News Release Cherokee Nation The Cherokee Nation is recognizing Friday, October 15 as “Sequoyah Day” in honor of the 200th anniversary of Sequoyah’s creation
KANSAS, Okla. â A fluent Cherokee speaker and longtime translator, Anna Sixkiller has become a caretaker for the language she holds dear.
âThat is my language. Itâs my first language,â said Sixkiller, a Cherokee National Treasure since 1991. âItâs what I work with every day. I really think about a lot of things when I translate something â whoâs going to be looking at it and how theyâre going to look at it, how theyâre going to feel, what theyâre going to say. I want to put the right words in there so they can understand.â
For more than two decades, Sixkiller, 75, of Kansas, Oklahoma, has helped translate the language for the Cherokee Nation and its immersion school, museums, universities, libraries, hospitals, the Cherokee Phoenix and even large tech empires such as Microsoft.