February 21, 1828 Cherokee receive their first printing press
On this day 178 years ago, the first printing press designed to use the newly invented Cherokee alphabet arrives at New Echota, Georgia.
In NW Georgia near present day Calhoon, New Echota is now maintained as a Georgia State Park.
The General Council of the Cherokee Nation had purchased the press with the goal of producing a Cherokee-language newspaper. The press itself, however, would have been useless had it not been for the extraordinary work of a young Cherokee called Sequoyah, who invented a Cherokee alphabet.
"Sequoyah," or George Guess (or Gist), was born the son of a white Virginian fur trader and the daughter of a Cherokee chief in the village of Tuskegee, Tennessee. He and his mother were abandoned by the father, and his mother left to raise him herself.
Early in life he worked as a silversmith, and also served with the Cherokee regiment in 1813-14 against the Creek Redsticks and fought under Andrew Jackson. He never learned either how to speak English nor how to write anything in it more than his own name, but he did recognize and appreciate the influence and profound usefulness of the written word.
In dealing with the white soldiers and settlers, he became intrigued by their "talking leaves"-printed books that he realized somehow recorded human speech.
In a leap of logic, Sequoyah comprehended the basic nature of symbolic representation of sounds and in 1809 began working on a similar system for the Cherokee language.
Ridiculed and misunderstood by most of the Cherokee, Sequoyah made slow progress until he came up with the idea of representing each syllable in the language with a separate written character. By 1821, he had perfected his syllabary of 86 characters, a system that Cherokee speakers of average intelligence could master in less than week.
After obtaining the official endorsement of the Cherokee leadership, Sequoyah's invention was soon adopted throughout the Cherokee nation. When the Cherokee-language printing press arrived on this day in 1828, the lead type was based on Sequoyah's syllabary. Within months, the first Indian language newspaper in history appeared in New Echota, Georgia. It was called the Cherokee Phoenix.
Sequoyah developed Cherokee numerals as well, but they were not adopted by the tribal government. This listing of numbers actually written by Sequoyah himself is from the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa. You can probably make out the lightly written arabic numbers beneath Sequoyah's numerals.
One of the so-called "five civilized tribes" native to the American Southeast, the Cherokee had long embraced the United States' program of "civilizing" Indians in the years after the Revolutionary War.
In the minds of Americans, Sequoyah's syllabary further demonstrated the Cherokee desire to modernize and fit into the dominant European world. The Cherokee used their new press to print a bilingual version of republican constitution, and they took many other steps to assimilate European culture and practice (including chattel slavery of blacks) while still preserving some aspects of their traditional language and beliefs.
Despite the Cherokee's sincere efforts to cooperate and assimilate with whites, their accomplishments did not protect them from the demands of land-hungry Americans. Repeatedly pushed westward in order to make room for white settlers, the Cherokee lost more than 4,000 of their people (nearly a quarter of the nation) in the 1838-39 winter migration to Oklahoma that later became known as the Trail of Tears.
I guess its rather ironic that now President Andrew Jackson, under whose command Sequoyah and the Cherokees had fought the Creeks allied with the invading British in the War of 1812, defied the US Supreme Court's ruling that removal of the Cherokee was unconstitutional. Jackson is quoted as cynically saying "Let the Supreme Court enforce their ruling" in response to their attempt to stop him.
Nonetheless, the Cherokee people survived as a nation in their new home, thanks in part to the presence of the unifying written language created by Sequoyah.
In recognition of his service, the Cherokee Nation voted Sequoyah an annual allowance in 1841. He died two years later on his farm in Oklahoma.
Sequoyah County OK
Originally Posted by Octavian
