William Jehu Garroutte

The pitch I sold over the summer ran 27 minutes, but I reckon that's more "something I got away with" and less "something worth emulating."

All I can really say at this point is if everyone isn't watching how trans people have lost basic rights and protections on a scale that hasn't been seen in decades in the span of 72 hours and realizing that even if you aren't trans there's nothing stopping it from happening to you, you're a fool

"Excluding Indians": Trump admin questions Native Americans' birthright citizenship in court The Trump admin is leaning on a pre-14th Amendment law in its fight to redefine birthright citizenship.

They are arguing that anyone with tribal citizenship, such as my daughter and I, should be stripped of US citizenship.

They are attacking my family, directly. When will they attack yours?

www.salon.com/2025/01/23/e...

(Post-script: And because English is less precise than Cherokee, you don't even know how many "you"s I might have meant there!!!)

Wish I hadn't put it off so long. Glad I'm diving in now. I think the next few years are gonna be an especially tough time for the preservation of Native cultures and languages, so for anybody who has a chance to hop into their own pool, I hope you take the plunge.

These two sessions, all of this complexity, and we're still just talking about verbs. Verbs! And yet I keep being moved by how intrinsic, inextricable RELATIONSHIPS are to this language. What that says about us. What it says about why the work of learning this language is so important.

Second session, we talked about how verbs also contain the tense. Again, Cherokee goes HARD. For instance, there are separate tenses for, "The past, and I was there," and "The past, and I wasn't there." (That second one can be shaded further based on whether or not there was a witness!)

Cherokee verbs are built with information about the verb's subject. Pronouns have their own prefixes. Keeping in mind that a lot of pronouns are relationships, this means that verbs - the ways we move, the ways we act - are DIRECTLY TIED to our relationships.

But wait, it gets more complicated AND cooler! (I might get overbroad or use terminology wrong - apologies to linguists, I am but a humble dirtbag nerd)

Like, there are separate pronoun categories for "you and I," "you all and I," "they and I (but not you), "you 2 people," "you 3 or more people." There are ten pronoun categories! One interesting note here - there is no pronoun difference between he/she/it. All one pronoun in Cherokee!

And that pool is DEEP. This grammar is no fucking joke. For example: On our very first day, we talked about pronouns. English has I, you, she, he, it, we, and they. Cherokee, though, has pronoun categories that include... Relationships?

My first foray into the language has been a crash course in Cherokee grammar with my aunt, a professor who has brought professor-grade Powerpoints to these Zoom sessions. There are LINGUISTS in this Zoom course. I'm learning to swim in the deep end of the pool, but there are kindly lifeguards.

I recently got a long-overdue start on a project that means a lot to me: learning the Cherokee language. It's daunting, it's more than a little overwhelming, and each lesson gently liquifies my brain. But it's also been fun! And surprisingly emotional! And I want to talk about it a little!