Have you heard of Sequoyah?

After listening to a bit of Kamala Harris’s speech to the National Council of American Indians, I began to wonder about the connection between the relatively poor economic performance of native Americans and their historically recent acquisition of literacy.

A google search for “earliest written American Indian language” introduced me to the remarkable Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah. After reading a couple of articles about him online:

• https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/sequoyah-and-creation-cherokee-syllabary
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah

I was genuinely surprised that I’d never heard of him before or read about him at all. Here’s a brief passage from Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), page 214:

“A Cherokee named Sequoyah, who’d fought under Jackson during the Creek War, invented a written form of the Cherokee language, not an alphabet but a syllabary, with one character for every syllable. In 1825, the Cherokee Nation began printing the 'Phoenix,' in both English and, using the syllabary, in Cherokee. In 1826, it established a national capital, at New Echota (just outside of what’s now Calhoun, Georgia), and in 1827 the National Council ratified a written constitution.”

I tend to think that the stronger the connection an ethnic or racial community has to the written word, the more likely that community is to achieve material success in the modern world. And beyond the individual’s ability to read and write is the cultural value the community places on literacy.

Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all “people of the book.” The Tanach, the New Testament, and the Quran have been studied in written form for over a thousand years, with portions of the Jewish biblical text dating back more than 3,000 years. Possessing a written text for several millennia has given Jews plenty of time to develop a culture of literacy.

North American Indians are relative newcomers to literacy. For the Cherokee, the written word dates back barely two hundred years. We should not be surprised if book learning and the economic opportunity that often accompanies literacy are not yet deeply embedded in native American culture.