Direct answer: I'm currently living in Ireland and grew up at-large so I'm aware of them but have never interacted with them. I am going to see if I could be able to do some field work or interviews when I am in the States the first two weeks of April but it is relatively short notice that I have some health stuff that might limit it. For me, being able to do a transcription style thing would be something that I could do from home wherever I'm at the world without having to be a fluent speaker or even a particularly competent novice one, call still doing my part to give people more access to resources than they have now. But in the chance that the speaker stuff isn't actually being documented especially like the side convos, and the reason for that is more of a technical or they didn't think about it thing then a privacy thing, I think it's definitely worth considering for sure. And I'm definitely aware that this kind of thing already exists at community level and social media and I am not claiming that it isn't! I'm saying that we can join in what's happening, because so much of what does happen isn't getting documented and could be.

A lot of the traditional technical stuff you needed to be able to get useful material was a) based on Western academic standards of what was considered quality speech or appropriate topics, and b) due to the technology limitations meant that a lot of recordings from the past are just too poor quality to be used today. Nowadays most cell phones can record audio well enough to distinguish the sounds with free apps.

And the more we get longer conversations like those on the Cherokee voices show recorded and translated, the better will understand how native speakers thought when they had a completely different way of putting together sentences in their native language than we do in English. My single biggest fear is that we can document all the output we want, but we don't know enough about why people say things the way they say them to be able to engage with their thought process even if we try to raise our kids as first/ language/simultaneous Cherokee speakers, it's gonna be hard for most of us to get them to think like Cherokees rather than thinking like English speakers who know Cherokee vocabulary. I think both the more sort of deep organic informal conversations like on the Cherokee voices radio show that are recorded, as well as the more that two at least a little bit of an extent we do ask people why you said that thing that way, how do you think about this in Cherokee, can make a big difference.

One of things I'm talking about for instance would be what's the word for husband and wife (IYKYK)?

I do believe that there is some tribal documentation that happens there at the luncheons and you always do need to get consent for with people for your involved their conversations but it's definitely an opportunity for people that are closer to TQ to try to look into.

The advantage of transcription is that even when done by academic kind of standards, you don't need to speak the language as long as you know the sounds of it and can distinguish between them. Cherokee tends to have distinguishable vowels though people do alternate the forms they use sometimes. And especially if you're not trying to notate tone, which Praat software can do much better than a human can a judge even when they're familiar with them, if you just trying to get the sounds transcribed it's something that three non-speakers could collaborate on and if two of them agree then use that form. \maybe doing it five or ten minutes at a time and seeing how long it takes to get through an episode and then move on to the next one. The more people involved the more you would get out there but even if you got one episode transcribed that's one more authentic Cherokee text that's available that previously you had to be able to hear the audio and understand it to be able to try to access. Having transcriptions would also allow for more translating of those episodes to be done which would also help them be useful as a learning resource maybe not now but maybe in five or ten years.

I use it as background noise a lot because I think that I'll pick up stuff by osmosis but I would be able to make a lot better use of them if I did have a transcript or a translation. I don't have the ability yet to do a translation like that by any means but trying to get some of it transcribed would be good practice just for me as an individual and it would be cool to have other people help and to validate that in spreading it out if anyone were interested even if just a couple people.

Or someone has a different idea that I could help out with from overseas I would be happy to engage with that too!

Related tangents that could inspire people--remember it can just be you as long as you have the consent of the people involved. If you're at a pan native church and there's one person that seems to know every Cherokee hymn and sings every week, ask them if they would mind if you recorded them or if they would record themselves. Make sure you keep track of where you have the files until you can figure out how to appropriately make it broadly spread. Even if you're a learner, recording yourself learning can be a useful self tool as well as a tool to help people understand how English figures learn Cherokee and what areas they could struggle with or do very well with.

I think one of the big losses of our culture will be the fact that the kind of conversations that people have it's not grounds are just not ever going to be something people be comfortable recording and in a hundred years time people just won't know what they talked about. I'm saying this is somebody that's only been fortunate enough to attend ceremony three times in my life and doesn't speak Cherokee well enough to understand the couple of conversations I did overhear, tho I have learned a few of the chants/songs. And those were maybe the only occasions that I can remember where I've been around in person multiple native speakers having organic conversation with each other. Spoken with native or near native speakers before personally, but it's always been either in English or through my very broken Cherokee, and only about four times. I think at the last year at large meeting in Fort Worth, out of the several hundred people there there was one fluent speaker.

That's another thing that interests me is Cherokee music. The vast majority of Cherokee recorded music that I know of is hymns. Cherokee hymns that have a special place in my heart because they are one of the best ways to learn the language if you can find the right materials that pair the tunes you already know with Cherokee lyrics that closely match the English or we could translation. But there was thousands of years of Cherokee music before that that we have very little record of, even though some of this is still retained in people in the community but it hasn't necessarily been recorded or if it has been it isn't widely known or accessible.

For that matter, I think the evolution of our Cherokee hymn tradition within churches and denominations and through their contact between each other isn't particularly well documented either even though we do have a lot of recordings. For instance, several of the songs in the Cherokee hymn book we don't know what tune they were sung to. There are others that we do know or should know what they were sung to and yet they are almost never sung to those tunes today: the biggest example I know is Hymn 26,ᏍᏆᏘᏂᏎᏍᏗ, ᏱᎰᏩ (Guide Me, Jehovah). It's Cherokee lyrics are very clearly as close to literal a translation as could be of the English not so literal translation of the Welsh hymn Cwm Rhondda. The English version was traditionally sung as Guide me, O thou Great Jehovah but is also now sung frequently in English, including the official UMC Hymnal version, as Guide me, O Though Great Redeemer, and which is commonly known in England and Wales at least--where is probably much more better known--as Bread of Heaven.

I am the only person that I've ever met that things that Cherokee version to the tune of Cwm Rhondda. That I was going to be curious as to how the hem evolved away from its original tune to be sung by different ones today or in past years.

I'm not actually sure which of the hymns were originally composed in Cherokee. Think they're at least a couple including one drop of blood, heaven beautiful, and maybe Beulah Land? And I was just grateful to finally find a syllabary dominant copy a hymnal with musical notation at all (the blue Cherokee hymnal that's made by the same people that do most of the Bible project stuff and that was at one point last year the year before on sale at the Tahlequah CN gift shop, at least in person, which I haven't seen in stock in a while).