The Cherokee Syllabary

For many of us who are passionate about local history, our interest extends when Marietta was yet to be built and Cobb was yet to be formed.

I am, of course, speaking of the , the people who occupied the area northwest of the Chattahoochee for more than 500 years.

For some, this interest runs deeper than curiosity or fascination; many of us, both Caucasian and African-American, have Cherokee ancestors. Even those who do not (my own Native American roots are with the Muscogee Creek) feel with them a “tender kinship from the earth,” to borrow a phrase from George Eliot. For us, then, the preservation of Cherokee heritage is the preservation of our heritage. Their story is a part of ours.

I have written elsewhere about the misconceptions many of us have about the Cherokee culture. Theirs was both a natural environment and a built one. They lived in villages and towns with wooden structures; they practiced agriculture and domesticated animals; the men often went on hunts simply as an excuse to get away from their wives for a day.

In these respects, they were not unlike the early white settlers in Georgia.

What many do not know is that, by the late 1820s, the Cherokee were also a literate people, having generated their own system of writing, one that is still in use today.

The Cherokee Syllabary was developed by Sequoyah (ca. 1770-1846), a Cherokee silversmith who lived in Tuskegee, a village on the banks of the Tennessee. Like many Cherokee, Sequoyah became fascinated with the “talking leaves” of the white settlers with whom he traded. Although many believe he never learned to read English, he studied the characters in a Bible he had been given and, realizing the power of the written word, set about creating a writing system of his own.

The system he crafted was not an alphabet but a syllabary, a writing system in which each character stands for a particular syllable rather than for a single sound or “phoneme.” He considered a system in which each character represented a particular word, much like writing systems found in Japan or China or the picture-writing developed in several Western Native American nations. This, he decided, would be too complicated and less likely to catch on. Whether or not he realized it at the time, it also would have been less likely to garner the respect of the white settlers, who would have been more inclined to view picture-writing as “primitive.”

This concept is vital to the importance of the syllabary, for a teachable and practical system of writing serves not only to preserve a language and facilitate the transmission of ideas but also to legitimize one civilization in the eyes of others. Thus the Cherokee Syllabary, which was completed in the early 1820s, appeared at a time when the Cherokee were fighting not only for their rights as a people but for their standing as a sovereign, civilized nation, independent of the encroaching United States.

This is the system that Sequoyah devised:

Few saw its value at first. In fact, some utterly rejected it. Sequoyah’s own wife is said to have burned an early draft of the syllabary, believing it to be “witchcraft.” So Sequoyah taught his system to the one enthusiastic student he had: his daughter Ayoka.

When Sequoyah presented his syllabary to Cherokee leaders in the Arkansas Territory, he took Ayoka with him. The leaders there were unconvinced until Sequoyah asked each of them to speak a single word, which he wrote down. Sequoyah then called for Ayoka, who had not been present in the counsel, and had her read back the words that each man had spoken.

This demonstration so impressed the members of the counsel that they agreed to allow Sequoyah to teach the syllabary to select men who would then pass it on. When Seqouyah returned East, he bore a sealed, written message from one of the Arkansas chiefs. When he read it before a counsel of Eastern leaders, they were much more receptive.

Receptiveness soon turned to enthusiasm as Cherokee leaders quickly saw the syllabary’s usefulness in uniting the nation and preserving its legitimacy before the U.S. government, which was already considering motions to remove the Cherokee people from their Eastern lands.

In 1825, the Cherokee Nation officially recognized the syllabary and put it into widespread use. By 1828, the first Cherokee language newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, was in print, followed by the Cherokee Advocate and the Cherokee Messenger.

Even as the U.S. Government went forward with its plans to remove all Cherokee east of the Mississippi, the syllabary remained, traveling west with the resettlement and enduring in the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina.

Both the Cherokee language and the syllabary have remained in continual use to this day. A Cherokee typewriter ball became available in the 1980s, and numerous computer fonts have been available in recent years. In 2010, Joseph Erb and Roy Boney, Jr. developed a Cherokee keyboard cover for use in schools.

The Marietta Museum of History maintains an exhibit on the syllabary among its Cherokee / Creek collection.