A group of babies are learning their first words in Cherokee, not English, in a cabin tucked away in 260 acres of forest on the edge of an Oklahoma lake. There aren’t any plastic toys or tablets propped up on sippy cups here. There are only mothers, elders, wild onions, and a language that has been erased on purpose for hundreds of years. It’s hard not to think that something really important is happening when you watch this from afar.
When Melissa Lewis, a new Cherokee mother with experience in child and family development, asked herself, “How do you raise a Cherokee-speaking child when you live in an English-speaking home?” she came up with the idea for Little Cherokee Seeds in 2018. It was a second language for both her and her husband. They talked to native speakers and found other mothers who were just as quiet and determined. Together, they created something that didn’t exist before: a Cherokee language and culture program for babies and their moms that took place on the Cherokee Nation Reservation.
The way the program works is planned and, by today’s standards for education, not typical. Cherokee children ages 0 to 3 spend their whole day doing more than 100 traditional activities, such as cooking, making baskets, gardening, gathering seeds, and walking in the woods. Phyllis Sixkiller, a co-founder who speaks Cherokee fluently and has taught for more than forty years, explains the philosophy in simple terms. Doing things with the language is better than memorizing them. She says, “Our classroom is a cabin in the woods,” and the way she says it makes me really amazed.
Most people agree that Cherokee is one of the most difficult languages to learn in North America. Its verbs can be changed into about 20,000 different forms. It’s not a mistake. That’s the point: this is a language that needs to be learned by immersion, not by doing worksheets. There are kids here who aren’t sitting still and learning grammar rules. Lewis says that looking for wild onions is always the kids’ favorite thing to do. They can hear Cherokee being spoken around them in the way that any child hears their mother tongue: constantly, naturally, and in the right context.
It’s not a coincidence that mothers are at the center of the program. Cherokee society is based on women and women only, and Lewis and her co-founders know that the people who speak the language at home are the ones who will keep it alive. Mothers are seen as “matriarchs in training” by the program. They not only learn new words, but also the cultural knowledge and values that give those words meaning. One of the more understatedly radical things about the program might be its recognition that language and identity are linked.
The scale of the results so far is small, but the scale is important. Two three-year-olds graduated from Little Cherokee Seeds in December 2025. They had each spent about 3,000 hours immersed in Cherokee culture and language. After that point, kids ten, eleven, and twelve years old are learning words at home and repeating Cherokee phrases to babies without being asked. Also, families are eating in new ways. In just one year, traditional Cherokee foods have gone from being eaten in 19% of participating households to being eaten in 28% of participating households.
Lewis has also helped with studies that show learning an Indigenous language can lead to measurable improvements in mental health, such as a lower risk of suicide and alcohol abuse. It’s still not clear how these results will affect policy or funding, but it’s getting harder to ignore the link between language revitalization and community well-being. Reading through what this program has made, it seems like there are a lot more at stake than just learning new words.
The mission statement for Little Cherokee Seeds could not say it better than the t-shirts they made this year: “We are not making Cherokee speakers.” We’re making Cherokees.” That difference is more important than it seems at first. In this case, language is not a subject being taught. That’s the whole point.
