The community of Native language linguists and speakers is saddened to learn of the death of the pre-eminent Cherokee linguist, Durbin Feeling, who died August 19, 2020 at age 74.
Durbin was one of the last remaining Cherokee speakers who spoke the language as his mother tongue, learning English when he went to school.
Durbin earned an Associate of Arts at Bacone College in Muskogee, OK in 1966. From 1968 to 1970 he served in Viet Nam as a helicopter machine gunner, earning several combat honors, including the Purple Heart. During his service time, he wrote letters home to his mother written in the Cherokee syllabary. In 1979 he earned a BA in Journalism at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah.
During this time, Durbin worked with linguist William Pulte to produce two of the most useful and influential Cherokee linguistic tools, the Cherokee English Dictionary and An Outline of Cherokee Grammar, published together as a single volume in 1975. He began graduate work at UC Irvine in 1988, serving as an instructor at the Cherokee Institute, and earning his MA in Linguistics in 1992.
In 1992 Durbin began work as a tribal linguist for Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. At the same time, he served as an adjunct professor of Cherokee at the University of Tulsa.
In 1999 Durbin was an Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern State. He taught the Cherokee language at the University of Oklahoma for several years before returning to consult for Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
In 2004, Durbin was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by The Ohio State University.
Durbin was given many honors by Cherokee Nation. In 2011, he was named a Cherokee National Treasure. The Nation also honored him by naming their language preservation bill and their language center after him.
Besides his influential dictionary and grammar, Durbin also published A Handbook of the Cherokee Verb in 2003 with Craig Kopris, Jordan Lachler, and Charles van Tuyl. in 2018, he published Cherokee Narratives with former collaborator William Pulte and son Gregory Pulte. This book represents a decades-long ambition: to provide morpheme-level glossing and tone marking on original Cherokee texts. He served as a language consultant for many linguistics papers and data bases.
Durbin had more collaborators than can be accurately named, since he was often the anchor of both academic and community Cherokee language projects. Some of his NSF/DEL collaborators were Marcia Haag and Keith Johnson (Cherokee language sound description and analysis) and Dylan Herrick, Tracy Hirata-Eddy, Lizette Peter, Marcellino Berardo, and Brad Montgomery-Anderson (Documenting Cherokee tone and vowel length). He was also a member of the VW Foundation-sponsored Prosody of the Wider World workshop in 2012 and of the working group "ToPIQQ: Tonal Placement – Interaction of Qualitative and Quantitative factors.”
Other collaborators were Hiroto Uchihara, Chris Koops, Wyman Kirk, and Ryan Mackey.
Durbin was always immersed in developing technology that would help speakers and students gain access to the syllabary. He was instrumental in getting the syllabary onto word processor keyboards and developing a unicode for it.
Durbin was on the first Board of Directors of the Endangered Language Fund, where he served as a proposal reviewer for many years.
Apart from his importance to Cherokee language and linguistics, Durbin was a kind and respectful man, always wishing to minimize credit to himself and always saying yes to demands for his time and expertise. He cannot be replaced.
Submitted by Marcia Haag