Date/Time
Date(s) – Oct 25 2018
7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Chieftains Museum/Major Ridge Home is honored to co-sponsor a lecture by Dr. Margaret Bender on the history of the Cherokee syllabary and language on Thursday, October 25th at 7:00pm in Evans Auditorium on the Berry College campus.

Dr. Bender is an Associate Professor of Cultural/Linguistic Anthropology at Wake Forest University. Bender believes strongly that the study of language is essential to our understanding of cultures, persons, and events. She has studied the relationship between language and culture in a variety of contexts—from political rhetoric in Iran to family literacy education in Chicago. Most of her work, however, has centered around the Cherokee language and been based in North Carolina’s Eastern Cherokee community. Focal areas have included literacy, language ideologies, linguistic sovereignty, and language revitalization. Bender has worked with authors and artists to develop two new Cherokee language texts to be used in language immersion education. Bender’s broader interests in scholarship and teaching include linguistic and educational anthropology, Native American cultures and languages, and anthropological theory. Her most recent publications include, “Shifting Linguistic Registers and the Nature of the Sacred in Cherokee,” in Registers of Communication (2015) and “Language Loss and Resilience in Cherokee Medicinal Texts,” in Trauma and Resilience in Southern History (2013).

The presentation by Dr. Bender is co-sponsored by Chieftains Museum along with the Department of Sociology/Anthropology and the Environmental Studies Program at Berry College as part of the Chieftains Lecture Series at Berry College. This program is free and open to the public.