Sequoyah Tells His Story of Creating the Written Language of the Cherokees

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I am Sequoyah, a member of the Cherokee Nation, and my life’s work was creating something that had never been done before—a written language for my people. I was born around 1770 in what is now Tennessee. My early years were shaped by hardship and change as settlers moved into our lands and tensions grew between Native nations and the expanding United States. I was raised in a time when our traditions were strong, but I could also see how the power of written language gave the settlers and government an advantage over us. They could write down their laws, agreements, and history, and we could not. That realization stayed with me.

I was not formally educated, and I never learned to read or write English, but I became curious about written language. I wondered: why couldn’t the Cherokee people have the same ability to write down our own words and stories? It began as an idea, something I thought about while working as a blacksmith. People laughed at me when I started, thinking it was impossible. They said I was wasting my time, but I kept going. I began by experimenting with symbols, trying to create a system where each symbol represented a word. That became too complicated, so I switched to representing syllables, the sounds that make up our speech.

It took years of trial and error, but eventually, I developed the Cherokee syllabary—a set of 86 symbols, each representing a unique syllable in our language. It was simple, logical, and something our people could learn quickly. To prove it worked, I taught my young daughter, Ayoka, to use it. When she could read and write flawlessly, the skeptics began to believe. I demonstrated the system to Cherokee leaders, and soon, it spread like wildfire through the Nation. In just a few years, thousands of Cherokee could read and write in our own language. It was one of the fastest adoptions of literacy in history.

The impact was incredible. Our people could now preserve our history, share stories, and communicate across distances in a way we never could before. The Cherokee Phoenix, our nation’s newspaper, became a powerful symbol of our identity and resilience. My work helped unify the Cherokee during a time when the government was trying to force us off our lands. It gave us a voice, and it gave us pride.

I spent the later years of my life traveling to other Native nations, hoping to inspire them to create written languages for their own people. I wanted all Native cultures to thrive and to be able to preserve their traditions. I passed away in 1843, but my legacy lives on. My syllabary is still used today, and it remains a testament to the strength and ingenuity of the Cherokee people. To you, I say this: never underestimate the power of learning, creativity, and persistence. Even when others doubt you, keep pushing forward. You never know what you might achieve.

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