The Man Who Created a Written Language for the Cherokee Did It So Efficiently and Elegantly, His Peers Thought It Was Magic

At first, they laughed. Then they scoffed. Finally, they accused him of witchcraft. The Cherokee silversmith named Sequoyah had spent years scratching strange marks on paper. In 1821, his fellow tribespeople, disturbed by his obsession, put him on trial for practicing black magic. Sequoyah insisted his invention would allow Cherokee speakers to write out Iroquoian language for the first time. To test his claim, tribal elders ordered Sequoyah’s young daughter, Ayoka, to another room. Father and daughter separately made marks on paper and told their minders in each room what the marks said. Then the papers were exchanged. When each was able to read the other’s messages aloud, suspicion turned to wonder.

The astonished elders immediately asked him to teach them his revolutionary transcription method. Within six months, one in four Cherokee, or Tsalagi, could read and write. Within a quarter-century, Cherokee people had achieved a higher rate of literacy than the country’s non-Native population.

The unprecedented development came after years of work by a man whose name means “pig’s foot,” perhaps a reference to his pronounced limp. Born in 1770s Tennessee to a Cherokee mother and a white father, Sequoyah was raised in his mother’s culture and didn’t read or write English. During the War of 1812, he served alongside American soldiers, sometimes using the English name George Guess. The experience likely exposed him to written language, or what he called “talking leaves.” 

After the war, Sequoyah moved to Alabama and began experimenting with an ideogrammic approach to written Cherokee, in which each word was a symbol, but he abandoned that as cumbersome and too difficult to learn. Eventually, he hit on 86 syllables that expressed specific sounds, each syllable represented by symbols borrowed from Greek, Hebrew and English. Later reduced to 85 symbols, Sequoyah’s syllabary was not simply a creative triumph, but a new means of self-government and cultural memory: By 1827, the Cherokee had a written constitution, and everything from hunting guidance to sacred chants could be recorded for posterity. The Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native newspaper in the United States, rolled off the press in 1828 using his symbols. Others followed. 

The syllabary was widely lauded, as its phonetic accuracy and simplicity made it far easier to grasp than English. “The superiority of Guess’ alphabet is manifest, and has been fully proved by experience,” wrote Albert Gallatin, a U.S. Treasury secretary, diplomat and linguist, in 1836. “The boy learns in a few weeks that which occupies two years of the time of ours.” Yet sudden mass literacy didn’t curb the U.S. government’s growing appetite for Cherokee homelands in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. Soon after Gallatin made his comments, the government forced tens of thousands of Cherokee to migrate along the Trail of Tears to a territory now called Oklahoma.

Despite this tragedy, the Cherokee carried the syllabary to their new home and maybe even across the Atlantic. In Liberia, a Cherokee named Austin Curtis, who married into the Indigenous Vai community, is said to have used the syllabary to devise a script for the Vai, which went on to inspire written works throughout West Africa. Sequoyah himself moved to Mexico, where he died in 1843.

Today, with only a few thousand Cherokee fluent in their ancestors’ tongue, the syllabary is a key tool in safeguarding Tsalagi culture. Teenagers use it to text one another; children’s books use it to convey traditional tales; and official documents and road signs communicate in the mode Sequoyah invented—moving reminders of how a single individual’s brilliance and tenacity can change the world.