Cherokee language learners bridge generations with iPad and Mac

At the Cherokee Immersion School in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the hallways are buzzing with young learners traveling from one classroom to the next. Serving students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, the immersion school — a branch of the Durbin Feeling Language Center — is tasked with creating the next generation of Cherokee language speakers.

“They’re really language warriors,” says Erlinda “Daksi” Soap, a fifth grade teacher at the immersion school. “Our mission here at Cherokee Nation and the Durbin Feeling Language Center is to find our future Cherokee leaders, those who are willing to share the language and continue growing the language.”

Today, there are fewer than 1,500 fluent speakers in a population of over 480,000 Cherokee people around the world. Apple has been supporting Cherokee Nation — and their partners at Oklahoma City University (OCU) — in their efforts to help revitalize the language and culture. Through its Community Education Initiative, Apple is helping to equip teachers and young learners with iPad and Mac at the Cherokee Immersion School and nearby Sequoyah High School.

“The technology that we utilize with Apple has allowed us to take everything that we really are trying to achieve here, which is the perpetuation and the revitalization of Cherokee language and culture, and use that same technology to make it relevant to the young people that are learning here,” says Chuck Hoskin Jr., Cherokee Nation’s principal chief.

Teachers like Soap, Tyler Teague, Jennie Pruitt, and others have also been selected as technology ambassadors through the initiative, attending trainings led by Apple and OCU to explore ways to combine creativity and coding into their curriculum, so that they’re more effective in reaching younger generations.

In Soap’s classroom, an affirmation mirror sets the tone for the day, with Cherokee expressions such as “I am smart, I am loved, and I am strong” greeting each student who stands before it. The students are practicing for an upcoming Cherokee Language Challenge Bowl.

“At first they would write words on their own on paper in pencil, but now they’re able to record themselves and study those words at school and at home,” says Soap.

By recording themselves reciting their vocabulary on iPad, the students can practice pronunciation more confidently. “In Cherokee language, every sound is so important,” says Soap. “One sound off, and you’re saying a completely different word.”

Down the hall, Teague’s class is putting the finishing touches on an animated storytelling assignment. After illustrating their stories in Keynote on iPad, the students use iMovie to record themselves narrating their stories. Storytelling is a key component of how the language and culture gets passed down from generation to generation. Traditions rooted in nature are another vital part of Cherokee culture. To understand the potential uses of plants, including their medicinal properties, students are working toward building an app that helps identify and document different species. In Keynote, they’re creating a draft for the app project. Then, they collect and annotate images from their environment to build a custom machine learning model. Finally, they will put it all together in an app using Apple’s Swift Playground.

“Keynote has been really helpful because they can put the name of the plant, a picture of the plant, and they can also record their sound bites so they can say the word themselves,” Teague explains. “So if I say it one way in my classroom, and they say, ‘Oh, that’s not what my grandma said,’ I say, ‘Well, record what your grandma said, because your grandma knows.’ There’s differentiation in our language because tones are really important in the way people say things within different communities.”

“Being able to type on the iPad in the Cherokee language and use the syllabary, that’s something that helps us promote literacy,” he says.

“iPad is an amazing tool, and it is something that I think has been revolutionary for everybody that’s used it,” says Hoskin. “It really does take everything we’ve been building here and puts it all within reach of a young Cherokee.”

Over at Sequoyah High School, a new immersion track has been established for the students graduating from the Cherokee Immersion School. Sophomore Olivia Daugherty graduated from the immersion school in 2024 and has continued her language and culture studies in Pruitt’s class.

“I was worried about my language and culture, and the way I might lose my community and I might lose my language,” Daugherty recalls. “But what I really liked about Sequoyah was how they offered Cherokee classes, and that’s when I got into conversational Cherokee.”

Daugherty recalls learning bits and pieces of the language and how to weave as a child. “When we’d go cruising, my dad would teach me how to count in Cherokee, and we’d just go through it. And he mainly taught me how to say animals,” she says. “Then they put me into immersion along with my sister, and ever since then, I have been trying to be inclusive with the language.”

In today’s Conversational Cherokee class, Daugherty is practicing basket weaving with elders. “I use art as an outlet to express my language and culture,” Daugherty says.

“It all begins with our origin story, the first fire,” Pruitt explains about the initial lesson in her weaving class. “We needed fire. Different animals were sent out in the story, and it ends up being the water spider that goes to get the flame and bring it back. And she’s able to do that by weaving a basket.”

For Daugherty, the practice is another callback to her childhood, learning weaving and pottery from elder women who would share their stories with her. “It’s more like memory sharing than anything,” Daugherty says.

Once origin stories are shared, Pruitt has her students go out around the school and their homes to photograph baskets with their iPad devices. The photos are then used as a reference for the students to design their own baskets in Freeform on iPad.

“Having the iPad opens up things for video and audio recording, teaching the kids podcasting skills, teaching the students Keynote to write reports,” says Pruitt. “It’s really neat to be able to access our language, our Cherokee font on iPad, and to add text to our videos and to our audio.”

Over in the STREAM (science, technology, research, engineering, art, and math) Lab, ribbon skirts hang from clothing racks alongside Mac computers, large-format printers, and sewing machines. The students are using iPad and Apple Pencil to design their own skirts before hand sewing them. The lab also serves as a studio for the student-run podcast, Stories of Sequoyah. Teacher Melissa Fourkiller is assisting a group of students who are conducting an interview with Sam Horsechief, an elder in the community who’s been coaching at the school since 1987. They’re recording and editing the audio for an upcoming episode.

“In the STREAM classroom, sewing, storytelling, and digital media come together,” Fourkiller says. “Students create traditional items while learning the cultural meaning behind them, and they use Apple tools like GarageBand on Mac computers to produce podcasts that respectfully preserve and share Cherokee stories. Through these projects, they develop creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving skills while learning to use technology with purpose.”

“Without Apple products and the things that we do today, we would not be able to see the language moving as fast as it is,” says Bryan Warner, Cherokee Nation’s deputy principal chief, who is also a former educator.

Throughout their history, storytelling and technology have been a through line for the Cherokee. Established over 200 years ago by a Cherokee warrior named Sequoyah, the written syllabary was a revolutionary tool for being able to document and communicate the language in writing for the first time. Sequoyah established 86 characters to represent the sounds — or syllables — in the spoken language. This paved the way for the nation’s first bilingual print newspaper, and more recently, the keyboards on students’ Mac, iPad, and iPhone devices.

“A big part of being Cherokee is you ensuring things like language and culture survive and continue,” says Roy Boney Jr., a Cherokee artist who worked with Apple engineers to bring the syllabary to Mac, iPad, and iPhone. “In previous generations it was just passed down naturally.”

“Having the syllabary on the iPhone or on a Mac laptop really takes us back in time,” says Hoskin. “It seemed like something in the history books. Now it’s suddenly on the leading edge of technology on our phones. I think that’s real power.”

That power is already in the hands of language warriors like Daugherty.

“My niece, she’s a first-language speaker in our language,” says Daugherty. “She’s one of the first in a very long time.”