 Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us this afternoon. I am delighted to introduce Jared Miller, who's going to talk to us today about indigenizing archives. My name is Dara Hoffman, and I am a settler on 3D8 land in what's known in colonial terms as Canada, and this is the traditional land of people including the Nahia, the Dene Selune, the Dene Tha, the Daneza, the Meti O Tempe Mesqua, and the Eskikisimu Nunagat. And I would also like to acknowledge that for those of you who are joining us from San Jose and through San Jose's facilities through which we're able to offer this, that San Jose State University is on the land of the present day Muwekma Olone tribe, an enrolled Bureau of Indian Affairs tribe with a document membership of over 550 people, comprised of all of the known surviving American Indian lineages aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay Region who traced their ancestry through the missions Santa Clara, San Jose, and Dolores during the advent of the Hispano-European Empire into Alta, California, and who are the successors and living members of the sovereign historic previously federally-recognized Verona Band of Alameda County, and furthermore, San Jose State University recognizes that the university is established within the Tamien Olone-speaking tribal ethno-historic territory, which based upon the unratified federal treaties of 1851 to 1852 includes the unceded ancestral lands of the Muwekma Olone tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area. And some of the enrolled Muwekma lineages are descended from the direct ancestors of the Tamien Olone tribe territory whose ancestors had affiliation with Mission Santa Clara. And perhaps most importantly, land acknowledgments are not the same as land back. Always want to put that out there. This shouldn't be more than just a performative thing that we do. So I want to welcome you all on behalf of the sponsors of today's event. I am the principal investigator here with my co-investigators, Michelle Villican, Nara Atar, and Shuvik Ghosh of the Circle Project, which is a Mozilla-funded project to bring responsible computing education to the whole SGSU community. We're also sponsored by the College of Professional and Global Education, the CPGE EDI Committee, and by the MARA program, the Masters of Archives and Records Administration. I'm now going to hand things over to Michelle to introduce our speaker, and I can't say how excited I am for today's talk. Thank you so much, Sarah. Excuse me. I'm Michelle Villagran, and I work closely with Sarah, Nara, and Vick on our Circle team, as well as chair of the CPGE EDI-SJ Committee. And I reside on the occupied lands and still inhabited by the cared people of the Tongva peoples. And so I'm in the Los Angeles area. Today, we have a wonderful event. We're really excited. Let me give you a little background about Jared Lee Miller. Jared is a Cherokee native citizen, a U.S. Army veteran, and the current language archivist for the Cherokee Nation Language Department. So he's working in tandem with both the Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians in developing a shared digital repository that will focus on language preservation and revitalization efforts for their shared digital materials. One housekeeping item I forgot to mention, please do engage in the chat. Make sure to choose everyone for messages you'd like to go to everyone. We also have Q&A open. We will be monitoring both Q&A and chat throughout. So as you're inspired and you have questions, as you have thoughts, please share those. And Jared will engage with those at that moment in time versus at the end. So welcome everyone. And let's hear more from Jared about indigenizing archives through digital sovereignty, digital curation, and language revitalization. Jared? My name is Jared Lee Miller, and obviously I didn't say that in Cherokee. My Cherokee name translates to Ganote Yohi to twist. And it's very hard to translate something from Cherokee into English. And twist, it doesn't mean twist. What it means is I used to have this habit of like going around almost time a twine. But it also, a lot of our Cherokee names are puns. And it also means I get angry really easy. Or I used to when I was really small and got that name. My mom told this story. They used to have a plastic record player by Fisher Price and they had these little, this is back in the 80s. So I'm probably showing my age. And you would play that, the little plastic records and it would have tunes like The Farmer and The Dale and those songs. Well, I guess I got mad at it and threw it across the room. And thus, Ganote Yohi was born. So a little bit about myself. I grew up not just in Cherokee Nation, but also in a place called Modesto, California. So I wouldn't necessarily call that home, but it was a place to lay my head. And I was always trying to get back to Cherokee Nation no matter what, because I had a longing to be here. And today we're going to talk about some very important things in my world. And maybe they're important in your world too. And it's language revitalization, digital curation and digital sovereignty. That's the only three things we're going to talk about. But we're going to talk about it. I can't just talk about things. I'm an old front porch guy. I sit on a front porch and I like to visit and rap. And I like to do that with y'all today if it's possible. So if y'all could take a minute and really turn up your volume on your computers. And if you can have co-workers say, call me. I will do it. And that means go give me some coffee. Because I want you to sit down like you're on that front porch as we talk today. And just enjoy each other's company. Cherokee wise, I'm going to break some stereotypes for you. I'm going to talk about our language. I'm going to talk about some values. If you just type in Cherokee on the internet, it's a scary thing. Because most of it's not true. It's written by the colonizer that takes on the persona of Cherokee. And that is one of the last vestiges I feel of genocide is when the conqueror can take on the persona of the conquered. So I'm going to give you a definition of what Cherokee is. And I want you to really think about it. And you can say, Jared, you are totally wrong. And that's OK. Because you have your freedom, and I have mine. And sometimes your freedom don't belong in my freedom. So without further ado, let me give you a definition for what Cherokee is. Our Cherokee people come from a place called which is our homelands back in Cherokee Nation, the old Cherokee Nation, which is now the current states of Western North Carolina, Tennessee, parts of Kentucky, parts of northern Georgia, parts of South Carolina, actually a good chunk of South Carolina, parts of northern Alabama, and just a sliver in northeastern Mississippi, shocking but true. These places were where the Cherokee continuity lived for 14,000 years. I'm not saying it was all roses, but it's what we had. And we came from a place called Gidua. And Gidua is a very powerful place to us even now. It's now located on lands of the eastern band of Cherokee in Indian. And the eastern band are our sister band that stayed behind. And I'm going to define Cherokee as this. The Cherokee people are the continuous lineage from Gidua to this very day. They exist because there is a shared history, culture, belonging, essence that came about through Gelagi, which is Gelagi, our Cherokee language. That's what that commonality is. And if I look at this cup of coffee here, excuse me, my Star Wars cup of coffee, OK, this cup of coffee is a language. And culture can only exist inside that cup of language. You can teach somebody that is an English mindset, Cherokee. But if you don't teach them the cultural nuances and understandings and contextualization and all that essence of language, you're not thinking in the terms of Cherokee. Now, something bad happened to us, Cherokee. There's been a series of, I'm going to use the J word for genocide, which is a very real thing. That real thing, excuse me, I almost tear up just thinking about it because of that connection and continuity. Genocide happened so many times, but one particular incident was downright unfair, and that was the Trail of Tears. And basically, it was a forced round of Cherokee people from our homelands in Gelagi and sent us here into where I'm currently located in Northeastern, now the current state of Northeastern Oklahoma. This is where the current Cherokee nation is. So to build on our definition of who is Cherokee, Cherokee people are a combination of those descendants that are in the federally recognized tribes of Cherokee nation, Easter Band and Cherokee Indians, and then our sister tribe that's also here in Northeastern Oklahoma, the United Cateau Abandoned Cherokees. To be Cherokee for Cherokee Nation in the United Cateau Abandoned Cherokee, you have to have an ancestry that goes back to the 1906 Dawes rules. And Dawes rule was the time back in 1906 when the communal lands of Cherokee Nation were broken up and parceled out to individuals. And Cherokee Nation, the land base, was broken up. And it was a horrible time. And what happened is Cherokee Nation had a functional government to include our own school systems, colleges, courts. We had all this. We weren't like the stereotype of plains people, not that there's anything wrong with their cultures or how they lived, but our way was a different way in how we lived. So to be Cherokee Nation in United Cateau Abandoned Cherokee, you have to have shockingly just one ancestor that's on that Dawes rules. And that's what it takes. That's how we define our citizenship. The Eastern Band of Cherokees require a descendant from the 1924 Baker rule that they use. And you must have a blood quantum of, I think, 1-16th maybe, or 1-8th. The United Cateau Abandoned Cherokee, also you have to have one ancestor from the Dawes rules, but you have to have a blood quantum of one quarter. So this is what defines our governments because we are government-to-government relationship. Although we are an ethnic people, we are also a political body. We are, according to the Marshall Trilogy, we are like a domestic-dependent nation. This continuity of treaties goes back before the United States government. We inherited that from the British. And when I say we, I'm talking about the Americans, they are either a sibling or a son of the British. So they inherited English common law. So those definitions give us the political status and citizenship for what defines Cherokee people. Now, I'm gonna tell you something. If you're hearing somebody that says, oh, my family hid out. Oh, my great-great grandma was a Cherokee princess. Oh, you know, our records burnt down in a court fire years ago and we can't enroll. Well, guess what? That's probably because they're not Cherokee, you know? And there are some instances where people aren't Cherokee citizens because they had a parent that is in another federally recognized tribe and that tribe doesn't allow for dual enrollment. So those people still are Cherokee, but they had the ability to enroll. And I wanted to give a definition because there are these fake groups out there that charge for memberships that speak of a place of, they think they come from a voice of validity. And what they do, they take away from that essence of being Cherokee. They take away from that voice. And I want to get that out ahead of time because sometimes you might have a question from somebody in the audience. Well, my great-great grandma said this and she hid out, you know, when we can't enroll, but they speak from a voice of being Cherokee. But that voice of Cherokee comes from our communities. It's that continuity of living together for generations that go back over 14,000 years. We call it the one degree of Cherokee separation, but we also call it Cherokee tenacity, the ability to overcome genocide. And even with our language that we're going to overcome. I truly believe that. Uneflina, that's our term for God. They say Uneflina is a stowaway on every bread. And that tells you the sacredness of our language. They say for Ketua people, for Ketua, those people that came from the mother town, they say we're derped from God. And, you know, I like that. I like the fact that I'm derped because, you know what, dirt grows things. And I like to think our language is going to grow. A lot of great things coming up. So without further ado, let's get this ball rolling, shall we? So who the heck is this guy talking? Well, I've already introduced myself and Cherokee is gonna tell you all he. So that's who I am. But my English name, my birth certificate name is Jerry Lee Miller. And I'm the language archivist for Cherokee Nation. So not only am I employed by Cherokee Nation, but I'm a Cherokee Nation citizen, which means I have a vested interest for our people to succeed. If they fail, I fail and vice versa because we are hand in hand moving forward. My primary occupation since about 2006 has been an archivist. I've watched this field go from when we were all generalists to specialists. I've watched where we were in the realm of physical archives to the importance of digital repositories. My secondary occupation is United States Army. I was a level Bravo infantryman. So I'm a old fashioned grunt. So what that tells you is I talk a combination of grunt talk, which we used to joke about, which crayon tasted better, the red crayon or the blue crayon. And I break down things in a way where even the most complex things have to be understood to all parties. Because if you hoard esoteric knowledge, if you keep people from understanding things, that's a disservice to the world. And so when I was in the army, we have to break things down because we have people that had the lowest GT score that barely got into the army, that from the heels of Kentucky, to that rebel from Boston that comes from a $100 million family that wanted to show them by rebellion in the army. And they had the best education that money could buy. So we have to bridge that divide. And I hope today I can do that with y'all because apparently I was told we got people from international. So this little boy from my hometown of Stillwell, Oklahoma and Cherokee Nation is gonna have to do that and make a case for y'all. So I wanted to kind of, long time back in the 80s, they had GI Joe action figures. And on the back, they would have statistics for that figure. So I kind of wanna be tongue in cheek a little bit because I like to cut up a little bit and put the language archivist for the Cherokee Nation language department is one of the most diverse roles in the department if not Cherokee Nation. It includes building a physical and digital repository from the ground up. There has been zero infrastructure in this department. And I'll get into that a little bit later but it's in support of language revitalization and all that entails. And let me tell you, there's a lot of tell behind that animal. So one of the things I've had to explain is the open archival, I'm drawing a blank here. O-A-I-S, the open archival information system. Thank you. I was gonna say the Oklahoma archival information system and I'm so glad you caught it. And one of the big things is it is that ecosystem for digital repositories but I had to explain to language speakers. I had to explain to our staff who aren't archivists that come from multidisciplinary. We have PhDs on staff. So I had to explain the basics of O-A-I-S and I'm gonna teach you something real quick. Okay, so you get an SIP, right? And you make an AIP so you can take out the DIP, see? And in Indian country, we have something called Indian tacos or if you're on Navajo lands, Navajo tacos. And underneath all those fixings is fry bread. So an SIP or sit, it's like the ingredients you get, the flour, the milk, the lard, all those good things. And then an AIP or the ape, all you're doing is really creating that Indian taco. You're getting all the fixings ready. And the AIP is for the people at home, the people at the powwow, the people in your tribal community that need to eat. And that's what the DIP is. So I just taught you an indigenous way of looking at SIP, ape and DIP. So I'll expect my quarter in the middle later. So this is who this guy is talking. There's not much about me other than that because I'm really not here to talk about myself. I'm really here to talk about the heroes that are involved and what we're doing. So without further ado, let's move on to the next episode. Our topics to be discussed. What are we gonna be talking about anyways? We're gonna be talking about language revitalization, digital curation, and of course, digital sovereignty. And we ain't lecturing either. So please get those questions going. Or y'all mind and I just ain't answering. So- We'll ask them when they come. Okay, awesome. And that's my topics to be discussed. So language revitalization. I wanna throw in this quote because I feel it's so important and it's been translated into Cherokee. But our Cherokee way of saying it's a little bit differently. It says all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. That means you have your freedom, I have my freedom and we ought not to tell each other what's going on in freedom. But you know what? I'm gonna hold you in the highest regard because your breath is my breath. And we all have that Unethanah's breath upon us because we're all his children. We may have different origin stories but we all come from that breath and we all need to hold each other up in the highest regard. And so that's language revitalization in a nutshell. What we're doing is we're taking that breath and we're speaking it into existence again. And even though at times if you run a marathon you may get short of breath. You may have panic attack, you may get short of breath. Whereas before you didn't, where your breath was brilliant you could go in the highest altitudes, you could backpack. Maybe you were born with short of breath but language revitalization is taking that short breath and taking a longer one and breathing it out and having that stowaway on every breath. And that's how I look at that. The word right there, I just want to harp on this a quick second, nagada, nagada. While it's being used as human beings, we say all friends and there's a old Cherokee saying in English, it says we either like you or we hate you and it takes years to figure out either way. And what that means is it takes a lifetime to get to know somebody and we want to honor that. We want to honor your essence. We're very inclusive people, but yes, we do have our cultural sensitivity that we don't share with the public. We don't share even amongst certain families, certain ways of thinking because of the power of that breath. Think of the big bad wolf going all huff and puff and blow your house down. You know, he had the power to blow straw houses and sticks. I say this because I used to tell my children that story, but with a, it was almost like a punk opera. So, you know, those stories, even though they came from Europe, that particular story, we can use it in a cultural connotation of understanding that stowaway breath that God, oh, next one gives us. So, next episode, please. I thought it'd be funny because I do come from a military background. I thought, what if we had a DD 214 of just an overview of the Cherokee language? So, let's talk about Jalal Gowonahisdi. Excuse me, I'm a little catching my breath. Maybe, maybe language revitalization needs to hit me, but Cherokee language was, is and always will be the language of the Cherokee people. We're separated from other Eirikorn languages by 3,000 to 4,000 years. Our closest living language relatives, shockingly, are Onondaga and Seneca. So, the Hada Noshoni, we have a long way back shared roots. So, maybe their stories are our stories. It's not for me to interpret that. I like to think we all came from Kedua, from Ketua, that mother town. Now, here's something that's going hit close to home for me anyway. Our average speaker age is 70 years old. Our language is listed as critically endangered, but I want to give you the emphasis. I talked about Cherokee tenacity. We are known for going through the hardest times. So, don't count, don't count us out yet, please. Okay. Our current Cherokee language population is roughly 1,200 people, give or take. Yes, some months we lose three speakers. Some months we lose eight, but guess what? There's also a positive here. We may have not got the entire count. So, we're finding Cherokee speakers that, well, they've always been Cherokee speakers. They've always been around, but they weren't counted. And they're, I'm hearing anecdotal stories from my wife who, by the way, is a higher blood quantum. She is from the Cherokee language communities. And she's telling me she has a relative that speaks in their 14 years of age. That gives me hope because they're in their house with their grandparents. But Cherokee is what they consider a category for language. So, it is one of the most complex languages for an English speaker to learn. Now, let me give you a definition of what we're using to get that number of 1,200 for Cherokee language speakers. Okay. Those are people that not only can think in their heads, but they can also converse on a higher level of Cherokee. Now, for my wife, for example, she's what they call a passive language speaker. Her first language was Cherokee. And when somebody talks to her in Cherokee, she understands it. But what has happened is she can only speak English. And that's what you call a passive language learner or a speaker. So we don't have hard numbers on those people, but they are still part of that Cherokee language demographic. They just can't be considered the full on, like if you went to Subway and got all the works on the Subway sandwich, there's still a Subway sandwich. They're just not all the workings. But you know what? Those are the people that live this language. Because even though they're speaking back in English, they still have a Mechlanar's breath as a Stowaway. And we're very blessed because in 1821, this little man you may have heard of him, Sequoia, developed his own syllabary. I've been told and people tell me and I've read that he's the only person in the history of the humanity that came up with his own writing system, just like that, that's known. Okay, I don't know how true that is or not, but that gives me hope because what we've done, that writing system was in the 1820s, put into a newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. It was a bilingual newspaper. Cherokee records in the Cherokee Nation government in the 19th century, about 15 to 20% of them were in the Cherokee language, in syllabary. We use that as a mode of the Bible. It is written in Cherokee, the New Testament. There are some books in the Bible that are in Old Testament also, but they're in Cherokee. But let me tell you a difference between English and Cherokee. Okay, I always say that English always talks about something and us Cherokee are action. And let me make a case for that. Okay, about 65% of our language is verb-based, so it's action. So what we do, we put into action. So when we breathe something and say something, we're held accountable, because we brought that into action. So we make it happen. Whereas English, English is very abstract. You know, Cherokee is very specific and to the point. When you say you're doing the coffee cup, you pick it up. There's different ways of saying the coffee cup is being picked up, but it has a specific connotation. You can't argue with those specific connotations. Whereas English with lawyers, they love to interpret. And by the way, some of my favorite people are lawyers, because lawyers know linguists, and linguists are some of my favorite people too, because they're helping in our fight with us. Whereas English, you know, you just talk about something and it goes on forever and nothing gets done. And it's proven track record through government, through we've always had those people in our lives that speak English, that talk about something like they're doing it and never get it done. But you know what? I wanna encourage everybody out there to, we're not promised it tomorrow. And because we're not promised it tomorrow, don't talk about something and not do it. Make it happen. Live your dreams, live your best lives. That's what we're here for in this world. So Jared, I'm going to follow through since Michelle and I said, told Elizabeth here, we would ask her a question. And I'm gonna actually ask, it's good for her. Does the number 1200 cover passive speakers like your wife or only those who are fluent in comprehension and speaking? No, it doesn't. So the unfortunate thing is because you have a passive speaker, there's, and I don't wanna spoil the next slide. And I wanna put a spoiler alert. It may be traumatizing to a certain number of people that maybe have experienced trauma. So if you can, it's really, I've made it in such a way that it's not traumatic, but the reason why we're, the decline of our language so much is because of not just historical and generational trauma, but because it's a continuity of genocide and trauma, either passive genocide or direct overt genocide. And we can make an argument that genocide, really the cutoff point in this country was in the 70s when America finally gave up and decided to quit snatching our Indian children from our communities and passing the Indian Child Welfare Act, EQUA. And when it stopped sterilizing indigenous women back in the 70s, when they finally did a cutoff date like this, that's maybe from that point on we're slowly getting better as an American people because we don't, Canada's great because they acknowledge the boarding school experience, but then in America, we don't acknowledge the genocide. We just go, oh yeah, it happened, get over it. Well, for the communities that, whose infrastructure was totally destroyed, children were taken out of our communities, older people had that trauma where, that trauma where you don't want to pass on culture, where you don't want to pass on language, that becomes a powerful tool for the extinction of a people. And even back into the 50s, you mentioned one of the Aloni tribes in the Bay Area who were once federally recognized. There was a period back in the 50s called termination where the government, government relationship of certain tribes was terminated because quite frankly, America wanted to get out of the Indian country business. They wanted to wash their hands of the genocide. And as tribes, we're holding them accountable, but here's the thing, there's always going to be that segment of America that no longer wants that history of indigenous people where if we no longer have our language, who's to say they're going to join that bandstand of get over it, you're not a people anymore? We're going to terminate you. And I believe that one day I may see that in my time. I've seen so many things, but the optimist in me has hope, but the pessimist in me says, this is viable in our day and age. Some of the stuff I've seen, I thought I'd never see in my time. And it's a common sense thing. We are indigenous, we are not going anywhere. We have nowhere else to go. This is our home. Settlers now, this is your home as well. Your continuity begins the moment your family came here, but we're forging a country, but we are not giving up our government. We are not giving our rights to exist on that bread because that comes from something so much more powerful. And I believe that that power comes from language. And it comes through a higher power. And if there's atheists in the audience, that's okay too, because you have that belief, you have that power and that power comes from you. Your belief system is yours and mine is mine. And guess what? We are both A-O-K doing that. Right now Cherokee is divided into two areas. And it's restricted to Cherokee Nation here in Northeastern Oklahoma. And it's also, with the Eastern Band Cherokee, the difference in population is that Eastern Band with 12,000 speakers only has a slightly over 100 now. Whereas we have about 1,100 to give or take. So that's the difference. And, but we're both on shaky ground. And next slide please. I couldn't find a graph chart to convey what I wanted to convey. And obviously I spelt this wrong in the slide. So forgive me, we'll just cross out that R over there. I was working on it late. But it's population decline in Cherokee speakers. But I only wanna focus, I didn't wanna go all the way back in history. I wanna focus on from the 1960s to now. And the graph in orange is our Cherokee Nation citizenry population. And our number of speakers is in red. So if you notice, back in before 1970, the chart reads 75,000 Cherokee Nation citizens and 16,000 plus speakers. And if you notice there was 21.3% of the population at that time that was speaking Cherokee. Now, our next point on the graph is in 2000. At that time, Cherokee Nation alone had 200,000 enrolled citizens. And we thought we were doing good because we had 10,000 Cherokee language speakers. And 10,000 is a good number if you think about it. 10,000 is the size of some towns. It's, you feel safe. There's a warm, comforted blanket. And we, at that time, Cherokee language efforts was more or less, we had, we started developing a Cherokee online language course for people that were at large because we have a diaspora of Cherokee Nation citizens. In fact, you could say there's 23,000 Cherokee Nation citizens in California. That makes us the largest de facto tribe in that state. So little known effort, but we have no land. We have no claim on California. But the diaspora for that brought Cherokee language speakers way back in the 30s into Oklahoma or into California to find a better way of life because quite frankly, after 1906 when our lands were parceled off into individual parcels when the federal government did that, they completely wiped out our infrastructure. So when you destroy an economic and a governmental infrastructure, people are going to suffer. And people did suffer. And that suffering has caused it while we have been blessed to have a rise in our citizenry to 465,000 citizens today. Our speakers are now 1200. And that makes the Cherokee population of Cherokee language speakers at 0.2% or less. And if you think in 2000, it was at 5%. Back in the 1960s, 21.3%. That's why that red is slowly declining. And we're going to lose a lot of speakers. And it's almost like, and I say this from a military perspective, when you go into combat, when you go in and when you lose people, it takes a toll. And we have a tradition here that when a speaker dies at our immersion school, we have one of the old church bells we ring. And you can hear that. And that remembrance is paid to the speakers. So when I hear that, it's a very sad, but it's reverence, respect paid to that person that passed. Because they are really the PhDs in not just language, but we go back to our coffee cup. The culture exists within the language. And let me define culture. There's a Cherokee medicine man by the name of Crossland Smith. And maybe I shouldn't be telling the story I tell, but it's already out of my mouth. So let's go with it. Back when I was in college, I had a problem come up. So I went to go see Crossland. And he said, Jared, what are you going to school for? And at the time I was avoiding being an archivist. I just kept on falling into internship after internship, but I want to be a cultural anthropologist. And he goes, what do you want to be? And I said, well, I'm studying anthropology. And he gave me this fossil look at that somebody had given him. Some mammalian from the Ice Age that shows you how well of a paleontologist or archeologist I would have been because I was on the culture anthropology track. And I said, well, Crossland, that's not what I'm going to school for. I'm going to, I want to work with culture. And he goes, the thing about the nation, he goes, they teach language. They teach history, but they don't teach culture. And I go with me in Crossland. He goes, you know, people think a culture is basket weaving and it's not. And he said culture, and he defined culture because culture is our coping skills, how we tease our body language, our social cubes, all those things. I'll use anywhere else in the world, passive-aggressive is bad. And Cherokee culture, we're just hardwired for that behavior. And yet, and it's very acceptable whether that is something good or bad, it's something that exists within this coffee cup. And you can't have the language without the culture. So I want to define that really quick to understand that if our language is endangered, our culture is even more endangered. Now, we have a great art scene, but art is not culture. And that's all I got on that. So next slide, please. Oh yeah. Before we go to the next slide, we do have a question that came in. And I think this might be a useful answer for several of us that might be interested in this. So Jenny writes, my desire career is to become a language archivist for endangered languages. I'm white with a B.A. in linguistics and I'm getting my Master's in Library and Information Sciences, SJSU. What roles can white linguists like myself play in the right way? In other words, what does it look like to help with the necessary humility and respect for the culture I'm working with that doesn't compromise the culture's agency over their language revival? That is such an amazingly awesome question. I do not ever want to discourage somebody from following their dreams and pursuits first off because otherwise I'm lowering somebody's soul. And if I lower somebody's soul, you know what? I'm no more than somebody that did genocide. I'm no more than somebody that caused trauma. Okay, and I'm gonna say something funny, but it's not funny. So there's a duality of humor there. Business is booming in endangered languages. So because business is booming, follow your support. When you go to a tribe, you know what? Let them tell you what they want done. Now you have the skill set to bring something to the table, but in the end, two things. Don't represent yourself even though you may be employed by that tribe as speaking for that tribe. Because there's a difference between yes, I am employed by a tribe and yes, I am employed by a tribe, but I come from this background. So the thing is, and yes, you will be immersed in that culture, but it doesn't necessarily allow you, you may even learn the teasing. You may be accepted into the community. You probably will be accepted into the community, but don't speak for that community because you don't have that voice. Let them be the voice and you bring the skill sets and they'll put it in an indigenized model because you know what? You can put best practices and indigenize it in such a way. And what is indigenizing for Cherokee is not indigenizing for Navajo. The thing is indigenizing is to be fluid with best practices in a way that works for you. And that applies to linguistics. And I applaud you for going into that field because that is powerful. And how I got it as the language archivist was because I was an archivist, but there was the title and they needed somebody that I was really blessed to be put in this position quite frankly, and that's the honest truth. So I could say, yes, I'm sailing under a shooting star. Maybe that's a good way to put it in. So please follow your dreams. And if you don't work with Indian country, you know what the beauty part? Well, it's not a beauty part, it's a very sad part is indigenous languages around the world. Colonization was very powerful. And even though most aspects of colonization have been done, it's like throwing a rock in a pond. You still have those ripple effects that hit our communities. Even though the action has been done, we're still paying for that. And around the world, indigenous languages are needing linguists. So if not Indian country, you may find yourself in the continent of Africa. You may find yourself in the Pacific Rim countries, Micronesia, the Kingdom of Tonga, Samoa. You may find yourself in places you never thought of yourself. I'll tell you, life is a wild ride. When I was 19 years old and then the infantry, I never thought I'd be a language archivist. True story. So enjoy the ride. That's the only advice I can give you. And just let the people tell their stories in the way it needs to be told and support them in the direction they want to go. Now you can suggest things on best practices like, hey, I could do this, what do you think? And let them tell you. That's my advice. So Jared, you got the whole comment section stirred up when you said, art is not culture. And they were wondering if you would be willing to clarify. Yes, art is a byproduct of culture. Okay, culture is a collective mindset. Culture, we've already defined it. So that is culture. But culture, through individual actions of creativity, art manifests itself. Art is a manifestation of that culture, thus a byproduct of it. So yes, it is cultural, but it's not when you're talking about culture, please do not define the true nuances of who you are, your essence of that breath, that language, how you tease. All of that is what makes us human. That's kind of like, there's my hand and there's my steering wheel that I drive. The steering wheel that you drive is the art. But the hand that steers it, that's the culture. And it's all right to disagree with me too. I see another question before we move forward that just came in. So I'll go ahead and read that one. Mitchell asks, I'm curious, since they use long lingo as an example of linguistic differences between English and Cherokee, could you speak to how that difference has influenced discussions around policy for historical preservation, cultural resources, et cetera? Let me see it on that minute. Hold on, let me get some water. And we can come back to it too. Just wanna make sure we read it out because it just came in. Oh, let me give the disclaimer. I forgot about this at the very beginning. Okay, my disclaimer is I'm a Cherokee Nation citizen. I am employed by Cherokee Nation, but the views expressed by me are individually. Now, with regard to legal policy and framework, that is a Cherokee Nation governmental role. My extension in that government is to support policy and law initiatives. Language revitalizations efforts have been done through legislation internally at Cherokee Nation. And those have afforded a framework and funding to revitalize language efforts. So by a manifestation of extension of that law, language becomes a part of it in such a way that the direction of how we view law indirectly influences language. But our language as a core isn't influenced by the policy and wording of English law or even if it's translated into Cherokee because Cherokee is its own essence. So a legal framework does not box in Cherokee. And I hope I answered that right. If not, Mitchell, you can respond back and we will circle back with Jared on that. Thank you. Because that is a really great question. I just think I need to think on that a little bit more because that is a pretty deep question and there's probably about three or four parts on that. Okay, let's talk about why the decline has happened. One of the most effective means to discourage Cherokee language use and its perpetuation to future generations. Notice I said, and we're talking about generational historical trauma in those incidents, why it wasn't perpetuated to future generations was through the federal boarding school experience. Okay, so the federal government ran a series of boarding schools and they went into Cherokee communities much like the bulk of Indian country and they took out children. But not every child had the federal boarding school experience. It was also done at local schools as policy whereby people were strongly encouraged not to speak Cherokee by staff. That is across the board and they would use a series of means and I use those pictures and to some people that have experienced abuse and trauma in their lives, I don't wanna touch more on what those pictures are. You can see them, they're very self-explanatory. And if we need to explain why somebody's holding a belt, please watch YouTube videos on certain aspects of abuse. Okay. And when speakers have to go through those things where they are being abused, either through shaming, through physical abuse, through trauma, they're not going to, there's a PTSD response that goes in your head. And you may still continue to use Cherokee throughout your life, but you're not going to wanna pass it on to your children. And oftentimes in Cherokee families, Cherokee's spoken in the home as a first language up to a certain age. And then once that child goes off to school, it's nothing but English in that home or the parents who are Cherokee speakers all of a sudden will only speak to that child in English because they don't want them to have not only either the trauma they once had, or they don't want them to have the troubles or they want them to have an easier life into communicating with people. And that's basically how the decline happened in a nutshell. It's really from the colonizer's perspective at a governmental level for trying to extinguish a tribal nation, that's a good way is to take children out of homes and then discourage them from speaking Cherokee through other means. Gosh dang, that's a effective tool in the most horribly way possible, but it was effective and here we are. Now, that wasn't the only means while Cherokee is on the decline or was on the decline, but we have to acknowledge that that was a very powerful tool. And I wanna move forward because let's get out the bag and go into the good, shall we? So before we move forward, we got lots of questions for you. So I'm gonna start. John says that culture is a human construct which implies all the encompasses, all that is attributed to human acquired knowledge, intelligence, core values, and how humans of a collective express all that identifies them from other specific groups. That's an interesting definition. You have your freedom and I have mine. The construct of culture, if we're looking from a purely academic stance, academia, anthropology has very many subsets for the definition of culture. My way of thinking, my culture's way of thinking, we are, as I've explained, it's that breath that's put into us, that inspiration. In my worldview, my world was created at Ketua and somebody would go, that's crazy. Everybody comes from Africa. You're discounting human evolution, DNA, everything else. This is where faith steps in. This is where that little piece of paper in American constitution steps in. The fundamental rights of others. Now, do every Cherokee believe the same way I do? Absolutely not. We have several versions of origin stories, different families, clams, depending on who's telling the story has different perspectives on that. My culture co-evolved with 14,000 years in what you call the Great Smoky Mountains, that co-evolved with the ecology, the plants, the animals. If I believe myself to be dirt of God, that dirt, that soil is ingrained in my DNA, my essence. And it is through those collective experiences as a people that we became distinct from our neighbors. That linguistic molding played a part of that. But it's kind of like if you have a mold and you pour something into that and it creates something, it came out of that mold. So we may be talking the same thing, but in different ways. And I appreciate how you brought it up. And I hope you appreciated how I brought it up. And so an anonymous person wants to know, our library special collections has significant manuscript holdings on indigenous languages and linguistics, including manuscripts that contain examples of extinct languages. We want to digitize these materials and provide them on our digital repository, but want to do so in a sensitive way that benefits the indigenous communities. Do you have suggestions or resources that could help us? Absolutely. So the first thing I want you to do is go to the federal tribes registry. And every year it is published by the department interior and it has a list of all the federally recognized tribes. And I would like you to get in contact with those respective tribes that the language came from and reach out to them. Make them an active participant and partner in that. There's a division with regard to archival materials. You have an indigenous population here and way over here there's a repository. Now, if I can't go visit you. So, and those materials were either collected up into my, from my community by ethnologist with American Bureau of Ethnology back in the day or perhaps in certain instances with, and I'll use the example of Cherokee. Okay, because we had the syllabary, our medicine people would keep ledger books. Oftentimes they were stolen by anthropologist or forced coercion where, for example, you might have somebody that's poor, barely eking out existence. And the anthropologist is like, I got $5 right here. And you're like, okay, here, you know, I can put this to use. And those materials are taken from the community. Now, if I asked those repositories, would you be willing to repatriate those back to my community? There, it's almost sacrilegious in archives for a repository, whether it's a physical repository or a digital repository, even though we're in the initial phase of digital repatriations within the field and I'm very happy that we got into that place. There still is a divide between the indigenous people, those of the linguistic materials came from and those repositories. And it is, sometimes some repositories are reluctant to repatriate because a tribe doesn't have, and I can understand why, where most tribes don't have humidity-controlled, temperature-controlled repository with fire suppression systems using best practices. So they make a case, well, we've been the caretakers and you're just gonna let it go hell basically is what they're thinking, you know? And the truth is that if you give tribes the opportunity to initiate best practices or do it in such a way, we can't succeed. Give us the opportunity to write grants so we can put these materials back into place. If not analog materials, please give us digital repatriation. Please reach out to us even though we haven't reached out to you. We may not know exist out there. Not everybody has a Jared Lee Miller on staff. You know, reach out to that tribe. Not only that, but it's just being a good human. It's outreach strategies. You know, the old days of the Brick and Mortar Archives only being allowed for the academic ivory tower researcher. Archives is meant for the people. And in a sense, it is a collective, it's collective knowledge for all of us that's housed in archives. That's the awesomeness of archives. It is a record of not only who we were but where we're going. It helps us understand the human experience. And by reaching out, that's the extension of the human experience, which is sharing. So we're going from stinginess to sharing. And sharing, it sounds redundant, but it's caring. You know, it sounds silly, but we gotta be kind to one another. We're on this little blue ball that's called Earth. And if we're just kind to one another, we've fulfilled something that's in that human essence. And maybe that's culture. I don't know. Thank you. I've not done peppering you with questions from our audience yet. Folks are super engaged as we knew they would be. So, Shannon asks, having worked as an archivist in language revitalization and non revitalization settings, how would you say your practices and day-to-day experiences differ professionally? How do you find the work to be different in those contexts? The context is amazingly different. And I say this because I'll use a, man, I'm going to spoil some of the stuff I'm going to talk about. So we have a program called the Cherokee Audio Speakers Project. And our intent is to interview all living Cherokee language speakers. Every one of them. Now, that sounds like a lofty goal. There's 1,200 speakers. Well, today we've got a little over 600. And that's powerful. So what we do, we pay the speaker $500 to interview. And basically it's basic ethnographic oral history type questions that are put into Cherokee language by Cherokee first language speakers for Cherokee language speakers. So for example, I'm not doing the interview. My role in the Cherokee Audio Speakers Project is initiating best practices, training up staff. I designed the questionnaire. So that's pretty cool. Cause, you know, I designed the English version of it and our translators put it into, and those guys are the real hero. They're at ground zero. But here's what we're doing with that information. Not only are we looking at it as a tool that can be used in the future for second language learners. There's a language revitalization component where we're actually mining our own linguistic data in the sense that we're looking for dialectical differentiation because Cherokee, if you read scholarly academia, they're like, well, there used to be three Cherokee dialects and now we're down to two, one of them, the Eastern bands, the other here in Oklahoma. Well, that's, if you ask any Cherokee speaker here, and say they're talking with somebody, okay, you're up in Kenwood up in the Northern area and you're speaking with somebody down in Sally Boe Haller and they're from the South, that speaker from up North will say they talk a little bit differently. They don't speak Cherokee, right? And what that is is different dialects. And internally, we're still figuring out how many dialects there are. There's probably anywhere from five to eight dialect. So what we want as we go into teaching second language learners is we want them to be familiar with the dialects that their family might have spoke from the areas they spoke at. So we're saying to second language learners, hey, it's all right to use this word in this context. Or the better thing is our first language speakers are really PhDs. And here's why, because they are using words that a second language learner or somebody that's advanced second language may have never heard or even other first language speakers because those words went extinct. So basically we're putting them back into action. That's our overall plan. And everything is going into the cumulation of bilingual metadata. And we're planning for an online language dictionary app that will be plugged into Preservica and it's not going to be a word list dictionary. It's going to have morphs. It's going to have glottals. It's pulling from what we've been working on which is creating a corpus body of Cherokee linguistic materials from our original source Cherokee documents that we've imaged around the country from the Cherokee audio speakers project from our translator involvement. We have a Cherokee radio show. We're putting the Bernstein Bears cartoon. We're putting in Cherokee. All that goes into what we're working on which is to the continuity of Cherokee language as a living language. We don't want to hit that extinct mark. What we continue to do is if a word isn't there we're going to create a new word or we're going to go back and find the old word for that. So I hope that answered your question. Oh, so let's talk about a little man that had a big impact. His name was Durban Fielding and he is a hero. Not only did he fight in Vietnam but he was the first Cherokee linguist. And back in the seventies, Durban put together a Cherokee English dictionary and every Cherokee language class has used some variation of that or part of that and it has inspired second language learners. Durban was also my wife's uncle. And my wife's father, sister was married to Durban. So there's that one degree of separation, the continuity there. And my wife remembers when Durban and some of the family they'd either be at Salem Baptist Church or different places. There'd be a coffee table involved. She'd be, you know, hell raising, crawling underneath the table and they'd be working on stuff. You know, that my wife was a child of course at the time, you know, and so she remembers this but the power and legacy is a continuity with Sequoia in the syllabary because by having the Cherokee English dictionary it brought forth Cherokee as a continuity of living language. And so sadly, Durban passed away a few years back and we opened up a immersion school called aptly named the Durban Feeling Immersion School. Durban also has inspired the Durban Feeling Language Preservation Act. And in 2019 Cherokee Nation invested $16 million into language preservation efforts. Prior to that, language was, yeah, it's real sexy but it was on a shoestring budget. All the sum, you give $16 million, you can be a viable, you can put up a viable fight. So the thought behind that is is the more money we throw at it, at least we're trying everything we can in our power to save our language. And I say that with the utmost sincerity because that our language isn't worth millions, it is worth billions, it is our essence and being. In 2024, just here last week, the Durban Feeling Preservation Act was renewed and it calls for a minimum of $18 million operating fund for language programs. Holy heck, that's an insane amount of money. But get this, provisions are encouraged for annual increase. So if we meet certain milestones and barkers, that budget can go up, that's powerful. So the tribe, our tribal leaders are saying, you know what, we value your efforts and we believe that there's no dollar figure that isn't worth our language. Our languages worth so much more. It also calls for $35 million in capital projects, 30 million of which is extending enrollment and space for pre-K through eighth grade programs. So we have an immersion program. We built here in Tahlequah, we built a $25 million language immersion school. Then we went to another Cherokee hotspot called Greasy and we built a immersion school there because we believe that these children are still in multi-generational homes with grandparents, first language speakers and we're taking the fight to the hotspots. So now there's two. We're talking about a third immersion school in another hotspot. This is how serious we're getting about our language. We have second language learner programs that we're developing teachers for for these immersion schools. The aim goal is to get a highly proficient cadre of Cherokee Nation citizens. That development of new immersion school in Kenwood will be on 1,200 protected acres. That's going to be the campus. You talk about while an immersion school is one thing, we also look at nature as a learning tool because we have our botanical plants that sustained us for generation exist in these woods. We have a co-evolution with that. We use them for medicines. We use food sources. My favorite food is something we call Ganaji in English you say Ganaji and it's a hickory nut soup that's made from the meat in hickory nuts. Well, if you have 1,200 protected acres, you have a lot of hickory trees on that. And so that can lead into such things as food sovereignty. So there's power by having protected land and developing curriculum around it. Now, I'm not involved in the curriculum development so I don't want to speculate on that. That's another person for another topic. But we're also putting teeth on that act by saying it's accountable through a state of the language report that will be done every two years. That means we're not just throwing money at a pink Cadillac. You know, the money has to show results. It's about transparency and integrity. If you don't have transparency and if you don't have integrity, then you know what? We're not, that's not doing right. That's not doing right by your people. So we believe in that transparency and integrity. Next slide please. Here's the good word in the good news. Language revitalization programs. Okay. Now, as an archivist, we like to put things in an intellectual property order in something so hierarchical. This is not how my department is organized, but I wanted to put it in such a way where people can understand. So I want to talk about the technology programs. Okay, first there's the Cherokee Language Technology Unit that focuses on the creation of language materials for educational purposes using new technologies. That includes app development for our at-large people. That includes our online language program that we have using, I forget the method they're doing. I want to say blackboard, but it's probably not blackboard. But we're doing things at a language tech level. So we also have good working relationships with Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Cherokee syllabary, by the way, is in Unicode. So that means we can put metadata in Unicode. And that was done through technological efforts by staff. Okay, we had the Cherokee Audio Speakers Project that records every living language speaker. So far, 600 today, I already touched on that. But if our first language speakers, if for some reason they're zero, we still have the words to live on through those interviews. And that is something so powerful. And because it's something so powerful, and it's such a powerful tool for second language learners that we'll use in the future, we have to use archival best practices. That means looking at things from a wave format, 96 kilohertz, 24 big. We're thinking about digital preservation when we continue that. I mentioned the online language dictionary app that's in development. We have a 14-gen, we call it 14-gen internally. It's a unit testing, or it's a testing unit for new educational technologies and also future planning by the department, which is pretty cool. So then we have our immersion programs. We have two going on three immersion school campuses that are from pre-K through eighth grade in language hotspots, pre-Dane Cool. That develops speakers, second language speakers, but speakers nonetheless. We have a high school after school immersion language game. We have what they call CLIMAP, which is the Cherokee Language Master Apprenticeship Program. It is a two-year, full-time apprentice program that pays second language speakers full-time to learn Cherokee through first language speakers. They are paid $15 an hour to learn the Cherokee language. Over the course of two years, while they're not fluent, that they reach a level of proficiency. And from there internally, we have other continuation programs that develop a higher proficiency for those second language speakers that graduate from CLIMAP. We have the teacher bridge develop, the teacher bridge. It develops Cherokee language teachers and it's very similar through CLIMAP. It's a bridge that puts Cherokee language immersion school teachers into the classroom. So we're home-growing people into fill the needs of having immersion teachers. This one's really cool. The Cherokee Little Seeds Program, it is a two-year parent-child immersion. It's done from six months to two years. Basically, in linguistic circles, it's called nesting. And nesting, what it is, the exposure to proficient Cherokee language curriculum at that young of an age, once you have those nesting kids as they grow older, you then put them into pre-K and through the immersion school and then through eighth grade. And then what you do, you send them once they graduate high school, then you get them in CLIMAP. And if you think about it, you're creating a super second language speaker basically, that's at a super higher proficiency. And hopefully over those course of the years, second language learners fall in love and they marry other second language learners and have kids and they decide to speak nothing but Cherokee. And then guess what? We've created first language speakers that's the hopes, the dreams. And you know what? I think it's going to happen. Now let's talk about community outreach. We have what they call speaker services and it assists first language speakers in their overall needs. And what they do with speaker services, if for example, a new shower is needed, we go into and replace that shower or if a ramp is needed for handicapped accessibility, we build that. If there's something that's a hindrance in their lives, we assist with this. And there's a good logic behind it. We go back to the average Cherokee speaker 70 years. Well, you know what? You can prolong somebody's life with quality of life. And what that means is we have the continuity of that language asset, that treasure if you will, of that speaker. Not only that, but it's the right thing to do for another human. It is to give them the best quality life possible. And our Cherokee language speakers, and I don't want to harp on poverty atypically because Northeastern Oklahoma until fairly recently was lower socioeconomic status because we don't have industry, we don't have Fortune 500 companies here that Cherokees by and large, they're poor. And so they don't have the socioeconomic means to build a porch or a ramp or the things that are needed. So the tribal commitment to that is powerful. It's a lasting power. And not only that, but it helps the family also. We're not just helping that elder, we're helping the family around that. We've also, what we're doing is establishing a Cherokee language village campus. Now this sounds crazy. What we're doing is we've said we're in the process of building 24 homes for a combination of Cherokee language learner and Cherokee speaker or first language speakers. And that area, those families are families that are second language learners, they have children that go to the immersion school, the parents are in Climap or the successor programs. And side by side with them are first language speakers and nothing but in this village will Cherokee be spoken. So we're creating a full on immersion experience. And the end game even in that town, that village that we're creating is also to have a grocery store, a little restaurant where you can order nothing but Cherokee. Thus proving Cherokee is a viable living language that we need to grow. We have a, what they call a language consortium and that develops new Cherokee words. So what happens is Eastern Band Cherokee Nation, our elders get together, translators on both sides also and we develop new Cherokee words. So to continue explaining technology in a way that fits the mold of Cherokee language because sometimes what can be explained in English can't be explained in Cherokee. And I think there's more power, there's more, if I was a non Cherokee speaker or a non Cherokee, I would say Cherokee is poetry and motion because of the way it's worded. There's a certain descriptive way that's lost in English. It doesn't have that verbiage, that power that we speak about. We also have language speakers meetings monthly. So that means Cherokee language speakers can get together once a month. We have a mill together. We talk about different things in the Cherokee language prizes are given out. It's pretty cool to see our language speakers come together and it's a good way to socialize within the community because Cherokee Nation, our jurisdictional area is roughly like nine million acres. We don't have, that's what's considered our quote unquote reservation. So the tribe doesn't own nine million acres, but our area is nine million acres, if that explains. So we go up clear on up to Kansas. So you have language speakers that might be two hours away from each other. So by having a language speakers meeting monthly, you have the ability to socialize. And that in itself is a powerful tool. Next slide please. Oh man, digital curation. This is how we are doing what we are doing. So next slide please. By the way, that's me four different angles. Think I was doodling some archival terms on here or something. So how did this all come about? So for years, my generation when we were much younger in our 20s, the second language learner batch from that time period, it was very proactive and the nation was very, at the time it really wanted to status quote more or less. And then as we matured and we would bounce ideas together, eventually quote unquote, young Turks, academia has the young Turks that come in and there's a paradigm shift. Well in the nation, there was also a paradigm shift. And under Bill John Baker's administration, language revitalization efforts really became something. At the time I was the archivist over at the Cherokee Heritage Center and a couple of my friends over at the map, Howard Payton and Ryan Mackie, the real rock stars called up and they said, hey, we want to go around the country and image original source Cherokee language materials in different repositories. And what we wanna do is bring it into such a way that we can put it back in the classroom in these words. And I'm like, hey, I'm your guide because I used to go archives hopping. I used to do freelance archiving, professional researcher. So I used to go archive hopping and you know, you'd end up in repositories and like, well, I'm here, I might as well see this collection. So I had the dubious distinction in my head of knowing where most Cherokee archival language materials are across the country because it's always been a passion of mine really. So to be in this position, it was really awesome. So our first place was the Newberry Library and it was our test run. So we made sure that our camera was hitting almost 600 DPI in the environment. TIF files were being created so we were using archival best practices in the field. You know, some of the image because of the lighting conditions might have been, you know, 590 DPI, you know, hey, we're still in the ballpark, right? We're still four star Fadji at that point. So we did that and it worked out. So we kind of worked out the kings on our imaging team. Then we went to the National Anthropological Archives and we hit the Franz Ulbrichts collection. And then I trained up some imaging teams and they went up to Yale and APS and then that was it for a while. So then COVID kind of happened and I got a call from my now director and a friend of mine was on the phone and he said, you know, we need to have a, you know, I'll use the term dams. He did and I did, you know. And he said, what's available on the market and my friend recommended past perfect. And I was like, Howard, I'm going to be honest with you. There is so many dams on the market. I can't give you a clear understanding of what you need at this time, but I will tell you this, it absolutely has to support the Cherokee syllabary in Unicode. That has to be one of the prerequisites. Okay, that conversation was that. So I decided to leave the Cherokee Heritage Center and pursue a job that paid 20% more in records management. So I was there and then language department all of a sudden, you know, I kept on hearing about all the good things and you know, with COVID that released an insane amount of funds in our community for the betterment that we put through social programs. And a lot of that was directed at language. And Howard, he goes, hey, we need to start on that archives. You know, we kind of bouncing around years ago. And he goes, you know, we're building an immersion school. It's in the old Cherokee casino, but we're basically the only thing left of the casino is maybe the steel infrastructure. Everything else is brand new. And the old vault that was in the casino became an archives. And guess what? We have the best fire suppression systems, relative humidity and temperature control. You know, I couldn't be a happier archivist. And it came about Howard's like, okay, we need to build a digital archives from the ground up, Jared, you're in. And so the rest is history. And you know, there's been a lot of bumps in the way because how many archivists build an archives from the ground up? Not just a digital archives, but an analog physical archives. And today I'm going to talk a little bit about that as we go on. So next slide, please. With everything, you need a working title for the digital repository. Okay, I'll translate it into English. Basically, it's talking about drawing something like knowledge from. And it's referencing like back in the day at Cherokee homes, you would have ladle and there would be a bucket of fresh spring water there. So when you had a guest or came in from the field, hard work, you'd take that ladle and you drink that nice cool water. And so there's going to be a variation of that title for our digital repository. And there, like I said, there's power in that name. And that name, I kind of, I'm in Cherokee, I'm good at it in my head, but I'm kind of like a first grader when I have to read a class and you know how you kind of stumble. So I'll give it to you. It's Uli's gave the, I was going to go to Waguyi Yisti. It is basically the Cherokee name. That's, and I went to one of our translators. Cherokee, by the way, we're matrilineal people. So the women are in charge. And as a man, I know exactly what my role is and how I behave. So I thought it would be very appropriate to have one of our translators, Doris Schell, give that name. And yeah, she's a cousin of mine, but that gives me even more power because there's the familial ties, but we're Cherokee, there's one degree of separation. And I think it's powerful reference to go back to that time because in archives, especially digital archives, you know, you're drawing that knowledge in when you view it, whether it's a metadata or a digital object, whether you're watching audio visual materials, the experience of archives is that powerful. Okay, so this is how we go about the selection and the session of materials. We look at things, archives don't just take in any random thing, whether it's a digital repository or not. I worked at an institution before where our mission statement was one thing, but we would take in anything that was donated from across Indian country. We had Kiowa beadwork, everything. And you're like, you realize this is a Cherokee museum, the Cherokee Heritage Center. Why are you taking that in from that donor if it was never owned by Cherokee, if there's no continuity in Cherokee, why are we taking it in? And for a language repository, we have to look at things from the perspective of collecting in regard to the support of Cherokee language. So we look at the intrinsic evidentiary, historical, physical, legal, diachronic and synchronic that's fancy verbiage for a certain place in time the language is or a certain place in time the dialect is and also linguistic variety values. And here's what we clicked in with regard to media. We click books, journals, diaries, bibles, hymnals, newspapers, ledgers, governmental documents, audio visual materials and photo images either existing in analog or digital form. Even if it's an analog form, we can digitize that. We can make it a part of our digital repository. We have the know-how and if we don't have the know-how, I'm being sure to go out and learn it. But disclaimer here, we are working archives. So everything is happening in real time as I speak. So if you go look for our digital repository, it has not been published yet. We're looking at a year to a year and a half out. Okay, next slide please. Okay, quick facts on our holdings. I'm still trying to figure out where this number came. It didn't come from me, but it's been estimated to be 100 terabytes of holdings. And we're having an ongoing inventory. So everything is happening in real time. So if you said how many terabytes you have, I would tell you I would be a liar to speak. And I want to be truthful when I say something. And our ongoing inventory is looking out for department translators folding. So think about it as all of the translators we have and their collective translations over 15 years and figure out a magic number for that. Our Cherokee radio show has been going on for over the course of, I believe 20 years. Okay, so that's a weekly show. So think about all those materials that have been created during that time. And think about this, the entire digital and analog Cherokee language created materials, Cherokee Nation is ever created and its existence. Okay, that's going on. We still have to identify things. We have to seek them out. Sometimes they're on people's hard drives. Thankfully, we have the power of Archiverger and Preservica. Oh man, that's spoiler alert right there. But right now we have 25 terabytes of available storage for us right now. Our digital assets include Cherokee audio speakers project. Obviously I threw out the number 600 interviews. That's one terabyte right there. Okay, we have imaging of original source syllabary materials throughout the country. That includes our pre-state of governmental records with the Oklahoma Historical Society, National Anthropological Archives, the gracious digital repatriation that the Smithsonian did of all digitized Cherokee language materials in their holdings. All of these have been taken from thousands of documents. That's about a terabyte right there when you think about it. Internally created Cherokee language media. We're creating cartoons. We're creating music. We just put out last year a contemporary Cherokee language record, put on vinyl. I mean, so it's got some rap. It's got some Cherokee heavy metal. It's pretty cool, you know. So there's just that. That's some quick facts on our holdings. So our strategies. Now, I say indigenizing archival space, but you know what? First, we need to build an ecosystem. And our ecosystem, like just like nature, you want an ideal balance. So we look at the open archival information system, OAS reference model, following four-star FADGE standards whenever possible. If we have to sing down to three, but we're not sinking past that. So we're creating a standard of how we're doing things. And everybody thinks of digitizing, but when it comes down to what the heck do you do after? Digital preservation, baby. It's ongoing and you always have to do. Just because you have a Shelby Cobra doesn't mean you quit doing maintenance on it. You're always under the hood for optimal performance. Okay, next slide, please. Okay, so this is what our ecosystem looks like when the OAS model is applied to the Cherokee Language Digital Preservation Plan. So our producers are a combination of repatriations, donations, private materials held by Cherokee Nation citizens. So in the near future, any Cherokee Nation citizen that would like their family papers that are in the syllabary digitized, we're going to go to them. They're not coming to us. So it's field work. Cherokee created in-house materials and going to other institutional institutions that house Cherokee language materials. They're not exempt. If they're not coming to us, we're going to them. Okay, and through all that, we create our sit and then we go into our eight. And then, of course, we go into the beauty of our archival storage access and we have to understand who our users and consumers are. And our users and our consumers will be first language speakers, second language learners, Cherokee Nation citizens. And I also put a non-Cherokee audience. I can't tell you the non-Cherokee audience impact population, but what I can tell you is the impact population that our digital repository had. And that is 487,000 citizens. That's the combined population of the federally recognized tribes of Cherokee Nation, Eastern Band and Cherokee and the Unite two abandoned Cherokee. This project is a joint endeavor with us and the Eastern Band. Now, the Eastern Band at this moment are what I'm calling a pause. And what that means is they're still involved in it, but they're working with their IT for the needs they need to do to move forward. But we've already developed shared naming conventions, shared planning, digital preservation plans, collections development plan, action plans. We are ready to run and gun. And it is a beautiful thing. And I also wanted to show, oh, gosh, dang, I didn't, oh, yeah, it's right there. I'm pointing to it, but I'm pointing to where it says Fadji initiated here. So our producers are following Fadji standards. So we get the most optimal quality of incoming digital assets. What we'll be using for a collections management system is Arcavera and our digital asset management system is Preservica. And obviously Arcavera and Preservica are top shelf, industry, respective in their field. I call Arcavera archive space on steroids. And Preservica is like butter. We needed something that has drag and drop features. We needed something that not only an archivist can use because we have people that are in non-archival disciplines working with us. And I know there's going to be a tech question. How do you marry up Arcavera with dams? Well, Preservica has an API. Arcavera uses an API that's RESTful and the rest is history. So that's that. I also, we use perpetual NDSA law. Digital preservation is an ongoing situation in our ecosystem. And if we are going to put such a reverence such a reverence and value with our audio speakers project as not only a second language learner tool, but the continuity of our language by having first language speakers speak with a future generation down the road. We have to do best practices with NDSA law. That includes monitoring through continuity, a fixity. That means cloning. That means we're not settling for second best and we're not just going to, within our department, initially it was thought, okay, we just upload a file and that was it. Oh no, no, no, no. Digital preservation is a whole other thing. So ingest isn't just putting up a file, it's building an eight. Next slide, please. So in the list of continuous things, we have a number of questions that have been rolling in. So I hope you don't mind if I, we could have you all day and half of tomorrow. So an anonymous attendee says, can you talk more about outreach strategies that are respectful to tribes and tribal authority structure? Though I realize it is probably vastly different between tribes. Yes, it is. So outreach strategies, what you wanna do is, aside from it being good, you want to have a long-term relationship. It goes back to that Cherokee saying, we either like you or we hate you and it takes years to figure out either way. This is involved in years. And here's the thing, you have a tribe, you have an institution. When you have a partnership, you have something very powerful. You don't only have a partnership, you have a friendship. And you know what? We can never have enough friends. And friends are a community, they are extended family. Like, I don't know, we could have the same cousin, and we don't know until we talk. And if I have you as a relative all of a sudden, we become closer. And that's the world among us. And you know what? Here's the thing. Institutions, if you want to get away from the atypical paradigm of a dominant society, engage with that voice of the Indian country. Let them be your voice. Not, hey, what do you think about this? Invite them over, do curation, do joint projects and programs. You know, it may cost a few bucks, it may not. But what you do is build something powerful. And then if you think about it from the perspective of the institution, your impact population grows bigger because you're engaging in that tribe, whether it's a tribe of 200, a tribe of 2,000 or 200,000. You're engaging in impact population drives numbers for funding. Whether you're fundraising, whether you're seeking grant funding with any age or, you know, somebody else, impact numbers are very powerful. I hope I answered your question on that. See here, I think so. It's all about relationships. And so the next person says, I work at a large university which has recently been addressing the intertwined history of the university being built and indigenous people being dispossessed of land. Are there any projects and initiatives you would like to see occur at university libraries or archives to support language initiatives? I would like to myself, and I'm only speaking to myself, I'm not a voice for Indian country. I'm one person, I'm not the token Indian that knows all and can give this esoteric wisdom. But what I can say is please reach out to tribes. And not only that, but I'm just gonna say it for what it is. If the land is stolen, give it back. Enter a joint conservatorship on that land. You can put a tribe's name next year's on Indeed and you can develop a shared plan in a way. Simple strategy. Now, whether people wanna do that or not, that's a whole another thing. And I'm sure some people would view it as controversial. I don't, but I'm biased. Hey, so we're getting here close to the end. So I know we've got more questions. What I'm going to do is we're gonna share those with Jared and we can always record them and put them up on your answers and put them up either in text or a separate recording with the answers to the questions. But I wanna give you the last few minutes here to share your last few thoughts. I know you've got many more slides we didn't even get to, but. Okay, thoughts. Indigenizing archives, when you create digital assets, you create something that is lasting, man, that is powerful. It's meant to last. When you get into indigenizing, please look at best practices, but be fluid and think of it as a cultural extension of, for example, I guess the terminology for us would be, cherish it. We're doing digital archival best practices, but we're making it in such a way that it can be used for the betterment of us, for the betterment of our people, our language community. And I don't speak for our language community. But I am a language archivist and I will say that indigenizing archives is so much more powerful because if there is a best practices that doesn't work and you, or you can't afford it, you can still do better practices. And you know what, you may come across something, you may, we may have best practices for archives, but you may put a higher standard and you may have to. But it is by your own hand that you create what you create and how you create it. And with your own hand, it can be your own success or your own failure to make it a good one. So on here is the 321 rule. 321 rule isn't a rule, it's law around here. We follow obviously 25 terabytes of cloud storage with AWS via Preservica. Internally, we're using a RAID Pegasus 32 capable of 28 terabytes of storage. In addition to that, we had three working hard drives with eight terabytes. And this almost seems counterintuitive, but this is where we indigenize archives. We're also creating analog surrogates of those digitized materials. And the reason for that in the event, let's say the grid goes down and cloud is no more, we still have those analog materials that were created from those digitized materials that were originally created from those analog materials because those original analog materials, I guarantee at this stage with institutional tribal partnerships, they will not repatriate them to the communities. The mainstream is not ready for that at the level it needs to be. But what I can tell you is my archives functions on best practices. My physical archives, my archival vault down the hill, I'm stationing up the hill and the immersion school is down the hill. I can do best practices. I have the shelving, I have everything it needs. The only thing I need is for an institution to say, you know what, we're going to do the right thing. And we're going to give those back to the community and it is up to the community to move forward internally with what it needs. Because really, what do Cherokee syllabary materials do for a mainstream scholar that cannot read Cherokee? Besides look at them and make a perspective based off of their insight into something. They don't have the insight, they're doing things from an edict insight where they don't have that emic voice that's needed in this community. So please don't keep what is ours, give it back. Okay, this slide. I don't think we could end on anything better than that. Because we are now at two o'clock. So we didn't even get to get to all the fun hardcore archive stuff. Can we just do the slide real quick? Yes, absolutely. Okay, digital sovereignty. Okay, this is the southeastern ceremonial complex iconography design. It is shared by the creek, the Seminoles, Chickasaw, Yuchi, Nachi, those people. We have shared art, which we can apply to a cultural situation. Now, here's how we're doing digital sovereignty. And as you know, digital sovereignty is two components that make it a technological sovereignty and data sovereignty. So let's talk data sovereignty. Our archives is looking at PII and culturally sensitive materials, safeguarding. Okay, that's one aspect of data sovereignty we're initiating. Our location of digital assets is being stored or no. So we have a clear location of where they're at. Accessibility is controlled by Cherokee Nation. So that means we're taking control of our data sovereignty in that regard. Technological sovereignty, our tech infrastructure and digital assets are protected and backed up. Our associate infrastructure is located, is also known. And our ownership is fully retained and asserted. That means in the partnerships we go with companies, we make sure when we sign contracts, they are respecting our government to government relationship and sovereign immunity. So we have to sit down our lawyers and they get the specific language. And you know what? Most companies want to do business with us. I'm very thankful for Archivara and Preservica. Archivara being based out of Canada, Preservica multinational company out of the UK and US. And they want to engage in Indian country and we appreciate that. So those are the two functionalities, those two continuities of digital sovereignty and that's how we're utilizing it in the space in our operating space. Now, I'm not a lawyer of course. I'm not with the digital sovereignty perspective or of Cherokee Nation or strategies. But at this level in this archives, this is how we're utilizing digital sovereignty. And it's done, by the way, our metadata is bilingual. So it is in both Cherokee Unicode and Latin Unicode. So the alphabet and the syllabary best of both worlds. Love it, that is, so I can't add anything useful on top of what you've said. I don't know if you can see the chat, Jared. Everyone's asking to have you again. They want a multi-part series. So all I can say is how wonderfully grateful we are for you coming, sharing your time and your expertise with us all. This has been a wonderful kickoff to the spring semester for us. And I'm just delighted to have had you with us. So thank you. Any time you ask me to come, I am more than obliged. First off, I wanna thank everybody that showed up, that was a part of it, man, that's mad love. Not for me, but for the topics of language revitalization, digital sovereignty and digital curation. And that's powerful because I want as many indigenous archivists and even non-indigenous archivists engage in these spaces because we just become more as people and healing can take place in the way it needs to take place. You live the world through archives. Hey, you know what? I want a T-shirt like that. Well, thank you all so much for coming and joining us today. And you'll be able to find the slides and the recording, including answers to the questions we weren't able to get to today. We'll make all of that available through our website. Please, if you have a chance, fill out the feedback form so that we can make sure to continue to offer you the best of the best out there. Thank you again for sharing your afternoon with us today.