Duke will offer a series of Cherokee language courses this fall, marking the first time an Indigenous language will be taught at the University.
Announced July 23, the course series begins in fall 2024 with Cherokee 1. The class will be taught online, but students will have the opportunity to meet with instructor Gil Jackson multiple times on campus and during a field trip to Cherokee, N.C.
Cherokee 2 will be offered in spring 2025, and intermediate courses will be added during the 2025-26 academic year. Students in the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences will be able to satisfy their foreign language requirement with Cherokee.
The course is part of Duke’s new Native American Studies Initiative, which was created in July 2023 largely in response to student demands for greater institutional support for Indigenous studies.
In August 2021, the Native American/Indigenous Student Alliance, then called the Native American Student Alliance, wrote an open letter to University administration asking for a number of administrative changes to better support Indigenous students. These demands included the establishment of a Native Studies program and Native American Center, the recruitment and retention of more Native American students, and the adoption of a land acknowledgement for the University.
Courtney Lewis, Crandall family associate professor of cultural anthropology and inaugural director of NASI, sees the new Initiative — and the Cherokee language course — as “a start” to addressing these student concerns.
“I kind of saw a need for a place that students, faculty, staff and community [members] could go to actually find out about all of the American Indian, Native American [and] Indigenous events that were already happening on campus,” Lewis said. “There was really no central place for this.”
Highlighting existing programs and events on Duke’s campus falls under NASI’s goal of increasing the visibility of Indigenous communities at the University. The Initiative also aims to support faculty and students engaging in Native American studies research, as well as to foster partnerships with other universities and Native nations.
The new Cherokee language course progression touches on all three objectives. Established through the support of the Office of Global Affairs, the department of cultural anthropology and the interinstitutional Partnership for Less Commonly Taught Languages, Cherokee courses will be taught in collaboration with other universities to allow students from multiple schools access to the instruction.
Duke had previously been involved in a partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which offered Cherokee language courses through its department of Native American and Indigenous studies. However, the school recently ended its Cherokee language program, meaning Duke students lost access to the resource.
“One of the biggest issues we have today with Indigenous people worldwide is language retention,” Lewis said. “Because Cherokee language was no longer going to be taught at UNC, I think it was just a great intersection of timing [to establish the Cherokee language program at Duke].”
Senior Josie van de Klashorst, former president and current vice president of NAISA, is excited for the Cherokee language course and NASI’s other efforts to enhance “education of Native culture at Duke.”
“I think that all of the work that students have done previously that I’ve seen during my time at Duke has really paid off in the Initiative being created,” she said. “… It has so much more momentum now … the actual actions and courses and tangible things are being developed, which I think is amazing.”
Van de Klashorst explained that while NAISA has historically played an activist role on campus, the establishment of the Initiative and the hiring of full-time faculty who are “able to push against the institution for the betterment of Native students” has allowed the group to focus on building community among Indigenous students at Duke.
“I think it’s a large step in the right direction,” van de Klashorst said.
According to the Duke Today announcement, the Cherokee course series will also recognize “the intertwined history of Duke University and American Indian education.”
North Carolina recognizes eight Indigenous tribes, but only the Eastern Band of the Cherokee has received full federal recognition. According to data from the 2020 Census, the state has the second-largest tribal population east of the Mississippi River, with over 130,000 Native American and Alaska Natives.
Trinity College — Duke’s predecessor institution — operated an “Industrial Indian Boarding School” from 1882 to 1887, enrolling 20 students from the Eastern Band of the Cherokee nation.
The school was designed to “westernize” the Indigenous students, forcing them to stop speaking their native language as part of the assimilation process. Its creation was reportedly financially motivated, as Trinity’s administration received $167 from the federal government for each Cherokee student it enrolled.
“To force Native people to stop speaking their language is so heartbreaking, but I think, in a sense, it is a moment of almost healing to be able to teach this language at Duke,” van de Klashorst said. “… I don’t know if I can properly put into words the meaning behind being able to speak Cherokee and teach the Cherokee language at what was a former boarding school.”
Trinity’s boarding school was named in a May 2022 report by the Department of the Interior investigating over 400 schools across the nation as part of its Federal Boarding School Initiative.
Lewis maintained that while the new course “won’t go into the boarding school very much” in its curriculum, it presents an opportunity to serve as “the beginning of a larger project on rectifying what [Trinity] benefited from with Eastern Band boarding school students.”
“It’s not just about the boarding school specifically really, but [rather] learning a broader history of the United States, learning how to work with Indigenous people on a broader scale, learning the importance of Indigenous knowledge [and] what that can do to help not only our own personal education but things that the larger world struggles with — everything from climate change to political policy,” Lewis said.
In addition to the new Cherokee language course series, Lewis hopes to eventually expand the program to offer several Indigenous languages at Duke, likely through continued interinstitutional partnerships.
Lewis is also planning a number of additional programs through NASI in an effort to meet students’ expectations for support of Indigenous populations and Native studies at Duke. She is currently in the process of developing a Native American Studies minor, organizing events to celebrate “A Year of American Indian Pop Culture” and establishing a yearly “Distinguished American Indian Changemakers” speaker series. She also hopes to one day create a standalone research center for Native American studies at Duke.
In addition to building up NASI’s programming, Lewis aims to engage a wider audience in Indigenous studies at the University in the coming years — starting with the Cherokee language course.
“Some students are a little intimidated to take these kind of language classes, especially American Indian language classes,” she said. “It’s not just about ‘should I be taking the Cherokee language as a non-speaker,’ but ‘what ways can I help bolster a language that is in some ways endangered,’ and ‘what can I learn through this language that will give me access to world views … [and] language construction in ways that I have never had access to before.’”
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Zoe Kolenovsky is a Trinity junior and news editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.