By Cara Cowan Watts, Cherokee411.com
Tom Belt Continues Decades of Language Preservation Work
CULLOWHEE, N.C. Dr. Thomas “Tom” Belt, a Cherokee Nation citizen and one of the most prominent figures in Cherokee language revitalization, has co-authored a new scholarly book examining how the Cherokee language reshaped the Bible during 19th century missionary translation work, adding to a career spent teaching, preserving and advocating for the Cherokee language at the university level.
Belt and Wake Forest University anthropology professor Margaret Bender published “The New Voice of God: Language, Worldview, and the Cherokee Bible” through the University of Oklahoma Press in July 2025. The book focuses on three books of the Cherokee Bible, Genesis, John and Matthew, and examines how Cherokee’s grammar and pronoun structure reshaped Christian texts translated into the language during the 19th century. The authors presented the book at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, North Carolina, on Feb. 28.
Belt was raised in a Cherokee-speaking family in the Rocky Ford community in Oklahoma. He moved to the Qualla Boundary, the land of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina, in the early 1990s, where he first taught at Cherokee Central Schools. He remains a Cherokee Nation citizen while living and working among the Eastern Band community.
In 2005, Belt founded and coordinated the Cherokee Language Program at Western Carolina University, teaching undergraduate language and grammar courses until his retirement in 2018. Western Carolina University awarded him an honorary doctorate that year in recognition of his work developing curricula and preparing multiple generations of students to read, speak and teach the Cherokee language.
Belt has worked with the Smithsonian Institution and the American Philosophical Society to develop protocols for handling culturally sensitive Cherokee archival materials, and has led workshops on Indigenous languages and Cherokee worldview at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Stanford, Yale, Duke and Wake Forest. He was also interviewed for the documentary “First Language: The Race to Save Cherokee” and featured in PBS’s “Osiyo, Voices of the Cherokee People.”
Belt continues to work on the Eastern Cherokee Histories in Translation project, a collaborative effort with Cherokee Language Program director Sara Snyder Hopkins, Cherokee Studies graduate student Barnes Powell and the late Wiggins “Inoli” Blackfox to translate two collections of 19th and early 20th century Cherokee-language documents: the Inoli Letters, written by Blackfox’s great-great-grandfather between 1848 and 1888, and the personal journals of Cherokee cultural historian Will West Long. The project has drawn support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Heisse Historical Preservation Fund and the Cherokee Preservation Foundation. Belt has described the difficulty of the work, noting that some Cherokee words require far more English text to convey their full meaning, and has said the stakes go beyond linguistics to preserving what he calls “applied wisdom” built up over thousands of years of Cherokee observation of the world.
Belt’s work extends beyond formal academic settings into recorded cultural teachings. In “Water is Life: The Healing Powers of Water in Cherokee Culture,” a short video produced by Western Carolina University’s Mountain Heritage Center, Belt discusses water as a source of healing within the Cherokee community. The video, shot by Sara Stanley in the spring of 2022 and released in June 2023, is part of the Mountain Heritage Center’s broader effort to document Cherokee cultural knowledge on film alongside Belt’s classroom and scholarly work.
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Sources:
- Western Carolina University honors Thomas Belt with honorary doctorate — Cherokee Phoenix
- Margaret Bender & Tom Belt present The New Voice of God — City Lights Bookstore
- WCU faculty assist with award-winning Cherokee language documentary — Mountain Xpress
- Preservation of an endangered language — Western Carolina University (Photo Source)
- Water is Life: The Healing Powers of Water in Cherokee Culture — Mountain Heritage Center, YouTube
