Joseph Erb, Joanna Hearne, and Mark Palmer with Durbin Feeling — Origin Stories in the Genealogy of Cherokee Language Technology

The intersection of digital studies and Indigenous studies encompasses both the history of Indigenous representation on various screens, and the broader rhetorics of Indigeneity, Indigenous practices, and Indigenous activism in relation to digital technologies in general. Yet the surge of critical work in digital technology and new media studies has rarely acknowledged the centrality of Indigeneity to our understanding of systems such as mobile technologies, major programs such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), digital aesthetic forms such as animation, or structural and infrastructural elements of hardware, circuitry, and code. This essay on digital Indigenous studies reflects on the social, historical, and cultural mediations involved in Indigenous production and uses of digital media by exploring moments in the integration of the Cherokee syllabary onto digital platforms. We focus on negotiations between the Cherokee Nation’s goal to extend their language and writing system, on the one hand, and the systems of standardization upon which digital technologies depend, such as Unicode, on the other.  The Cherokee syllabary is currently one of the most widely available North American Indigenous language writing systems on digital devices. As the language has become increasingly endangered, the Cherokee Nation’s revitalization efforts have expanded to include the embedding of the Cherokee syllabary in the Windows Operating System, Google search engine, Gmail, Wikipedia, Android, iPhone and Facebook.