Sequoyah and the Talking Leaves

Sometime around eighteen oh nine, a Cherokee silversmith and veteran named Sequoyah began a project that most people around him thought was madness. He had watched white settlers pass messages to one another on paper, words traveling distances that no spoken language could cross, and he decided that the Cherokee people deserved the same power. He called written symbols the talking leaves.

Sequoyah could not read English. He had never been taught any written language. He started, some accounts say, by trying to draw a symbol for every word in Cherokee, a project that quickly overwhelmed him. Over the following twelve years, working largely alone, sometimes accused by neighbors of practicing witchcraft, he changed his approach. He began listening to the sounds of Cherokee speech itself, isolating its distinct syllables, building a grid. By eighteen twenty-one, he had a finished syllabary: eighty-six characters, each representing a specific syllable in the Cherokee language, a complete system that any Cherokee speaker could learn in a matter of weeks.

The Cherokee Nation adopted his syllabary officially in eighteen twenty-five. Within a generation the Cherokee had a literacy rate approaching one hundred percent, higher than that of many neighboring white communities. The Cherokee Phoenix newspaper began printing in eighteen twenty-eight, both in English and in Sequoyah's script, making it one of the first Native-language newspapers in American history.

After removal, Sequoyah traveled west with his nation to Indian Territory, the land that is now northeastern Oklahoma. He spent his remaining years working to unite the eastern and western branches of the Cherokee people, who had been separated by removal and by time. He died around eighteen forty-three, somewhere in Mexico, still trying to find and bring home a band of Cherokee who had never come back.

His name was given, later, to the giant California redwood trees, the sequoia, and to the proposed Indian state that the Five Tribes tried and failed to establish in nineteen oh five. Not bad for a man who could not read until he taught himself, and then taught a nation.