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by Tim Whitmire

Cherokee, North Carolina (AP)

In writing the follow-up to his best-selling debut Cold Mountain, novelist Charles Frazier borrowed the history of the Cherokee Indians and their forced removal from the mountains of his native western North Carolina for the setting of Thirteen Moons.

As a way of giving back to the Eastern Band of Cherokees, Frazier is translating a portion of the novel and other books into the Cherokee language. They will be the first contemporary works translated into the tribal language in 175 years.

“I’m just glad that this happened during my lifetime,” said Myrtle Driver, an Eastern Band member who is helping Frazier translate the section of Thirteen Moons that chronicles the tribe’s removal from their Appalachian homeland to Oklahoma in the late 1830s. “I feel like my life is complete.”

Frazier’s new novel, which has been on best-seller lists since its October publication, tells the story of Will Cooper, an orphaned white boy who runs a trading post on the edge of the Cherokee Nation. A Cherokee elder adopts Cooper and he eventually becomes a tribal chief.

Will meets his true love, Claire, when he wins her in a card game at age 12, then finds her again decades later in a story set against the backdrop of the migration along what’s known as the Trail of Tears.

Half a century ago, some 70 percent of the households in the tribe’s Big Cove community in North Carolina still spoke Cherokee, said Barbara Duncan, education director at the tribe’s Museum of the Cherokee Indian. Now, there are maybe 1,000 speakers left among approximately 13,500 Eastern Band members and an estimated 10,000 speakers among the much more populous Oklahoma Cherokee Nation.

“I was interested in the fact that the Cherokee language is in some danger of becoming a dead language,” Frazier said at a recent reading of Thirteen Moons in English and Cherokee that he gave with Driver, the book’s Cherokee translator.

Frazier visited the museum months before the book’s publication, looking for a Cherokee syllabary – or alphabet – he could use to decorate the book. While there, he told education director Duncan he wanted to use some of the book’s proceeds to fund a project that would benefit the tribe. Duncan knew right away what the project should be.

“The issue for a lot of people right now is the language,” she told Frazier.

Since the 1830s, the only literature available to Cherokee readers has been ancient editions of the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, the Bible and some old hymnals. Once done with Thirteen Moons – the translation will include the English text, along with a Cherokee translation on the facing page – the pair have a list of books they want to add to the canon.

“I’d love to see some standard children’s books, like Where the Wild Things Are and Runaway Bunny translated,” Frazier said.

At the reading, Driver talked about the challenges of translating from English into the complex Cherokee language, where verbs can take as many as five different prefixes and suffixes that offer different information about the subject, object, time, direction of the action – even whether the information being relayed is known first- or secondhand.

“We had to eliminate some words in order to make the story flow as beautifully in Cherokee as it does in Charles Frazier’s words,” she said.

One thing that translates easily into Cherokee are the humorous sections of Thirteen Moons – something that was evident when Frazier and Driver read a passage from the book that describes one character’s humiliation after he marries a Cherokee woman and her two sisters and becomes a target of fun for the sounds he makes during intimate moments.

“They’d talk about Bear’s love sounds over breakfast... they’d make sounds of warthogs rooting in the ground, a groundhog’s whistle, buck’s noise, crow calls,” Frazier read in English, to general laughter.

Driver prefaced her Cherokee translation by telling the audience, “This is my favorite part of the book – because this is exactly what me and my sisters and I do. We love to sit around and laugh at people.”

Moments later, she brought down the house – both the Cherokee speakers and the non-speakers – with her literal rendering of the animal sounds.

With the publication of Thirteen Moons and other initiatives funded by revenues from the tribe’s casino, the Eastern Band Cherokees are enjoying something of a cultural renaissance. Descended from tribal members who hid in the hills to avoid the forced move to Oklahoma, the tribe struggled with poverty, education and economic development even after winning federal recognition in the 1860s and a federal acknowledgment of their reservation in the 1920s.

For decades, the town of Cherokee has been a tourist trap: cheap T-shirts and rear-view-mirror “dream catchers” are sold in souvenir shops, while some Cherokees dress like Hollywood Indians and sit outside teepees to have their picture taken on the main drag into town.

“The 20th century was not really a good time for Native people,” said Duncan, who has worked with the Eastern Band for a quarter-century. “It wasn’t the Trail of Tears, but it was repressive of the culture in other ways.”

That began to change in the 1990s, with the opening of the casino that pumped revenue into the tribe and helped support a revival of traditional Cherokee stamped pottery, a growth in language preservation initiatives and this year’s debut of a revamped version of Unto These Hills, the long-running Cherokee outdoor drama.

As Taylor, an archivist at the tribe’s museum and a traditional Cherokee dancer, put it before he and others danced in honor of Frazier on the afternoon of the Thirteen Moons reading, “We’re dancing in honor of Mr. Frazier, the fact that he recognizes the Cherokee people have something to give.”

On The Net:

Museum of the Cherokee Indian site:

http://cherokeemuseum.org/

Cherokee syllabary: