The Man Who Created a Written Language for the Cherokee Did It So Efficiently and Elegantly, His Peers Thought It Was Magic

At first they laughed. Then he scoffed. Eventually, they accused her of witchcraft. A Cherokee silversmith named Sequoyah had spent several years scratching strange marks on paper. In 1821, fed up with his obsession, his fellow tribesmen prosecuted him for black magic. Sequoyah insisted that his invention would allow Cherokee speakers to write the Iroquoian language for the first time. To test her claim, tribal elders ordered Sequoyah’s young daughter, Ayoka, into another room. Father and daughter made marks on separate papers and told their thinkers in each room what the marks said. Then documents were exchanged. When each was able to read each other’s messages out loud, suspicion turned to surprise.

The astonished elders immediately asked him to teach them his revolutionary transcription method. Within six months, one in four Cherokee, or Tsalagi, could read and write. Within a quarter century, the Cherokee people had achieved higher rates of literacy than the nation’s non-Native population.

This unprecedented development came after years of work by a man whose name means “pig’s foot”, perhaps a reference to his apparent lameness. Born in Tennessee in the 1770s to a Cherokee mother and a white father, Sequoyah was raised in his mother’s culture and did not read or write English. During the War of 1812, he served with American troops, sometimes using the English name George Guess. The experience probably exposed him to written language, or what he called “talking leaves”.

After the war, Sequoyah moved to Alabama and began experimenting with an ideographic approach to written Cherokee, in which each word was a symbol, but he abandoned it because it was cumbersome and too difficult to learn. Ultimately, he hit upon 86 letters that expressed specific sounds, each letter represented by symbols borrowed from Greek, Hebrew, and English. Later whittled down to 85 symbols, the Sequoyah syllabary was not just a creative triumph, but a new means of self-governance and cultural memory: By 1827, the Cherokee had a written constitution, and everything from hunting guidance to sacred chants could be recorded for posterity. Cherokee PhoenixThe first original newspaper in the United States, printed off the presses in 1828, using their symbols. Others followed.

This course was widely appreciated, as its phonetic accuracy and simplicity made it much easier to understand than English. In 1836 U.S. Treasury Secretary, diplomat, and linguist Albert Gallatin wrote, “The superiority of Gesse’s alphabet is obvious, and has been fully proven by experience.” “The boy learns in a few weeks what it took us two years to learn.” Yet sudden mass literacy did not curb the U.S. government’s growing appetite for the Cherokee homeland in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. Soon after Gallatin made his comments, the government forced thousands of Cherokee to relocate along the Trail of Tears to the area now known as Oklahoma.

Despite this tragedy, the Cherokee carried the course to their new home and perhaps even across the Atlantic. In Liberia, a Cherokee named Austin Curtis, who married into the indigenous Wi community, is said to have used the curriculum to produce a script for the Wi, which inspired written works throughout West Africa. Sequoyah himself moved to Mexico, where he died in 1843.

Today, only a few thousand Cherokee are fluent in the language of their ancestors, so the curriculum is an important tool for protecting Tsalagi culture. Teens use it to send messages to each other; Children’s books use it to convey traditional stories; And official documents and road signs communicate in the way Sequoyah invented – a reminder of how a single person’s talent and perseverance can change the world.