Sequoyah

Linguist

• Born: c. 1770
• Birthplace: Taskigi, near Fort Loudon (now in Tennessee)
• Died: August 1, 1843
• Place of death: Near San Fernando, Tamaulipas, Mexico

Native American scholar

Sequoyah single-handedly devised a Cherokee syllabary that allowed his tribal nation to become literate in their own indigenous language—a first for American Indian cultures located north of the advanced pre-Columbian civilizations of Mexico and Central America.

Area of achievement Linguistics

Early Life

Solid factual information on the life of Sequoyah (seh-KWOY-ah) is sparse, and some anecdotes tend toward myth making. There is uncertainty about both the date of his birth and the time and circumstances of his death. Various sources also render his American Indian name as Sikwaji, Siwayi, or Sogwili, meaning “sparrow” or “principal bird.” Furthermore, his Euro-American name is cited as George Gist, Guess, or Guest. However, standard accounts generally adhere to the following sketch of Sequoyah’s early life and later accomplishments.

Sequoyah was born in a Cherokee village on the Tennessee River in what became Tennessee. The original Cherokee homeland was a large and scenic mountainous region encompassing northern Georgia, southern Tennessee, northern Alabama, and corners of the Carolinas. Most sources assert that his father was a white trader named Nathanial Gist who deserted Sequoyah’s mother, Wurteh, a full-blooded Cherokee. The youngster and his mother moved to near Williston, Alabama, when he was twelve years old. Later he pursued various occupations or trades, working as a farmer, a blacksmith, a silversmith, a hunter, and a fur trader. Moreover, he also displayed considerable artistic talent in sketching animals and nature scenes.

Along with other Cherokee volunteers, Sequoyah served for several months during 1813 and 1814 under the command of General Andrew Jackson in a war against a rebellious faction of Muskogee Creek traditionalists. In 1815, he married a woman known as Sally, the first of five wives. Sometime before this period, his name began to appear in documentary sources as George Guess, probably a misspelling of Gist. In spite of his mixed heritage and assumed name, he neither spoke nor read English, having grown up in a traditional Cherokee community with no formal education. In 1818, Sequoyah moved westward with a group of over two hundred Cherokees who settled in northwestern Arkansas. About one thousand of their countrymen had preceded them to the area a few years earlier. These groups, known as the Western Cherokees or Old Settlers, increased in numbers and later moved into adjacent areas of present-day Texas and Oklahoma.

Life’s Work

Sequoyah is internationally acclaimed as a Native American genius who succeeded in creating a system of writing for Cherokee speakers. Work on this great task began almost one decade before his westward migration. Contact with white people and observation of their customs led to his fascination with the uses of writing. The letters and notes that he saw white people using (“the talking leaves”) represented an advanced means of communication with such obvious advantages as transmission of knowledge and information over long distances. Convinced that he could produce a written Cherokee language, he threw himself into what would become a twelve-year obsession. Another contributing factor may have been a hunting accident or war wound that left him lame in one leg. Forced to assume a less active lifestyle, the former hunter and warrior now devoted nearly all of his time and energy to the ambitious project.

At first scratching symbols on bark and wood and later using pen, ink, and paper, Sequoyah experimented by trial and error with various methods of developing a script. His initial efforts centered on using symbols or pictures for every word in the language. After creating about two thousand characters, he rejected this approach as too cumbersome and difficult to memorize. Following other futile attempts, he finally seized on the idea of breaking up words into the various syllables or sounds that formed them. This involved the rigorous and patient task of identifying all sounds used in Cherokee speech, then assigning a symbol to each. Because certain sounds or syllables in one word are repeated in many others, the number of required characters was greatly reduced. Constant refinement eventually lessened the number of symbols in his emerging syllabary to eighty-six. Sequoyah created some of these characters himself. Others were Greek and Roman letters copied at random from written materials that he could not understand.

Sequoyah faced ridicule from some Cherokees who viewed his obsession as a foolish waste of time and violent opposition from others who linked it with sorcery. In 1821, after having taught his system to a daughter and a few family friends, he temporarily returned to the East, where he put finishing touches to his work and met with the Cherokee National Council, which officially approved the new syllabary.

The simple and ingenuous nature of this remarkable discovery was soon evident. This syllabary of sounds was different from an alphabet of letters used in spelling words. Although it contained many more characters than the twenty-six-letter English alphabet, the syllabary could rapidly be mastered. By memorizing the eighty-six characters for every sound in their native speech, Cherokees could become literate within days or weeks. In contrast, it took three to four years for Cherokee pupils to learn to read and write English in the schools established by missionaries. Furthermore, with a completely phonetic system, spelling was not a problem. Soon thousands mastered the syllabary without the use of schools or textbooks. In a few years, nearly all members of this Native American tribal nation were literate in their own language.

The Cherokee national leadership, which was struggling to retain possession of the homeland in the face of increasing pressure by avaricious local white settlers to dispossess the tribe, took advantage of this transformation to mass literacy. Tribal leaders who adopted a constitution and legal system similar to that of the United States believed that by appropriating many features of the dominant Euro-American culture, the Cherokees would be accorded the right to remain on their lands. The nation soon acquired a printing press with type set in the new Cherokee script. Publications included Christian literature and a tribal newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix. Cherokee laws were codified, legislative acts were printed, and business transactions were recorded in ledger books. Literacy also bound the eastern and western Cherokees closer together.

Sequoyah’s accomplishments were not limited to his miraculous syllabary. He is also credited with creating a new Cherokee numbering system. Heretofore, the Cherokees had used “mental” numbers up to one hundred without means of adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing. The new process provided for nearly infinite totals and employed signs and formulas for calculating.

Now a prominent figure among the Cherokees, Sequoyah returned to Arkansas in late 1822 and served as diplomat and mediator. In 1827, he accompanied a delegation of Western Cherokees to Washington, D.C., for the purpose of securing their land, personal property, and treaty rights from the illegal activities of white settlers. The result was the 1828 treaty that exchanged Cherokee holdings in Arkansas for new lands a little farther west. Thereafter, Sequoyah resided in the Indian Territory. His cabin was located near Salisaw in what is now Sequoyah County of eastern Oklahoma.

The spring of 1839 witnessed the traumatic arrival of more than thirteen thousand eastern Cherokees. The newcomers were victims of a controversial removal policy that forced over seventy thousand Native Americans of the “Five Civilized Tribes” (Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles) from their sacred homelands in the South. The genocidal Cherokee experience, known as the Trail of Tears, cost about four thousand lives. Outnumbered two to one, the Old Settlers did not wish to relinquish any governing control to the eastern faction.

Especially dangerous was the intense ill feeling between the newcomers and a small group that had arrived around 1836 after signing a controversial removal treaty with the United States in defiance of the legitimate Cherokee government and 90 percent of their countrymen. Sequoyah took a more flexible position in opposition to that of many other Western Cherokees and assisted in obtaining a unified Cherokee government in the summer of 1839. At this same time, he also persuaded about fifteen hundred Cherokee refugees from Texas, survivors of a murderous assault by a Texan military unit, to forego revenge and settle permanently with their countrymen in Indian Territory.

Sequoyah’s intellectually curious nature persisted into old age. In 1842, he left on an expedition to trace the location of a mysterious group of Cherokees who were believed to have migrated to the Southwest around the time of the Revolutionary War. He was never heard from again. In 1845, a party sent to look for him reported that Sequoyah had died in August, 1843, and was buried near the village of San Fernando in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The account, however, remained unconfirmed, and his body was never found.

Because of his international fame, Sequoyah received various honors during his lifetime and after his death. In 1841, the Cherokee National Council awarded him a silver medallion and granted him a small life pension. In 1911, the state of Oklahoma had the famous Cherokee’s statue placed in Statuary Hall of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Finally, the species of towering giant redwood trees along the northern California coast is named Sequoia in his honor.

Significance

If the story of Sequoyah is accurate, he stands alone as the only person in world history to single-handedly create a complete alphabet, a process that took other cultures, including the white races, centuries to develop in a collaborative effort. It should also be noted that Cherokee is one of the most complex Native American languages. For this reason, the Moravians and other missionary groups failed in earlier attempts to create a Cherokee alphabet. Although the astounding and difficult nature of this breakthrough by an uneducated individual has prompted some to doubt the truth of his discovery, no one has disproved it.

The scarcity of solid sources on this interesting American Indian intellectual, as well as the political-ideological bias of his biographers, has contributed to widely differing interpretations and speculation about his role and significance. Sequoyah is a cultural hero to both Caucasians and his own people. White supporters of past government policies to assimilate tribal people proclaim his great accomplishment as that of uplifting a tribal nation to the Euro-American level of civilization.

On the other hand, Cherokees used the syllabary to record and thereby preserve many ancient tribal traditions and rites that the U.S. government policy sought to eradicate in the name of civilization and progress. These include medical lore, healing ceremonies, ball games, and the use of magic. Regardless of differing interpretations, many agree that Sequoyah’s remarkable creation aided the beleaguered Cherokee people by stimulating national pride and providing another means to fight injustice, and later to rebound from defeat, during this difficult period of their history.

Bibliography

Bird, Traveler. Tell Them They Lie: The Sequoyah Myth. Los Angeles: Westernlore, 1971. This revisionist account is by a descendent of Sequoyah who argues that a Cherokee alphabet predated Sequoyah. The book depicts him as representative of an old tradition of warrior-scribes, a fiery traditionalist, and resistance leader against U.S. cultural imperialism rather than one who sought to facilitate assimilation.

Foreman, Grant. Sequoyah. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1938. Foreman’s book is regarded by some as the standard biography of this creative and famous Cherokee. It relies heavily on archival records and descriptive views of individuals who encountered Sequoyah.

Foster, George E. Se-quo-yah: The American Cadmus and Modern Moses. 1885. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1979. This is a classic example of the late nineteenth century assimilationist outlook of Christian reformers who influenced federal American Indian policy. Foster glorifies Sequoyah as the great educator of his nation who led the Cherokees to the promised land of U.S. civilization.

Hoig, Stan. Sequoyah: The Cherokee Genius. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1995. Comprehensive biography of Sequoyah.

Kilpatrick, Jack F. Sequoyah: Of Earth and Intellect. Austin, Tex.: Encino Press, 1965. The author, a Cherokee whose wife is a descendent of Sequoyah, presents a fairly standard account of his subject’s impressive life and accomplishments. The book employs a few documentary sources not found in Foreman’s book.

Waters, Frank. Brave Are My People: Indian Heroes Not Forgotten. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Clear Light Publishers, 1993. Contains a brief biographical sketch of Sequoyah based on secondary sources that provides a standard heroic treatment of the subject.

Woodward, Grace Steele. The Cherokees. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. Woodward focuses largely on the early nineteenth century period during which Sequoyah was an active force in Cherokee history. The book is useful for grasping the relevant background events, but the interesting and readable narrative account sometimes becomes polemical in its advocacy of the Cherokee national cause.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Nineteenth Century

February 21, 1828: Cherokee Phoenix Begins Publication; 1830-1842: Trail of Tears; May 28, 1830: Congress Passes Indian Removal Act; March 18, 1831, and March 3, 1832: Cherokee Cases.