The Cherokee Phoenix: The World's First Indigenous Bilingual Newspaper

On February twenty-first, eighteen twenty-eight, the first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix came off a printing press in New Echota, Georgia, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. It was printed in two columns: one in English, one in the Cherokee syllabary invented by a man named Sequoyah, who had spent twelve years developing a writing system for a language that had only ever been spoken.

The syllabary had eighty-five characters, one for each sound in the Cherokee language. Sequoyah completed it in eighteen twenty-one. Within a few years, a significant portion of the Cherokee population had learned to read it, a literacy rate that in some accounts surpassed that of their white neighbors. The Cherokee Phoenix was published both because the Nation had a printing press and because a large portion of its readers could use one.

The paper published news, legal proceedings, treaties, and editorials. It argued against removal. It addressed both Cherokee and white audiences simultaneously, in both languages, on the same page. The editor was Elias Boudinot, a Cherokee journalist who later, controversially, signed the Treaty of New Echota that authorized removal, a decision for which other Cherokee eventually killed him.

The Georgia Guard, the state's paramilitary arm, seized the printing press in eighteen thirty-five and destroyed it. The paper stopped publishing. Three years later, the army came for the people.

The digitized archive of the Cherokee Phoenix is held by the Western Carolina University Hunter Library and is accessible online. Every issue survives.