NGE >> History and Archaeology >> Antebellum Era, 1800-1860 >> People >> Sequoyah (ca. 1770-ca. 1840) |
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Sequoyah (ca. 1770-ca. 1840) Sequoyah, or Sequoia (both spellings were given by missionaries, but in Cherokee the name is closer to Sikwayi or Sogwali), also called George Gist or George Guess, was the legendary creator of the Cherokee syllabary. Born in a village
From the 1820s, when the syllabary became well known, until the 1960s, published accounts agreed that Sequoyah was the son of a Cherokee mother and a white father, almost certainly Nathaniel Gist, a commissioned officer in the Continental army and emissary of George Washington. Sequoyah nevertheless appeared to be a full-blooded Indian who remained true to the traditions of his people, never adopting white dress, religion, or other customs. In particular, he spoke no language other than Cherokee. Impressed by the whites' ability to communicate over distances by writing, Sequoyah invented a system of eighty-four to eighty-six characters that represented syllables in spoken Cherokee (hence it is a syllabary, not an alphabet).
In 1971 Traveller Bird, claiming to be a direct descendant of Sequoyah, published the book Tell Them They Lie: The Sequoyah Myth, which posits a vastly different tradition. According to Bird, Sequoyah was indeed the full-blooded Native American he appeared to be, who all his life opposed the submission and assimilation of his people into white culture.
It is fact that the syllabary was used to print some articles in the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, published in New Echota,
Suggested Reading Traveller Bird, Tell Them They Lie: The Sequoyah Myth (Los Angeles: Westernlore, 1971). Grant Forman, Sequoyah (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1938). Stan Hoig, Sequoyah: The Cherokee Genius (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1995). Henry Thompson Malone, Cherokees of the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1956). Kim Schlich and Victor Schlich, "Talking Leaves," American History, December 1995, 38-40. Willard Walker and James Sarbaugh, "The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary," Ethnohistory 40 (winter 1993): 70-94. Samuel A. Worcester, New Echota Letters: Contributions of Samuel A. Worcester to the Cherokee Phoenix, ed. Jack Frederick Kilpatrick and Anna Gritts Kilpatrick (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1968). Ted Wadley, Georgia Perimeter College Published 9/3/2002 |
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