Kenny Wallace doesn’t have a number of people to discuss with in Choctaw.
But he does have a Bible app with a recent translation of Scripture within the Indigenous language that his ancestors spoke. And it has an audio sync feature that enables him to hearken to the words aloud, to listen to how they sound.
“Sometimes, that’s the one Choctaw voice I ever hear,” Wallace told CT. “Not only is it feeding my soul, however it’s actually feeding me culturally as well.”
Wallace, an African American Choctaw Pawnee, said his family was cut off from their Indigenous heritage by racism and geographic distance. He officially began the journey to reclaim his heritage in 2008, starting with language. To know where he got here from, he knew he wanted to grasp Choctaw.
He began by getting an old Bible translated within the 1800s and learning words from it. But when Wallace, a teacher and worship pastor who lives in Canada, began interacting with other Choctaw speakers, he learned he’d picked up some peculiar vocabulary—old religious words, somewhat old-fashioned.
Then he found a new edition began by the Choctaw Bible Translation Committee. It got here with an app, which had the audio sync feature that allowed him to hearken to Scripture as his ancestors may need heard it.
“The app has been such a blessing for me,” he said. “Language might be the most important carrier of culture.”
The Choctaw Bible translation project continues to be in progress. So far, portions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke have been translated, together with 2 Corinthians, the three epistles of John, and just a few of the shorter Old Testament books, including Amos and Jonah.
“The heart of a culture is in its language,” said T. Christopher Hoklotubbe, director of graduate studies at NAIITS, an Indigenous seminary. “The hope is that Indigenous people will read … the Bible in their very own language, which is able to revitalize the language.”
There are currently about 175 Indigenous languages spoken within the United States. But many are at risk of disappearing. Data from the US Census Bureau shows that while one in five Indigenous people over 65 speak an Indigenous language, just one in ten under the age of 17 do. Some experts predict that greater than 80 percent of the languages won’t have anyone who speaks them by the yr 2050.
Today, there are lower than 20 Indigenous languages which have greater than 2,000 speakers. Choctaw, a part of the Muskogean language family spoken by the individuals who lived in what’s now the Southeastern US before European colonization, is considered one of them. There are roughly 10,000 Choctaw speakers today. And yet it continues to be considered endangered, because so few people learn it once they are children.
Preserving and reviving those languages is significant to many Indigenous people. For Christians like Wallace and Hoklotubbe, there’s a spiritual aspect to it too.
A Bible in an Indigenous language provides Christians “a unique way of hearing and excited about Scripture,” said Hoklotubbe, a New Testament scholar who’s Choctaw and is teaching himself the language.
Most Christians throughout history, the Bible scholar notes, have received Scripture in translation. Jesus more than likely spoke Aramaic, while the Gospels were first written in Greek, so even in the unique New Testament, Christians learned a “second-degree version of Jesus’ words,” in keeping with Hoklotubbe.
This reality should encourage Christians to approach recent translations with curiosity about what will be learned, Hoklotubbe said, trusting that God will fill in any gaps.
“By translating biblical texts into modern Indigenous languages and sitting with the nuances of Indigenous words, we would bump into recent meanings,” he said. “Any opportunity to have accessible material in our Indigenous languages, especially texts which have a lot importance for Christians, is an excellent opportunity.”
The modern translation of the Choctaw Bible has been in progress for greater than 20 years. The committee was formed in 1998 in response to a call from Choctaw churches.
“Pastors had a passion for the youth, for his or her faith and growing and knowing Jesus,” said Laura Christel Lavallee Horlings, committee program coordinator with Wycliffe Bible Translators. “But they realized the youth didn’t understand the Choctaw version of the Bible that that they had, although the language they understood best was Choctaw.”
The committee’s first goal was to translate the passages and stories specifically requested by pastors. Some early translations included the Christmas stories from Luke and John 1:1, which says, “Áyokcha̱ya anno̱pa yat ammóna aki̱li ka̱ a̱ttattók. Mako̱ oklah í haha̱klot hicha hapi nishkin a̱ isht oklah í pihi̱sa hicha hapibbak isht oklah í potoho̱littók mak ókih.Áyokcha̱ya anno̱pa yappak isht imma oklah í hachim anólih ókih.”
The app, with the audio feature, has gotten a number of positive responses, Lavallee said. It’s very useful for people learning the language. One woman told her, “I’m going to be listening to this until I can read it for myself.”
Translation is slow work, though. The committee goals to have a digital version of the New Testament finished in 2027, with a printed version out the next yr. This yr, they got funding for 3 full-time and one part-time Choctaw translators. There are also plenty of volunteers from Choctaw churches working on the project.
In the meantime, others are making the 1800s Choctaw Bible, originally published by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, available online. YouVersion, a ministry of Life.Church in Oklahoma, added the Choctaw version of Scripture to its popular Bible app this yr. It is the 1,three hundredth language available on the YouVersion Bible App.
Bradley Belyeu, who worked on the project for Life.Church, told the Choctaw Nation newspaper that he was motivated by the invention that his great-grandmother was Choctaw, in keeping with her birth certificate. He saw a replica of the 1800s Bible within the Choctaw Nation museum in Tuskahoma, Oklahoma, and threw himself into the digitization project.
“I’m really obsessed with getting God’s Word into people’s heart language,” Belyeu said. “We rejoice every recent language that’s added.”
Kenny Wallace knows the difference it could actually make—especially when your “heart language” just isn’t the language you grew up speaking but a lost piece of heritage that will be recovered by reading the Bible in Choctaw.
“It allows me to reconnect with my history [and] with God’s Word in ways in which were really stolen from me and my family,” Wallace said.
