Kenny Wallace doesn’t have a lot of people to talk to in Choctaw.
But he does have a Bible app with a new translation of Scripture in the Indigenous language that his ancestors spoke. And it has an audio sync feature that allows him to listen to the words aloud, to hear how they sound.
“Sometimes, that’s the only Choctaw voice I ever hear,” Wallace told CT. “Not only is it feeding my soul, but 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 started the journey to reclaim his heritage in 2008, beginning with language. To know where he came from, he knew he wanted to understand Choctaw.
He started by getting an old Bible translated in the 1800s and learning words from it. But when Wallace, a teacher and worship pastor who lives in Canada, started interacting with other Choctaw speakers, he learned he’d picked up some peculiar vocabulary—old religious words, a little out of date.
Then he found a new version started by the Choctaw Bible Translation Committee. It came with an app, which had the audio sync feature that allowed him to listen to Scripture as his ancestors might have heard it.
“The app has been such a blessing for me,” he said. “Language is probably the largest carrier of culture.”
The Choctaw Bible translation project is still in progress. So far, portions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke have been translated, along with 2 Corinthians, the three epistles of John, and 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, and a classics professor at Cornell College in Iowa. “The hope is that Indigenous people will read … the Bible in their own language, which will revitalize the language.”
There are currently about 175 Indigenous languages spoken in the United States. But many are in danger of disappearing. Data from the US Census Bureau shows that while one in five Indigenous people over 65 speak an Indigenous language, only one in ten under the age of 17 do. Some experts predict that more than 80 percent of the languages will not have anyone who speaks them by the year 2050.
Today, there are fewer than 20 Indigenous languages that have more than 2,000 speakers. Choctaw, part of the Muskogean language family spoken by the people who lived in what is now the Southeastern US before European colonization, is one of them. There are roughly 10,000 Choctaw speakers today. And yet it is still considered endangered, because so few people learn it when they are children.
Preserving and reviving those languages is important 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 different way of hearing and thinking about Scripture,” said Hoklotubbe, a New Testament scholar who is Choctaw and is teaching himself the language.
Most Christians throughout history, the Bible scholar notes, have received Scripture in translation. Jesus most likely spoke Aramaic, while the Gospels were first written in Greek, so even in the original New Testament, Christians learned a “second-degree version of Jesus’ words,” according to Hoklotubbe.
This reality should inspire Christians to approach new translations with curiosity about what can 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 might stumble upon new meanings,” he said. “Any opportunity to have accessible material in our Indigenous languages, especially texts that have so much importance for Christians, is a wonderful opportunity.”
The modern translation of the Choctaw Bible has been in progress for more 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 their 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 they had, even though 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 lot 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 aims to have a digital version of the New Testament finished in 2027, with a printed version out the following year. This year, they got funding for three full-time and one part-time Choctaw translators. There are also a number 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 year. It is the 1,300th 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 discovery that his great-grandmother was Choctaw, according to her birth certificate. He saw a copy of the 1800s Bible in the Choctaw Nation museum in Tuskahoma, Oklahoma, and threw himself into the digitization project.
“I’m really passionate about getting God’s Word into people’s heart language,” Belyeu said. “We celebrate every new language that is added.”
Kenny Wallace knows the difference it can make—especially when your “heart language” is not the language you grew up speaking but a lost piece of heritage that can be recovered by reading the Bible in Choctaw.
“It allows me to reconnect with my history [and] with God’s Word in ways that were really stolen from me and my family,” Wallace said.
