The Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence is going to translate and create a digital archive of the Willie Jumper Stories.
How did Native American elders learn so much about ancient healing and medicine? According to one legend, seven elders learned this wisdom from a “little person” they sought out to capture one night.
This legend and many more tales of notable Cherokee people and events are all captured in “The Willie Jumper Stories,” a collection of tales written by Cherokee Baptist priest Willie Jumper in 1964.
The stories offer valuable insight not only into Cherokee culture and tradition, but language as well. This is why Northeastern University’s Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence is creating a digitally edited and annotated collection of all of Jumper’s stories.
“Indigenous languages have never been more threatened, but also more inspiring in terms of their persistence,” said Ellen Cushman, founder of the digital archive and a professor of English at Northeastern University. “There are so many grassroots-level efforts to continue these languages. Our goal and our hope is to lend one more kind of practice to the language persistence efforts that are already unfolding.
“Those stories have a wealth of cultural, linguistic and historical knowledge for our people,” said Cushman, a lifelong Cherokee Nation citizen and a dean’s professor of civic sustainability. “They really contain quite a bit of information and a legacy of language for us.”
In 1964, Jumper sat down for 24 hours and wrote 140 pages of stories in the Cherokee syllabary. This included remembrances and stories of community events and people as well as interpretations of biblical stories such as the story of Noah’s Ark. Many of them have morals or pass down legends like the Story of Old Man Butterfly at Standing Rock who made musical instruments like the piano and guitar.
The digital archive will be created through a collaboration with members from three federally recognized Cherokee tribes and use existing digitized manuscripts to create a new transcribed, annotated and translated collection of the stories with accompanying audio.
The stories serve as a valuable resource for showing the Cherokee way of life, Cushman said, from gathering practices to how people stored food. Some stories already translated offer the origins for these practices as well.
“(These stories) are important to understand life, not just us as Cherokee people, but as humans,” Cushman said. “Like, what kinds of nuts make good food, and how do you process those to make sure that you’re not poisoning yourself? And then there are the really wonderful stories about people from the past who helped invent our syllabary.”
The Cherokee syllabary is an 85-character writing system that was the first created by Native peoples, Cushman said.
“We have all of these wonderful stories of how people were inventive and creative, and all of those ways of sustaining life, even when things feel very precarious or uncertain or challenging,” she said. “That’s precisely what’s needed.”
In addition to serving as a tool to remember important people, practices and events in Cherokee history, Cushman said there are indications that the stories were also written to help preserve the Cherokee language. In the stories, Jumper separated each word with a dot. If a word was long and had to carry over to the next line of text, he added an arrow.
These types of typographical markers aren’t common in the Cherokee language, Cushman explained. In fact, this is the first time she’s seen this type of marking in a document. But it seems Jumper, who was transcribing these stories at a time when tribes were just being reinstated and recognized once more by the government, likely added them to help English speakers understand the language.
“We don’t really use punctuation,” she said. “We don’t really use capitalization. Word boundaries are identified by speaking aloud. But he must have known that people who would not know word boundaries would be coming to these documents in the future, so he visually represented how these words should be isolated. He anticipated a need we would have as English speakers.”
The DAILP was established in 2022 and works with Cherokee community members, students, software engineers, partner archives, and linguists to translate and create an online collection of Cherokee syllabary documents to encourage language learning and preservation.
The DALIP previously worked with collaborators to translate about 20 of the Willie Jumper stories for its first digitally edited collection, “Cherokees Writing the Keetoowah Way,” which came out in 2023 and is made up of 87 syllabary documents translated by Cherokee speakers and annotated by students, linguists and Cherokee community members. These documents include funeral notices, letters, and stories that shed light on Cherokee history after 1888.
The team made the decision to translate the full collection of stories after seeing the history they held, both in terms of language and Cherokee culture.
“The team decided … it would be great to do the entire collection because they were some of their favorites to translate,” Cushman said. “They would see family members in them, or know places that they were talking about, or historical events. They just wanted to go deeper in a brand new set of collections.”
The translations will be done through an interface that will allow the team to directly enter data into a database so it can be displayed in other digital collections. Once a word is translated, it will go into a lexical data set so people can search for a word and see its meaning and conjugations.
The digital archive received grants from the National Historical Publications and Record Commissions and the National Endowments for the Humanities that will allow it to develop the project with the other federally recognized Cherokee tribes.
This is continuing the work Cushman and the digital archive have done to translate Cherokee language documents in archives around the country in order to bolster the knowledge of the language.
“We’re recuperating the language through archival documents and then we build out scholarly materials for other folks to use,” Cushman said. “All our translations become a primary data source for upstream scholarship.”