With Cherokee Country Songs Agalisiga ‘Chuj’ Mackey is Reviving Language and Culture

Singer/songwriter Agalisiga Mackey, or “Chuj” as he’s known, cuts quite the country figure. With his long hair tucked under a wide-brimmed hat, he’s strumming through three chords and the truth, voice cresting in a delicate yodel, as he covers Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” But there’s a catch: Mackey’s singing in Cherokee. 

Mackey, from Oklahoma, is the only artist writing and performing country music in the ancient Cherokee language, which is so endangered that only 2,000 native speakers remain. He didn’t grow up speaking Cherokee, but he’s dedicated his life to learning it, and teaches it to children in a language immersion school. He’s part of a vanguard of young Native musicians who are using songwriting to revitalize nearly lost Indigenous languages. 

On his debut album, Nasgino Inage Nidayulenvi (It Started In the Woods), out now on non-profit label Horton Records, Chuj’s original songs speak to traditional themes like the Cherokee reverence for nature, but also include murder ballads and love songs inspired by his love for country music. Chuj also covers Williams and Bob Dylan, the latter of which was a difficult task to translate since the Cherokee language doesn’t treat metaphor the same way as Dylan does. Chuj’s voice sounds old before its time, a soft twang cutting through it that could come from either the Cherokee language or his own Oklahoma accent. The songs are taken from his experiences growing up Cherokee, and his hopes for strengthening a language that few speak fluently. 

Agalisiga “Chuj” Mackey grew up in a family that loved country music, from Waylon and Willie on his mom’s side to Bob Wills and Hank Williams from his dad (though his dad played in metal bands). He listened to many genres of music, but never thought he’d be writing his own songs, let alone in Cherokee. Credit that to the vision of family friend and noted Tulsa Cherokee filmmaker/photographer Jeremy Charles. Inspired by how New Zealand’s Māori use songs and music videos to support the language, Charles got the idea to put together a compilation album with Cherokee singers singing in the Cherokee language. Prior to this, most music making for the Cherokee was done in English, aside from traditional or gospel songs. Charles produced the album, Anvdvnelisgi, and recruited the artists, including Chuj, for the project.

In 2021, Chuj’s mom was posting informal videos on Facebook of Chuj singing old country songs for her. “ It was during COVID, so we didn’t have anything going on,” Chuj remembers with a laugh. Charles asked Chuj to write an original song for the album, something he’d never done before.  ”He’s one of the youngest proficient speakers we have,” Charles says from his studio in Tulsa. “He really loves old country and old music traditions, which sticks out.”

Chuj grew up in the midst of a thriving traditional culture, rocked to sleep with Cherokee language lullabies as a baby and field recordings his father made of traditional songs. Of course, he wasn’t sheltered from the rest of the world, he grew up listening to rap, metal, soul, blues, as much as anything else, but the early influence of Cherokee traditional singing clearly embedded itself in his mind. He hails originally from the tiny town of Kenwood, Oklahoma, an hour East of Tulsa, smack dab in the middle of Cherokee Nation land. It’s a “reservation within a reservation,” as he says, part of the larger Cherokee Nation in Northeast Oklahoma, but also its own world. 

Chuj spent his first three years there before moving South to Tahlequah, where he now teaches. But he’d travel back to Kenwood a couple times a month to visit relatives. “You know, of course, there’s a lot of poverty and struggle,” he says. “There’s drugs and alcohol. It plagues a lot of our reservations. But through all that, there’s always this love for each other. And though everyone is struggling, the love is so strong within the community that everyone helps each other. No one really gets left behind.” 

Language informs Chuj’s music the most. As he gained skills, Chuj came to prefer writing songs in Cherokee, because it’s built for songwriting, he says. Entire sentences in English can be reworked as a single word in Cherokee.  ”Even though they’re really long words,” he says, “they fit with melodies… You can make things rhyme super easy.” 

Cherokee is a tonal language, so the same word can mean three different things depending on how you say it, but that also means that the way he speaks Cherokee has its own melody. Knowing country music also made songwriting easier, since the storytelling aspect of country songwriting made sense to Chuj, who grew up with Cherokee stories from his father and elders around campfires. Still, he had to acquire a taste for some early country like Jimmie Rodgers whose music he stumbled upon during the pandemic.

“At first I was like, ‘Man, this guy sucks! Why does he sing like that?” Chuj confesses with a laugh. “Then I started researching him and I started really listening to his words and his songs and the feelings that he put into those. I gained a much bigger respect for him and his music, and I really started to enjoy listening to his music.” The song “Gatlohiha” (“I’m Crying”) on Chuj’s album is his tribute to Rodgers. It’s an old-school, jilted lover murder ballad written in the style of a Blue Yodel. Like Rodgers, Chuj’s “Cherokee Yodel” is a serial, meaning he hopes to continue the sordid tale on the next album.

Country music’s rural aesthetic works well, too, in Cherokee. Traditional Cherokee language and culture is focused on the natural environment, on giving thanks, and paying homage to nature. “It’s hard to talk about modern things in Cherokee,” Chuj says, “because it’s one of those things that hasn’t grown yet. It’s still so a part of the natural world. All our songs, that’s all we pray to is nature. Whether it’s an animal or a plant, we have a dance for it if it really mattered to us.”

Chuj’s songs on Nasgino Inage Nidayulenvi (It Started In the Woods) speak of the close relationship between Cherokee traditional culture and the natural world. “Inagei Otsehi” tells of the simple things Cherokee do every day in nature, gathering crawdads, foraging, planting gardens, dancing, giving thanks to things. “Tsitsutsa Tsigesv” relates core memories from Chuj’s childhood, roaming around the wilds of Oklahoma. A personal song to him, it talks of the Cherokee connection to water, to each other, and to the seasons and how life changes with the seasons. “Usdi Yona”, which means “Little Bear”, is a song he wrote for his students that blends together a number of different Cherokee songs about bears. 

Chuj now teaches Cherokee language and practices in Tahlequah, at the Durbin Feeling Language Center, a huge state-of-the-art building on the grounds of a former casino. Chuj includes songs and dances, how to look for native medicines, how to make a mask, and ways to build a garden in his curriculum. “We’ll just do everything that we can to show these kids how to do things that our people used to do and should still do,” he says, of his dedication to keeping Cherokee culture alive.  ”I’ve seen how much they have grown and changed and how they treat not only the people around them and the things around them, but the way that they treat themselves. They have more respect for themselves and for each other. They’re more confident in themselves.”

One of the main reasons that the Cherokee language is so endangered is the haunting legacy of the boarding schools on the Cherokee. From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, the US government supported taking children out of Native populations and placed them in boarding schools to force assimilation to American culture and language. Although President Biden recently apologized for the grave harm the schools caused (nearly a thousand children died in the schools) their effects remain. 

Chuj has heard of elders who gave up speaking Cherokee after surviving the schools; in his own family, both grandparents on his mother’s side were fluent Cherokee speakers, but didn’t pass the language down due to generational trauma. “I really do think that that trauma carries through to today’s generations,” Chuj says. “That’s why we have to fight so hard to bring back our language and culture because for so long our elders were told that it’s wrong.” 

It wasn’t just boarding schools, the onslaught of Anglicized American culture over the years left many elder Cherokee feeling like the old ways had little worth. Part of Chuj’s drive is to show that the language can be a part of the world today. “ Contemporary music in the language or any form of art with the language,” he says, “it shows that the language is valuable, not just with culture or in the home, but it can be used anywhere. It can be used for anything.”

Chuj finds himself now full circle, living just near Kenwood where he grew up, in the town of Salina. Living close to aunties, uncles, and cousins. “Iit feels natural,” he says. “It feels very good to me, feeling rooted in a way.” He’s thinking too of the music of his own family. His great-grandfather was a Cherokee fiddler (family bands were big for Cherokee musicians, though the songs were in English).  ”I don’t know how true this is,” Chuj says, “but they were called the Cherokee Boys, and they opened for Bob Wills whenever he would play in Tulsa.” He inherited his great-great grandmother’s mandolin too, and wants to get it fixed up to play. 

Chuj’s been gratified by how his community received the album, too. “All these kids here [at the immersion school], they all know my songs and sing them in the hallways.  Songs are incredible at teaching anything, especially language.” Chuj hopes the album will inspire others to make music in Cherokee, or to make TV shows, podcasts, any kind of modern media in the language, and even that other endangered Native language speakers will do the same with their languages.