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.
Margaret Bender is Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life and editor of Linguistic Diversity in the South: Changing Codes, Practices, and Ideology. Thomas N. Belt (Cherokee Nation) is a retired Cherokee language instructor at Western Carolina University, where he received an honorary doctorate. He is a fluent Cherokee speaker and the author of articles on Cherokee language and worldview.
This wonderful collaboration draws our attention to what is found in translation: the creativity of Cherokee speakers and the power of the Cherokee language-based world view in nativizing Biblical books. Bender and Belt have made a major and original contribution not only to the study of indigenous Christianities, but to translation studies, linguistic relativity, and language ideologies more generally." - Paul V. Kroskrity, editor of Telling Stories in the Face of Danger: Language Renewal in Native American Communities "The fascinating insights into Cherokee philosophy, cosmology, and ways of knowing revealed by the authors' meticulous attention to how language encodes biblical concepts in Cherokee moral and epistemological frameworks are unrivaled in the literature. This book lights a fire that students and scholars will follow for years to come." - Joshua B. Nelson (Cherokee Nation), author of Progressive Traditions: Identity in Cherokee Literature and Culture
