Sequoyah in the Southern Quote

He was born somewhere around 1776 in an Indian village in Tennessee.  His mother was the daughter of a Cherokee Chief, his father a Virginia fur trader who abandoned them before he was born. He grew up, married a Cherokee woman, and started a family, working as a silversmith to support them before becoming one of a number of Cherokees to fight under General Andrew Jackson in the war of 1812.

During the war, Sequoyah watched the white soldiers write letters home to their loved ones. He and his fellow Cherokee soldiers were unable to follow suit. Nor could they read their military orders or document the history they were making. Sequoyah called the books and letters “talking leaves” and marveled at their ability to record thoughts, dreams and intentions. Although he had become intrigued by the written communication of white settlers from childhood, those wartime experiences fueled his desire to develop a similar method of communication for his own people.  Once the war was over, Sequoyah made his dream a reality, working tirelessly to create 85 symbols from the thousands of sounds in the Cherokee language. He tested his system by successfully teaching it to his young daughter. After more than a decade of working on his project, Sequoyah presented the symbols to the Cherokee people. They absorbed the alphabet by the thousands and were soon reading and writing on their own “talking leaves.” The Cherokee Nation awarded Sequoyah a silver medal of honorary and a lifetime literary pension.

No doubt it is my love of the written word that endears this Native American and fellow southerner to me. I know that many times I need to write about something I’ve seen or heard before I really understand how I feel about it. In today’s Southern Quote the literary efforts of a man who taught his people to read and write. Sequoyah once said, “When a talk is made and put down, it is good to look at it afterward.”