Margaret Bender – författare

For Christian European missionaries among the Cherokees at the turn of the eighteenth century, translating the Bible meant wrestling with the extreme structural differences between Cherokee and English. The New Voice of God reveals how these linguistic differences encoded basic predispositions and orientations toward the physical, spiritual, and social worlds— and how their translation in turn encodes the profound linguistic and cultural exchange manifested in the making of the Cherokee Bible. While the introduction of Christianity shaped Cherokee communicative practices and culture, the Cherokee language also reshaped the Bible to reflect a definitive Native worldview. Focusing on three books of the Cherokee Bible - Genesis, John, and Matthew - Margaret Bender and Thomas N. Belt demonstrate how Christianity, written in and on Cherokee terms, can be uniquely and distinctly Cherokee, while remaining undeniably Christian. For example, Cherokee's rich and complex grammar work against English's noun-centeredness, yielding creative approximations of European objects as conditions and essences as events. Cherokee's radically different pronoun structure includes the reader in Biblical conversation in surprising ways. The authors also explain the relevance of the Cherokee Indigenous writing system - invented by Sequoyah, a non-Christian native speaker - to the complex spiritual landscape of the nineteenth century. Their analysis suggests that the Cherokee Bible records this cross-cultural encounter at a deep philosophical level, providing evidence that microlinguistic detail powerfully and intricately reflects macrosociological phenomena. In showing how Cherokee Christians ingeniously adapted Christian practices to create unique social and spiritual identities, The New Voice of God documents how this adaptation - manifest in the translation of Christian texts into Cherokee - not only bridged two vastly different languages but also exposed deep philosophical differences, challenging Western cultural norms and reshaping spiritual discourse.

Based on extensive fieldwork in the community of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina, this book uses a semiotic approach to investigate the historic and contemporary role of the Sequoyan syllabary - the written system for representing the sounds of the Cherokee language - in Eastern Cherokee life. The Cherokee syllabary was invented in the 1820s by the respected Cherokee Sequoyah. The syllabary quickly replaced alternative writing systems for Cherokee and was reportedly in widespread use by the mid-nineteenth century. After that, literacy in Cherokee declined, except in specialized religious contexts. But as Bender shows, recent interest in cultural revitalization among the Cherokees has increased the use of the syllabary in education, publications, and even signage. Bender also explores the role played by the syllabary within the ever more important context of tourism. (The Eastern Cherokee Band hosts millions of visitors each year in the Great Smoky Mountains.) English is the predominant language used in the Cherokee community, but Bender shows how the syllabary is used in special and subtle ways that help to shape a shared cultural and linguistic identity among the Cherokees. Signs of Cherokee Culture thus makes an important contribution to the ethnographic literature on culturally specific literacies.