Chuck Hoskin Jr. fondly recalls watching a room full of Cherokee immersion students crowd around a screen to watch How to Train Your Dragon. Except Hiccup and Astrid weren't speaking English—the protagonists were speaking Cherokee, dubbed by voices from the local community.
\n\n“They're hearing it in our mother tongue—that didn't happen a generation ago,” Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, tells WIRED. “We're a long way, thankfully, from rote classroom instruction and memorization to a world where kids can see the sort of creativity that sparks imagination and helps every kid become more articulate and literate.”
\n\nThe Cherokee Nation has around 1,500 active speakers left, and most are over 70. Hoskin Jr. says the community is rapidly losing that generation, which is why it has spent time training up second-language learners. It even has a baby immersion program, hoping their first words are Cherokee.
\n\n“The foes we’ve had historically are the so-called Age of Discovery, colonization, the displacement of our people economically and geographically, boarding schools,” he says. “But it's nothing compared to the mathematics we’re up against now. Which is why we’re filled with this urgency every day to do all we can to find partners that…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/