Last month, I had the good fortune to go to Tahlequah, Okla., and thank Anna in person for putting my English words into Cherokee.

Anna has long black hair that flows down her back and an easy smile. She speaks English with an Oklahoma accent, and here and there you can hear the soft lilt of Cherokee, her mother tongue.

For the past decade or so she has taught Cherokee to adults and children and she maintains a column in Cherokee for the Phoenix, the Cherokee newspaper founded in 1828.

Anna works in a prison. Let me clarify that. Its thick brick walls and barred windows no longer keep the outlaws under lock and key, for the building is now a historical site. To get to Anna's desk, you have to go through heavy cell doors. One of the doors is all metal with a slit in it. "For solitary confinement," says Anna laughing.

Later, she tells me, "One of my ancestors was the sheriff in Tahlequah in the 1800s. Samuel Sixkiller was his name. Recently, I went to the local university and read the reports he wrote in Cherokee." Imagine that, his great-great-granddaughter able to read the Cherokee symbols he wrote and understand the language!

There is a lot hidden in what she has just said: the Trail of Tears in the 1830s, when the Cherokee were forced west, the reservation schools, the rules against speaking Cherokee in class.

Anna is up at the university a lot these days. She is working on getting a degree. Her goal: to write a Cherokee dictionary — not a translation dictionary but a Cherokee Webster's.

We talk animatedly about this idea of hers. A lifetime project, but worth every minute of it, for when the old people go, there goes the understanding it takes to write definitions in Cherokee and find synonyms.

The Cherokee language is much healthier than Hawaiian is. There are some 60,000 native speakers, while Hawaiian has only a few thousand at most. But there is one thing that the Hawaiians have over the Cherokee: a fully developed system of immersion schools.

Anna drives me out to the Cherokee immersion school. It's an ultramodern facility with gleaming hallways. Up ahead is a warning: No English! Suddenly I am ushered into a room of teachers and children, and my ears are treated to the music of Cherokee: "Osiyo (aloha), Osiyo, Tsi-mi (James)."

But the immersion school is only a preschool for now. There are no certified Cherokee-speaking teachers for grades K-12. "We're working on solving this problem," Peggy, a gifted teacher (without a certificate yet) tells me in English when the children are outside playing. "All of us here are taking classes at the university. We all believe in what we are doing."

Then she and Anna tell me how the Hawaiian immersion schoolteachers came to Oklahoma to share their experiences and help the Cherokee set up a rigorous program.

"Some of the Cherokee staff went to Hawai'i last year to visit the immersion schools there," Anna tells me later in the car. "But next year in May will be my turn to go to Hawai'i."

Then she adds, "There's so much to learn. ... It will be my first plane flight."

We laugh good-naturedly about that, and I think how that plane flight is a symbol of Anna's life. She once was a healthcare worker. She used to make baskets and was so good at her craft that she was named a national treasure by the former chief, Wilma Mankiller. But now at age 59, Anna is soaring even higher, exploring new worlds, making herself grow. Instead of weaving honeysuckle and hickory, she is weaving words for her people.

I turn to look out the car window and notice the street signs in Cherokee letters. We're back at the "prison." We say goodbye.

"Aloha," I say. "A hui hou. See you in May."