Tsisa a ki ke yu ha

Transcriber: Robert Bushyhead

THE REVEREND ROBERT BUSHYHEAD was a Cherokee linguist whose efforts to preserve his native Kituhwa dialect, spoken by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians until government attempts to stamp it out in the early 1900s, brought the language to a new generation of Cherokees - fewer than 1,000 of whom now speak the dialect. Robert Henry Bushyhead was born in 1914 and brought up in a one-room log cabin in the Birdtown community of the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina. Bushyhead's ancestors had been among the Cherokees removed from their homes there, and in Georgia and Tennessee, in 1838, and forcibly resettled in the Indian Territory of what is now Oklahoma. The 1,000 mile march to their new location had killed more than 4,000 members of t… Go to person page >