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.
1. Una cultura urbana