The inclusion of a Native language, whether that’s Cherokee or any other language in books for young people now is much more, becoming much more common, which is wonderful. And it’s not that there weren’t books published before, because Charlesbridge had done a book back in 1994 called Itse Selu which was the Cherokee Harvest Festival book, so I knew it was very much possible to put the Cherokee words in a book, and so I did.
I have a complete Cherokee language version of At the Mountain’s Base, that’s an e-book that you can get in the Cherokee Syllabary. For our immersion school, for adults that are learning and families that are learning the language online, that’s a wonderful book then for them to be able to read in the Cherokee Syllabary.
I did a short story in Ancestor Approved, which is a middle-grade anthology that came out in February of 2021, and I centered that with an Ojibwe family in Michigan, and I used a lot of Ojibwe words in that, and consulted with a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who is an Ojibwe expert on that.
For me, wherever I can put that language in that makes sense I’m going to. For Indian No More, Charlene my co-author, she had used the Chinuk Wawa language which is what the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde speak, and that’s what the young people learn now, so that’s in the book as well.
Anytime that it works — because again, if you are writing an authentic piece, there are many families that use that language. They will use English and their language, sometimes they’ll just speak in their language, so it makes sense to have that in the story, but also if we’re going to support Native language revitalization, right, so many of our grandparents and great grandparents lost their language through the boarding schools.
In order to help that, we have to do our part. And so, I see including Native language in trade books as helping assist in that effort and also letting other kids know that there have been numerous languages on this continent long before any languages arrived from Europe.