Sequoyah

Sequoyah

Savior of a Language

This photograph is of a Cherokee shawl, a plate of the Cherokee alphabet (found miraculously at a yard sale many years ago) with a merged photo of a bust of sequoyah from a museum.

Sequoyah was born between 1760 and 1770 five miles from the original Cherokee capital of Chota in Tuskegee, now part of Tennessee. At that time, the Cherokees were an independent nation still living on their original tribal lands. They were coexisting with the British Colonies as equal neighbors and were making seperate trade agreements with the government.
Sequoyah’s mother ‘Wurteh’ belonged to a prominent Cherokee family, whose three brothers and nephew were all chiefs. Sequoyah’s father was probably a white shopkeeper, named Nathaniel Gist with whom Wurteh lived until he went home to Virginia, while Sequoyah was still an infant. Gist had nothing further to do with either of them and died before Sequoyah became famous.
Wurteh brought up Sequoyah in a little cabin in the Overhills country, resembling a fullblood, was interested in everything and became a blacksmith and self-taught silversmith. He was naturally mechanical and a gifted artist whose special talent was for drawing animals. He married, had a family of four sons and settled on some land in the village of Tallahassee, not far from his birthplace.
As a very young man he had noticed the power that the ability to read gave the white man. He began to think and talk, both jokingly and seriously, about creating an equivalent advantage for the Cherokees.
About 1806 he and other Cherokees were forced off their land, and he moved his family to Alabama. In 1809 he started working on the syllabary, with a pair of silver spurs on which he had a friend stamp his Cherokee name in English letters – sitting for hours turning the spurs in his hand, thinking and jotting down tentative ideas on wood shingles. He used his nephew’s speller and some printed alphabets lent by missionaries for ideas as to the function of the letters. For the sounds of the letters represented he had to rely on his own powers of analysis, since he knew no English at all at this time.
The alphabets he saw are supposed to have included English, Hebrew and Greek.
During the Creek War of 1813-1814, he fought against the Creek for the US Government, interrupting his work, but after injuring his leg, he returned to the syllabary zealously until the cabin that contained all his work burnt down.
Migrating to Arkansas, he started over on the syllabary, reducing 200 letters to 86, remarried in 1815 and in 1821 was granted a hearing before the tribal council presenting written messages between his daughter and himself, proving writing worked just as well in Cherokee as in English. The council was impressed and Sequoyah began teaching youths and in a few months the whole nation was reading and writing the Official Cherokee alphabet in 1821.
In 1825, a medal was struck for him by the US and he began Cherokee periodical printed in Cherokee. He also visited Washington on behalf of the Cherokees in 1827, prior to the ‘Trail of Tears’. In 1839, as the president of the Westaern Cherokees, with his cousin George Lowrey, the president of the Eastern Band, they co-signed an Act of Union, uniting the two previously separated and warring tribes.
In 1842, he set off to Mexico looking for dissident members of the tribe, apparently becoming ill and dying around San Fernando, Mexico in 1843, where his grave has never been found. Like so many traditional heroes of other nations, he had vanished into legend, leaving a legacy of an alphabet, language and writing skills for his people.

Sequoyah belongs to the following groups:

"Exceptional Ekphrasis", 1 In The Beginning - Ancient Practices and Spirit of the Native American Available for sale as

Greeting Cards, Matted Prints, Laminated Prints, Mounted Prints, Canvas Prints, Framed Prints and Posters