Dear Ann,
Something has happened to my husband. Ever since we married when he was 20, he has provided well for the children and me. He is a talented person who can do most anything—an excellent coppersmith as well as the best silversmith in our nation. Men love to wear his signed jewelry—rings, bracelets, armlets, nose bobs, crosses, fine chains, earrings, buckles and buttons. Hunters and soldiers seek out his gorgets to protect their throats. Other customers want knife handles and spoons. The wealthy buy spurs and fancy silver plates for their horses' martingales.
In his blacksmith shop he can produce iron pots, make and mend tools and weapons, shoe horses, sharpen plows. With a burnt stick, a coal or a turkey feather he can draw the likeness of any person or animal on bark, wood or deerskin. Since he was 12 years old, he could carve figures, or create masks and bowls, in ash, oak, pine or hickory. He makes his own bows and arrows, then skillfully trades his fox, deer, bear and elk skins for knives, axes and saws. He built our log cabin and the furniture inside it. The problem is that he no longer does any of these things. I get no help with raising our five children. It's as if his family doesn't exist. My young sons and I have to care for peach and apple trees; work the corn, beans, squash and tobacco patches. I have to haul water and firewood and tend the livestock. He spends all his time in a cabin in the woods, obsessed with the idea of trying to set down our language into "talking leaves" like white men have. When I try to discuss this with him, he walks away. He is drinking much too much. He has forsaken his friends whom he used to entertain with the fine storytelling he learned from his grandfather. They think he has gone insane. I've about reached that conclusion myself. I know this letter is too long, but I need help.
-Desperate in Cherokee Country
Flames may have destroyed his drawings, but not his ideas, his vision or determination. In another cabin built deeper in the woods he began anew.
Most written languages evolved over hundreds or thousands of years, their origins lost in antiquity. Sequoyah is the only person in the history of mankind who singlehandedly invented a written system for a spoken language. He was 39 when he began. With the exception of two years spent fighting in the War of 1812, he worked at his self-imposed task from 1809 until 1821. His wife, his children, his relatives and friends could not understand that his work would be of lasting benefit to their nation. So he tuned them out, sacrificing relationships as he focused persistently on his obsession.
Sequoyah knew of the many broken treaties—treaties Cherokee chiefs could sign only with an X. English translated into written Cherokee, he reasoned, would give the Indian chiefs new strength. Then the white man would lose the advantage of always claiming more land than the treaties allowed. And the Cherokee people would be able to read about their ancestors, their culture, their news. Fascinated as he watched white soldiers open mail during the War of 1812, Sequoyah wanted his people to be able to communicate over distance, too.
Working on birch bark, this unlettered dreamer who never learned English had first tried drawing a picture for each Cherokee sentence. Dissatisfied, he experimented with a picture for each word. But how could he depict words like easy or hard? As bark strips piled up around him, Sequoyah realized his people could never learn pictures for 20,000 words when he couldn't remember them himself. A switch from pictures to symbols was no better.
After his wife burned his first work, Sequoyah chanced upon an English spelling book. He studied the letters, figuring out that all the white man's talk on the pages used only 26 different signs. Again and again he copied them. At last a revelation: The key was sounds. All he needed was a symbol for each Cherokee sound.
On he worked, sounding out Cherokee word syllables then inventing a symbol for each one. Se-quoy-ah—three symbols. Ah-yo-ka, his young daughter—three symbols. Chat-ta-nooga—11 English letters, only four Cherokee symbols. Finally he had signs for each of 86 spoken syllables—a syllabary rather than an alphabet.
Because each syllable had only one sound, the symbols were easy to learn, with no spelling worries. Knowledge spread like wildfire to people of all ages across the Cherokee Nation. In less than a year the Cherokee became the best educated tribe in America, more literate by far than most of the land-hungry, ever-encroaching settlers who drove them west from their ancestral lands. They had a weekly newspaper, The Phoenix; a written constitution; a Bible translation; printed stories, poems, songs and more, preserving aspects of culture that might otherwise have been lost.
Sequoyah never asked any remuneration for his syllabary. It was his gift to his people, he said. However, The Cherokee Eastern Council honored its "Wise, Beloved Man" with a $300 annual stipend for life and a silver medal. An accompanying letter from his friend, Chief John Ross, said, in part:
"...The present generation have already experienced the benefits of your incomparable system. The old and the young find no difficulty in learning to read and write in their native language and to correspond with their distant friends with the same facility as the whites do...your name will exist in grateful remembrance...your genius...cannot be fully estimated—it is incalculable."
Sequoyah's mother was Wut-teh, sister to famous chiefs of the Red Paint Clan. It was probably Wut-teh's father who taught the child Indian lore: how to make a blowgun with darts for hunting, how to tell time and direction by the sun, how to make a ball of deerskin filled with buffalo hair.
Sequoyah's father, depending on source, was either George Gist (sometimes Guess or Guest), a wily, hard-drinking Dutch trader; or Colonel Nathaniel (possibly George) Gist, a trader and explorer from a famous family of Virginia (or Maryland) planters who were friends with George Washington—and who claimed no Indian kinship until after Sequoyah become famous.
Again depending on source, Sequoyah (in Cherokee, The Lame One, or Like a Pig's Foot) was born with one weaker, shorter leg, or the handicap resulted from a teenage, polio-like illness. It slowed him little.
He left Taskigi for Willston (Will's Town), Alabama, where he did much of his language work. Either there or in Arkansas, he remarried a full-blood Cherokee, Sally. He shows up in Arkansas in 1822 to teach Cherokee who had emigrated, carrying letters to and from, proving that Indians "could talk at a distance."
In 1828, he was part of a delegation to Washington, D.C. to plead his people's cause. Here artist Charles Bird King painted Sequoyah's only known portrait. Later, in Oklahoma, he trained teachers, opened schools, and helped, after The Removal, to find food and lodging for displaced Cherokees. He adapted his writing system for the Choctaw language.
Believing that all Indian languages shared one root—which old stories said he might find in Mexico—Sequoyah set out with a small group on horseback to make a search. He also hoped to find some Cherokees who had gone earlier to Mexico and convince them to return home.
His son Tessee went along as interpreter. The year was 1842; Sequoyah was over 70. Ignoring his frail, arthritic body and flagging energy, he rode with the others over difficult terrain, often with little food. They talked with Indians of several tribes along the way, Sequoyah always with an ear cocked for common words in sound and meaning. After several weeks of hardships, Sequoyah became too ill and weak to travel on. He sent the others to continue the search while he waited. There, alone, in August 1843, he died near San Fernandino, in northern Mexico.
In Statuary Hall, in our nation's Capitol, stands a statue of Sequoyah, the only Native American so honored. His name is perpetuated in the country's oldest, noblest trees, the giant sequoias of the west, and in California's Sequoia National Park.
In Cherokee, North Carolina, on the Qualia Boundary, nearly 800 elementary children are learning Kituhwa, the language of their foreparents. This special Cherokee dialect is spoken only by Native Americans of these eastern mountains. And precious few of those. Only about one in 12, mostly elderly people, still speak Kituhwa.
For several years retired minister Robert Bushyhead, who for years played the minister's role in the outdoor drama "Unto These Hills," his daughter Jean, an elementary teacher, and project staffer Krystopher Storm, have devoted themselves to preserving this language.
Using computerized methods, the team has put about 1,800 words into a voice-based dictionary, giving formal and conversational pronunciations, with a sample sentence for each word. In addition, they have produced lesson plans for the school, and enlisted tribal elders for oral history recordings.
Only dedication and determination such as theirs could accomplish the monumental task of preserving a language and creating pride in their culture in this dramatic way.
Audio-Forum, a Guilford, Connecticutt, maker of self-instruction tapes, sees increased interest in learning and perpetuating Native American languages. Navajo and Cherokee are among the top 10 language tapes most requested from this firm.