Writing Cherokee

PHILLIP HOOSE, IN HIS WONDERFUL BOOK We Were There, Too!, argues that it wasn’t Cherokee chief Sequoyah alone, but also his six-year-old daughter Anyokah, who brought a written language to the Cherokee people and found a way to prove its importance to the tribal elders.

First, father and daughter tried to make a list of every sound in the spoken language of the Cherokee people and to draw a picture for each sound. Then they made a list of all the spoken syllables. They came up with about two hundred, but were able to narrow down the list to eighty-six distinct syllables, each with its own written expression.

By now Anyokah was ten years old. It was 1821. Sequoyah and Anyokah rode to the Cherokee Tribal Council to present their idea. At first, the Council laughed because they couldn’t see how writing down sayings could be useful in any way. So, Sequoyah proposed a test. He would leave the room. The Tribal Council could tell Anyokah anything they wanted, and she would write it down. Then Sequoyah would come back, look at the marks on the deerskin, and tell them what they had said. It worked again and again. “The first few times the elders called it luck,” Hoose writes, “but gradually doubt gave way to excitement. Soon thousands of Cherokees wanted to learn how to read. The syllabic alphabet led to the preservation of the Cherokee language and then to the first American Indian newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. Before long schoolchildren were learning to read in both Cherokee and English. The letters were called talking leaves.”

Source: Hoose, Phillip. We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001.