80 Table 2.1 “Three Little Ducks” 89 Table 2.2 “Twelve Days of Christmas” 90 Table 2.3 “Something Sweet” 92 Figure 2.1 “The Little Plant” Finger Play 96 Table 2.4 “Little Garden” 97 Figure 2.2 in 24: Melodic and Syllabic Stress 101 Figure 2.3 in duple meter 104 Figure 2.4 in duple meter 104 Figure 2.5 in 4/4: “Jingle Bells” 107 Table 4.1 Cherokee Verb Morphology 143 Table 4.2 Experienced Past Tense Suffix 145 Table 4.3 Non-experienced Past Tense Suffix 146 Table 4.4 Charlotte’s Web Sentence Translation 148 Table 4.5 “Dalonige Tsiyu” Chorus 149 Table 4.6 Finger Plays Translation: Hen and Chickens 150 Table 4.7 Habitual to Present Tense Shift 151 Figure 4.1 The Hen and Chickens 154 !ii Table 4.7 “The roots wake up” 158 !iii Orthographic Conventions The Cherokee language has a rich orthographic history. Since the introduction of the Cherokee syllabary in the early nineteenth century, Cherokee people themselves have written their language using their native writing system. The syllabary does not represent morphological features such as vowel length and tone and consonant clusters in conversational Cherokee. Within the text of this dissertation, I use “simple phonetics” to represent Cherokee words. Simple phonetics is a romanized form of representing Cherokee that does not indicate vowel length and tone and represents a glottal stop with an apostrophe (Montgomery-Anderson 2015, 27). I have chosen this system for two reasons. First, most people who work with the Eastern Cherokee language understand and read phonetics, but many lack comparable literacy in the Cherokee syllabary. After Removal (“the Trail of Tears”), Eastern Cherokees were less literate in the syllabary or in English than Western Cherokees (Finger 1984), and many fluent speakers who write using simple phonetics are less comfortable using and reading the syllabary. Second, in addition to being a theoretical and scholarly text, this dissertation is also intended to be readable and usable to people working in Cherokee language revitalization. Modified systems of phonetic representation, such as Cook (1979) or Montgomery-Anderson (2015), present challenges for non-linguists. In order for this text to be accessible to as many Cherokee language speakers and learners as possible, I have chosen to use simple phonetics with added descriptions to explain tone and stress where relevant. I have represented many of the song texts in the appendices using both syllabary and phonetics because these texts can be printed independently for immersion students or other !iv Cherokee readers who are more comfortable reading the syllabary. Where simple phonetics indicates how a word would be spelled in syllabary, parentheses are used to show any vowel omission in speech. For example, halsgi’a would be written hal(a)sgi’a to indicate ᎭᎳᏍᎩᎠ. The underlined syllabary character indicates that a vowel sound has been omitted to aid reading in the syllabary. Some people working with the language use a dot above certain syllabary characters to distinguish between voiced and voiceless consonants. For instance Ꭹ is pronounced “gi,” but ˙Ꭹ would be “ki.” I have chosen not to make this distinction in the syllabary symbols used for the song texts because it is not universally accepted by syllabary users and it is difficult to render in type. The accompanying phonetics will indicate such distinctions. The vowel sounds of Cherokee are represented phonetically by “continental” vowels a, e, i, o, u, and v. The “v” symbol represented a nasalized schwa sound. The consonant sounds of Cherokee are represented by d, t, g, k, h, l, m, n, s, w, y, ts, dl, tl and ' (glottal stop). These sounds are approximate to English consonant sounds. They correspond to the Cherokee syllabary as follows: !v Cherokee syllabary Ꭰ a Ꭱ e Ꭲ i Ꭳ o Ꭴ u Ꭵ v Ꭶ ga Ꭷ ka Ꭸ ge Ꭹ gi Ꭺ go Ꭻ gu Ꭼ gv Ꭽ ha Ꭾ he Ꭿ hi Ꮀ ho Ꮁ hu Ꮂ hv Ꮃ la Ꮄ le Ꮅ li Ꮆ lo Ꮇ lu Ꮈ lv Ꮉ ma Ꮊ me Ꮋ mi Ꮌ mo Ꮍ mu Ꮎ na Ꮏ hna Ꮐ nah Ꮑ ne Ꮒ ni Ꮓ no Ꮔ nu Ꮕ Ꮖ qua/gwa Ꮗ que/gwe Ꮘ qui Ꮙ quo/gwo Ꮚ quu/gwu Ꮛ quv/gwv Ꮜ sa Ꮝ s Ꮞ se Ꮟ si Ꮠ so Ꮡ su Ꮢ sv Ꮬ dla Ꮭ tla Ꮮ tle Ꮯ tli Ꮰ tlo Ꮱ tlu Ꮲ tlv Ꮳ tsa Ꮴ tse Ꮵ tsi Ꮶ tso Ꮷ tsu Ꮸ tsv Ꮹ wa Ꮺ we Ꮻ wi Ꮼ wo Ꮽ wu Ꮾ wv Ꮿ ya Ᏸ ye Ᏹ yi Ᏺ yo Ᏻ yu Ᏼ yv !vi Acknowledgements ᎢᏥᎩᏚᏩ ᏗᎦᎵᎢ, ᏂᎪᎯᎸ ᎤᎵᎮᎵᏍᏗ ᎠᏆᏓᎾᏖᏍᏗ ᎢᎦᎢ ᏍᎩᏰᏲᏅᎢ. Itsigiduwa digali’i, nigohilv ulihelisdi agwadantesdi iga’i sgiyeyonv’i. When I visited Cherokee as a graduate student in the summer of 2008, I took a Cherokee language course at Western Carolina University (WCU) with Tom Belt and Dr. Hartwell Francis, who helmed the Western Carolina University Cherokee Language Program for ten years. Tom Belt, whose voice is heard through this work, is a fluent Cherokee speaker from Oklahoma who has lived in Cherokee, North Carolina for several decades. Hartwell is a linguist whose contributions to Eastern Cherokee language archives and future language projects is immeasurable. Tom and Hartwell provided their support, knowledge, and insights, without which this dissertation would not have been possible. Also during the summer of 2008, I met Benjamin (Ben) Frey and Rainy Brake, who, like myself, were Cherokee language learners. Ben is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) whose own scholarly path led to a doctorate in German and Sociolinguistics in 2014. He is now Assistant Professor of Native American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His voice appears throughout this work as an Eastern Cherokee friend, collaborator, and scholar. His friendship, unwavering support, and critical insights have been invaluable to this work. Rainy Brake was hired as the first teacher at New Kituwah Academy in 2009. She and I were coworkers for nearly six years and worked together to develop the drama club program at New Kituwah. Third through sixth grade students !vii in the drama club perform plays and musicals in the Cherokee language. The song translation and text setting processes described throughout this dissertation continue to support the efforts of the drama program at New Kituwah. Rainy’s unwavering enthusiasm and Cherokee language knowledge continue to make the drama program possible. Hartwell Francis paved the way for the work described in this dissertation in 2010 when he contracted me to create Cherokee-language songs for WCU’s Cherokee Language Program. He paired me with fluent Cherokee speaker and musician Nannie Taylor to translate and create popular and children’s songs for language revitalization. I would later use the songs we created in music classes at New Kituwah. The work that Nannie and I did together over the past several years forms the foundation for this dissertation and is described in detail in Chapters Two, Three, and Four. Nannie is a dear friend who has stood up for me on several occasions.
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