Sequoyah (also written ᏍᏏᏉᏯ Ssiquoya, or in English George Guess, c. 1770–1843) developed a fully functional writing system without first being literate in another language. Nineteenth-century commentators disputed that account, but the syllabary and its adoption by Cherokee communities are well documented.
Sequoyah was a silversmith and disabled veteran of the Cherokee Regiment under Andrew Jackson in the Creek War. He spoke no English and had had no formal schooling. But he had seen English-speaking soldiers reading and writing letters during the war — what the Cherokee called "talking leaves", and he became convinced that this was not magic but a technology, and that his own people deserved it too.
From around 1809 he worked obsessively on the problem. His first attempt was logographic — one symbol per word — and he reportedly drew over a thousand symbols before realising the system would be unlearnable. His wife is said to have burned his work in frustration at one point. He started again.
The breakthrough was the realisation that Cherokee, like Japanese, has a fairly small inventory of distinct syllables — about 85. A syllabary, not an alphabet, was the natural fit. He assigned one symbol to each syllable. For inspiration he drew on Latin, Greek and Cyrillic letterforms (which he could not read) plus original shapes, treating each as a meaningless visual token to be matched to a Cherokee sound. The result has letters that look familiar but mean nothing of what their European counterparts mean:
- D in Cherokee is a
- R in Cherokee is e
- T in Cherokee is i
- L in Cherokee is tle
- Ꮳ looks Greek but is the Cherokee syllable tsa
In 1821 he demonstrated the system, famously, by separating his six-year-old daughter Ayoka from the audience and having her transcribe and then read back messages dictated to him. The Cherokee Nation Council was unconvinced this was anything but a trick — until they tested it themselves and found that adults could become functionally literate in days, not years.
What happened next is unprecedented in the history of literacy. The Cherokee Nation adopted the syllabary by official decree in 1825. By 1828 they had begun publishing Tsalagi Tsulehisanvhi / Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper, printed bilingually in Cherokee and English on a custom-cast syllabary type. Within roughly ten years of Sequoyah's 1821 demonstration, contemporary observers — including American missionaries — estimated that Cherokee literacy in their own script exceeded the literacy rate of surrounding white settlers in English.
"The tribes watched the youths for several months with anxiety; and when they offered themselves for examination, the feelings of all were wrought up to the highest pitch." — Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, Lectures on American Literature, 1829
The triumph was followed by tragedy. In 1838–1839, despite the Cherokee Nation's literate, constitutional, newspaper-publishing modern state, President Martin Van Buren's administration — executing the removal treaty Andrew Jackson had secured — forced them westward on the Trail of Tears; an estimated 4,000 of 16,000 Cherokee died. The syllabary went with them. Sequoyah himself died in 1843 in Mexico, searching for a rumoured separated band of Cherokee.
Today the Cherokee syllabary is taught in immersion schools in Tahlequah, Oklahoma and Cherokee, North Carolina. It is in Unicode (U+13A0–U+13FF), supported by Apple and Google operating systems, and has been used to write everything from translations of the Bible to modern social-media posts. The California coast redwood Sequoia sempervirens is traditionally said to be named after him, though how Endlicher arrived at the name in 1847 is still argued over. The man could not read. He gave a nation a script.