EBCI speaker Marie Junaluska sits down for an interview with Michael Cooksey from the Cherokee Nation Language Department. (BROOKLYN BROWN/One Feather photos)
By BROOKLYN BROWN
One Feather Reporter
CHEROKEE, N.C. – Darrell McCoy, Michael Fields, and Michael Cooksey from the Cherokee Nation Language Department have been exploring the Qualla Boundary during the first week of November, recording interviews with Cherokee speakers from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI). Their interviews are part of a larger ongoing project since 2022 called, “Saving the Voices.”
“The project started with interviewing speakers back in Oklahoma in 2022. We came out here to interview Eastern Band speakers. Everybody’s got different dialects and different ways to speak. It’s been really good to be able to hear. We’ve been able to talk with them about, ‘How do you say that? Well, we say it this way, I wonder why we say it this way and you say it that way?’ Not that anybody’s wrong or right. It’s just interesting to see how it is has changed,” McCoy said.
Cherokee Nation speaker Michael Cooksey has the recorded conversations with EBCI speakers, which range from talking about families, to canning vegetables, to hunting and fishing, or wherever the conversation goes.
Cherokee Nation speaker Michael Cooksey conducts an interview with EBCI speaker Marie Junaluska for the “Saving the Voices” language project of the Cherokee Nation Language Department.
“It’s an absolute pleasure to be here and just have an opportunity to meet these wonderful people and I’m just thankful,” Cooksey said.
“We listen for some words that are hardly spoken, and it’s just produced for learning purposes for others. We try to make that as clear as possible and to preserve that person’s voice; We usually tell them in the beginning how their family or someone might want to listen to that years down the road.”
“There’s definitely some where you’re just like, man, I could have sat for four or five hours listening to them talk,” McCoy said.
“I say it all the time, I can’t believe how lucky we are that we get paid to do something like this. And to come out here and visit our homelands, visit everybody. Everybody’s always so nice and welcoming and we’re always so appreciative of it.”
Although the project is still developing, the team said the goal is to eventually develop an app where people can access the interviews, which are transcribed and translated in English and Cherokee.
Darrell McCoy and Michael Fields help conduct an interview for the “Saving the Voices” language project.
Renissa McLaughlin, Kituwah Preservation & Education Program (KPEP) youth & adult education director, said KPEP is working on a similar project. They have currently interviewed roughly 40 EBCI speakers, and the ongoing interviews will eventually be housed on a tribal digital archive accessible only to enrolled EBCI members.
