Joseph Erb, a Cherokee animator and educator, has played a significant role in promoting Indigenous storytelling and language preservation through both art and technology. Erb is known for directing the first animation in the Cherokee language, “The Beginning They Told,” which features characters such as Grandpa Beaver, Little Water Beetle, and the Great Buzzard Su Li as they create the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains. Reflecting on his career path, Erb said, “I wanted to go home and teach my community how to tell stories through animation.”
After earning a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, Erb returned to Oklahoma in 2002 to teach animation and video production to Cherokee and Muscogee Creek students. With limited resources, he initially taught stop motion animation. “As a result of that, everyone started sharing Cherokee stories with each other,” Erb said.
In the late 2000s, Erb led efforts to include the Cherokee language on major technology platforms. He organized meetings between technology company leaders and Cherokee community members, resulting in the Cherokee language being included in Apple’s iOS 4.1 release in 2010. “Then Google contacted us, and we started adding our language to the Google search engine and Gmail. And then Microsoft invited us back and we got on Windows 8 and Windows 10,” Erb said. Community volunteers contributed thousands of hours to complete over a million translations.
Erb has also supported other Indigenous nations, such as the Osage, in similar language technology projects. Beyond technology, he is an accomplished artist whose work includes children’s book illustrations and copper sculptures. One of his notable pieces, “Indigenous Brilliance,” is displayed at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma, which honored him with a “Creative Native” award in 2022.
In 2022, Erb joined the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) as an associate professor in the film and digital media department. His work at UCSC focuses on intersectional approaches to filmmaking and emphasizes the contemporary relevance of Indigenous cultures. John Brown Childs, a distinguished emeritus professor at UCSC, described Erb as “a model for positive interaction” and noted his contributions to language revitalization efforts for other tribes.
Celine Parreñas Shimizu, former Dean of the Arts at UCSC, highlighted Erb’s commitment to serving his community through scholarship. “He said, ‘I don’t do my research for myself. I do it for the Cherokee people.’”
UCSC has become a center for language and artificial intelligence research. Matthew Wagers, professor and chair of the linguistics department, is leading a cross-campus initiative to promote diversity in language technology. The project aims to address biases in AI language models by ensuring they reflect California’s multilingual population. Wagers said, “There are opportunities to improve language technologies to address the needs of people who speak or communicate differently, such as people who stutter, or language users who are blind.”
Wagers pointed to Erb’s work integrating Cherokee into digital platforms as an example of increasing access. The Cherokee writing system’s complexity posed challenges for digital adaptation. “It couldn’t take up the whole screen and we had to follow Apple’s philosophy about design without quite knowing what that was,” Erb said. He added that developing voice-to-text technology for Cherokee remains a future goal due to its tonal nature.
Looking back on his career, Erb noted progress in both technology and recognition. “Our language is still in decline, but we have more tools than we used to when I started,” he said. He emphasized the importance of making it possible for community members to create stories using their own language: “Today, our filmmakers and bookmakers and writers can type in our language. It ultimately preserves the inherent, important knowledge therein.”
