c. 1770–1843
Cherokee polymath who created the Cherokee writing system.
Sequoyah was a Cherokee silversmith who gave his people something almost no one in history has created alone: a way to write their own language. Born about 1770 in the Cherokee country of what is now Tennessee, he could read and write no tongue at all when he began.
Over a dozen years, working against ridicule and suspicion, he devised a syllabary — some eighty-odd characters, each standing for a syllable of Cherokee. When at last he demonstrated it, having taught it to his young daughter, the Cherokee Nation adopted it in 1825.
Its effect was extraordinary. Within a few years much of the Cherokee people could read and write their own language — a literacy said to have surpassed that of their white neighbors — and by 1828 the syllabary carried the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper.
He is the only person in recorded history known to have single-handedly invented a writing system for a people who had none. He died about 1843. Honored among the Great Ones of every civilization; kept here so the memory is never lost.
Kept with honor.
References
Biography drawn from the public historical record, verifiable against the sources above.
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Submitted by the Honored Ancestors Editorial Committee.
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