One of the most striking developments in the world’s history of written language took place in the Cherokee Nation in 1821. That year, the spiritual leader Sequoyah introduced the Cherokee community to his syllabary – a writing system with eighty-six glyphs, each representing a syllable of spoken Cherokee language. It caught on rapidly, beginning with the Cherokees’ production of a flourishing manuscript culture. Then, in 1828, the tribe’s National Council acquired a printing press and a set of syllabic types, which Cherokee printers used to create the famous bilingual national newspaper ᏣᎳᎩ ᏧᎴᎯᏌᏅᎯ or The Cherokee Phoenix. In their outstanding book The New Voice of God, authors Margaret Bender and Thomas N. Belt examine a less-often-explored set of textual materials that were enabled by the spread of the syllabary and the ability to print it: Cherokees’ translations of books of the Bible.

The large part of The New Voice of God consists of Bender and Belt’s close analysis of the language used in Cherokee editions of the books of Genesis, Matthew, and John. The pair’s focus stems from their opening premise – widely emphasized by Cherokee language teachers and first-language speakers – that the Cherokee language encodes a worldview, providing a site for the “basic physical, spiritual, social, and spatial predispositions and orientations” (1) of Cherokee people. An investigation into the biblical translations thus offers a “critical Cherokee perspective” (3) on materials that came out of missionary encounters. Overall, they find that “the translation of the Bible into Cherokee did not involve a unidirectional or wholesale imposition of Euro-American concepts and categories onto Cherokee readers.” Instead, “it preserved Cherokee associations and ways of thinking, and the use of semantic extensions even produced new metaphorical meanings” (46).

Bender and Belt came to their insights collaboratively. Their method started with Bender – a non-Native linguistic anthropologist with years of fieldwork experience with eastern Cherokee communities – who would pose an interpretation of a particular word or passage, drawing on resources like the community-sourced cherokeedictionary.net. It would continue in consultation with Belt, a Cherokee elder and the retired coordinator of Western Carolina University’s Cherokee Language Program. Belt used “his linguistic knowledge as a first-language speaker of Cherokee and his cultural knowledge as a lifelong community member to provide English glosses or equivalent translations” (3). The pair repeated this intensive process for the entirety of the text of all three books.

The results are impressive. For an initial example, consider the word power in the King James Version of Matthew 28:18: “And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.” Translators rendered this concept as digilvhwisdanehdiyi ( ᏗᎩᎸᏫᏍᏓᏁᏗᏱ ), roughly, “our shared repeated work or responsibility.” Such translation decisions are revealing of a Cherokee worldview, in this case of how power “is not about control over others or over resources but instead is about using one’s own strength for good” (101). The authors further demonstrate how the complexity of the gloss is attributable to the capaciousness of Cherokee as a polysynthetic language, in which words are composed of small units of meaning, called morphemes, built up around a verb stem. “Power” in this case was not an isolated idea but was rendered with appended pronouns (our), an inflection of temporality (repeated), and a sense of relationality (shared). In other words, its invocation calls into being a web of social, spatial, and temporal relationships. Bender and Belt parse many such poignant examples over the first three chapters of their book. While the authors offer explanations that readers will understand even without any background in Cherokee language, linguistic anthropology, or translation studies, specialists can consult the book’s fifty-eight tables that contain hundreds more textual examples. Specialists and nonspecialists alike will appreciate the extent and meticulousness of this work.

Another example of one of this book’s compelling insights appears in chapter four, which focuses on the distinctiveness of the biblical translations in comparison to contemporaneous forms of sacred syllabic writing such as medicinal manuscripts and ceremonial prayers. As Bender demonstrated in her earlier work (Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah’s Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life [University of North Carolina Press, 2002]), those manuscripts were written in a “sacred register” (54): they were characterized by deliberately obfuscatory vocabulary, dropped syllables, lyric repetitions, interjections, and ample references to cosmology. By contrast, the Christian texts are clear and quotidian, indicating that the translators declined to utilize the “full range of traditional Cherokee sacred linguistic genres and forms” (117). Bender and Belt attribute these textual differences to their genres. Sacred medicinal texts were not for the public – they “were performed on an individual basis by experts and were their exclusive property,” rarely circulating beyond a matrilineal kin group (143). Biblical texts, by contrast, had a missionary function, and Cherokee translators recognized that they called for a particular use of the capacities of the language that were more suited to a wider distribution.

I sometimes thought that Bender and Belt may have been able to refine their interpretations even further with some more attention to the conditions of the translations’ production. While they note that several versions of biblical texts were produced over decades – competing texts emanated from the Baptist missions on the one hand, and, on the other, from the Congregationalists and Presbyterians allied with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) – they do not specify which versions they consulted. With this information, one could likely determine the specific identities of the translators and better contextualize their decisions. For instance, in the pre-removal period, the most widely available translation of the gospel of Matthew was the 1829 edition translated by the Cherokee statesman Elias Boudinot in collaboration with the ABCFM missionary Samuel Worcester and printed on the national press in New Echota, then the capital of Cherokee Nation. The title page bears the names of both men. This fact raises the question of how their collaboration proceeded. Presumably, Boudinot took the lead, though Worcester would have contributed his knowledge of Greek, the source language used in the translation process for the New Testament books. How did this partnership, and the skills and concerns of each actor, change the final products? For example, how do we know that the straightforward syntax of the biblical language was attributable to a deliberate choice, and not to, say, the presence of Worcester and his want of language ability and ignorance of sacred textual registers? The ABCFM records may contain some answers. It could also be fruitful to compare the Boudinot-Worcester Christian translations with those completed by Boudinot working alone, such as his translation of the tract Poor Sarah or ᎤᏲ ᎢᏳᏛᎿᏕᎩ ᏎᎵ (1833).

To summarize, The New Voice of God makes an exceptional contribution. This is a book that reshapes scholarly understandings of the meaning of Bible translations, the practice of Indigenous Christianity, and the centrality of Cherokee perspectives in missionary encounters on Native land. I also found it to be a pedagogical book in the best sense in that it models the signal importance of learning Native languages and the value of pursuing collaborative scholarship. It deserves a wide readership among historians of Christianity and across fields.