Born: between 1760 and 1776, Tennessee Mountains; Died: 1843, near Tyler, Texas

Sequoyah is also known as the only person in history to "invent a written language without being literate in any language."

Overview and Contributions:

Sequoyah, or Sequoia (both spellings were given by missionaries, but in Cherokee the name is closer to Sikwayi or Sogwali), also known as George Gist or George Guess, was the legendary creator of the Cherokee syllabary. He was the son of Nathaniel Gist, a Virginia fur trader, and Wut-teh, daughter of a Cherokee chief. After Sequoyah had been crippled by a hunting accident in 1809, he became interested in developing an alphabet, or table of characters, for the eighty-six syllables in the Cherokee language. By 1821 his task was completed and approved by the Cherokee chiefs. The results: In a short time thousands of his people learned to read and write.

The influence of Sequoyah’s work on the Cherokee Nation’s efforts to develop a culture more in keeping with European standards was significant. His syllabary helped the Cherokee overcome the limitations of a strictly oral culture and establish a constitutional basis for their government. Without Sequoyah’s work, of course, the Cherokee’s newspaper would have been impossible, and the efforts of missionaries to convert them to Christianity would have lagged.

Humble Beginnings of a Great Man:

Sequoyah was born about 1776* to a Native American woman named Wut-teh and an obscure white trader named Nathaniel Gist. After Nathaniel Gist abandoned his family soon after his child’s birth, Sequoyah and his mother lived alone in the foothills of the Great Smokies near the sacred town of Echota in what is now Tennessee. As he grew older, Sequoyah showed artistic and mechanical skill that would help him with what, early on, became his life’s task. In his solitude, Sequoyah had found plenty of time to contemplate some of the things that were to him a teasing mystery. The most important of these was the European’s ability to put thoughts upon paper and understand them.

*Eastern Band of Cherokee Indian Nation and sequoyahmuseum.org; additional sources vary and reflect 1760 - 1776

The Foundations of Cherokee Literacy:

Around 1809 Sequoyah began work to create a system of writing for the Cherokee language. This work took Sequoyah 12 years to complete. Sequoyah refused to share the belief of some of his people that written speech was a gift of the Great Spirit. He boldly declared it to be a mere ingenious thing almost anyone could master with sufficient effort. The young man soon focused his effort and talents toward creating a way for his people to communicate over distance and time, as well as preserve their wisdom, history, and culture for future generations. Sequoyah sought at first to make a character for each word, but in a year he had thousands of characters, that even he could not decipher. Finally, he began attempting to develop an alphabet based on syllables in the language—a system in which single letters would stand for syllables. By 1820 he had determined that there were 86 syllables in the Cherokee language and that for his alphabet he would need a corresponding number of characters. To solve the problem of creating so many distinctive characters, Sequoyah adapted Roman letters, adding curls and dashes and turning them upside down.

A Convincing Demonstration:

A dozen years had gone into the work, and now he was ready to make his invention known to his people. The first scholar was his own daughter. In only a few days, she was able to read and write. In 1821, he and his daughter appeared before a gathering of the tribal heads. He sent his daughter away and out of earshot. Then he asked one of the principal men "to make a few sentences of talk." As it was spoken, Sequoyah "put it down on paper." Then he called his daughter, and she read it back to the group. Soon the entire nation was reading and writing Cherokee. The demand for pen and paper skyrocketed among the Cherokee, and letters sped from the East to the West where a small band of 1,000 had moved in 1817. A translation of the New Testament using the new syllabary was completed in 1825, and in 1827 the Council of the Cherokee Nation formally resolved to establish a national newspaper "in the mother tongue." Two years earlier the Legislative Council of the Cherokee Nation had presented Sequoyah with a medal as a token of respect and admiration for his ingenuity. In 1917 the State of Oklahoma presented to the United States a statue of Sequoyah, placed in the Hall of Statuary in the National Capital. Today a large wooden statue in his honor stands in Cherokee.