Sequoyah

Sequoyah (ca. 1770–1843), Cherokee leader, inventor of the Cherokee syllabary. Sequoyah, also known as George Guess (or Gist), was born in the Cherokee Nation in Tennessee to an English father and a Cherokee mother. He later lived in the Cherokee country in Georgia. A hunter, fur trader, warrior, and silversmith Sequoyah around 1809 began work on a Cherokee alphabet. He recognized that a written language enabled Euro‐Americans to preserve and communicate information over great distances and believed that it would provide the Cherokees with the same capabilities and instill in them a renewed sense of power and self‐expression. After considerable effort, Sequoyah concluded that a Cherokee alphabet would require over a thousand pictographs and be extremely difficult to learn. He then shifted his efforts to devising a syllabary, a system in which the syllables of a spoken language are represented by phonetic symbols. After over a decade of work, Sequoyah settled on a syllabary of eighty‐six characters. In 1821, he demonstrated his invention before the Cherokee national council by exchanging written messages with his young daughter.

Within a few years, most Cherokees had become literate in their own language. The Cherokees recorded their laws and constitution and translated the Bible and numerous other works into Cherokee. In 1828, the Cherokees began publishing a weekly newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix and Indian Advocate, in both Cherokee and English. (Sequoyah himself never learned English.) Sequoyah later supplemented the syllabary with a Cherokee numerical system. Because of his invention, Sequoyah became an influential leader and diplomat for the Cherokee nation. He accompanied his people on their forced removal to the trans‐Mississippi West in 1838.
See also Cherokee Cases; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Indian Removal Act; Literacy.

Bibliography

Jack F. Kilpatrick and Anna Gritts Kilpatrick, eds., New Echota Letters, 1968.
Grant Forman , Sequoyah, 1938; 7th printing, Civilization of the American Indian series, vol. 16, 1984.

Tim Alan Garrison