Bushyhead, preserver of Kituhwa dialect, dies

By Rose Hooper

Robert Bushyhead

When he went to government boarding school, he was punished for speaking Cherokee. Family and friends say Bushyhead, who developed a passion for the history and culture of his people, spent the rest of his life overcoming that period of punishment. He became principal founder, linguist and historian for the Cherokee Language Project.

This noted preserver of the Kituhwa dialect died Saturday at the age of 86.

Son of the late Ben and Nancy Goings Bushyhead, he was a graduate of Carson Newman College and an ordained Southern Baptist minister. His resounding voice was heard at many a Cherokee gathering as he delivered a prayer or blessing in his native Kituhwa dialect.

In 1996, the N.C. Arts Council chose Bushyhead for the N.C. Folk Heritage Award. The award, presented to traditional artists who have made outstanding contributions to North Carolina's cultural heritage, marked Bushyhead's achievements in preserving the Kituhwa dialect. The dialect is one of at least four dialects recognized among today's speakers of the Cherokee language.

In the 1970s Bushyhead worked with linguist Bill Cook to save the original Cherokee language. In 1992, the endeavor took on a whole new context as Bushyhead began making a series of videotaped linguistic lessons. Those recordings became his life's work as each day he and his daughter and a local videographer recorded the sounds of the native language along with its grammar.

Bushyhead explained that all the complicated and intricate inflections and glottal stops in speaking Kituhwa are precisely timed. Vowel sounds and sentence structure mean nothing when spoken incorrectly, he said.

His Kituhwa project was featured in 1994 at the opening ceremonies of the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh, where a demonstration tape of the lessons and a sample of the voiced-computer dictionary was on display.

The videotapes were presented in lesson format at the kindergarten level and extended through high school grades.

"No other language sounds exactly like it," Bushyhead often said. "We have 85 sounds - and just a little inflection makes all the difference. Cherokee has a flow, it has a rhythm that is beautiful. But once you lose that rhythm, then of course, you are lost."

Bushyhead also won Western Carolina University's Mountain Heritage Award for his language preservation efforts.

For 18 years he portrayed Elias Boudinot in the Cherokee outdoor drama "Unto These Hills." Boudinot, also a preserver of language, was the first American Indian editor. He published the Cherokee Nation's first newspaper, The Phoenix.

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