Ed Fields and Mary Rae are co-authors of Journeying Into Cherokee: Help and Encouragement for Learning the Cherokee Language.
ED FIELDS
Ed Fields is a native Cherokee speaker who has taught the Cherokee language for over 23 years. His online classes have reached students all over the United States as well as countries as far away as England, Serbia, Italy, Norway, China, France, New Zealand, Belgium and Germany. In 2010 he was named a Cherokee National Treasure for his contributions to the language. Ed has been interviewed by the Cherokee Phoenix and was also featured in an OsiyoTV segment, Shade Tree Stories. He is a member of the Cherokee Nation Medicine Keepers, a small group which works to preserve traditional knowledge of plants and medicine. In 2022 Ed was a guest speaker for U.C. Berkeley. He was also named as project leader of a new archive at Northeastern State University, The Ed Fields Digital Cherokee Archive. In addition, Ed was selected to receive the Cherokee Phoenix’s Seven Feathers Award for language.
MARY RAE
Mary Rae was born in Washington D.C. and grew up in Virginia. She graduated cum laude from Boston University with a B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature. In 2014 she began taking Ed Fields’ online Cherokee classes and has been studying ever since. In 2018 she passed the Cherokee Nation’s proficiency test and, in 2019, she received her teacher certification from Cherokee Nation. Mary has created language curriculum for DAILP, the Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence, and maintains a youtube cannel, Tsalagi Elohi Igvnadena, dedicated to songs sung in Cherokee.