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  • Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life
  • Nancy Shoemaker
Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life. By Margaret Bender. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xx + 187 pp., illustrations, preface, introduction, index, bibliography. $49.94 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Ever since his invention of the Cherokee syllabary in the early 1820s, Sequoyah's life and achievement have been the object of scholarly and popular fascination. In Signs of Cherokee Culture, anthropologist Margaret Bender studies the syllabary from an entirely new vantage point by asking what [End Page 669] place the syllabary has in contemporary Cherokee life. In 1992, Bender began several years of fieldwork on the Qualla Boundary, home to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. She observed and participated in Cherokee language classes aimed at all age groups, assisted in a language preservation program, interviewed members of the community, attended fairs and church services, and examined street signs and tourist-shop displays. Wherever the syllabary was, Bender was there, too.

Her close attention to the multiple venues, contexts, and forms in which the syllabary appears makes for an insightful analysis of the syllabary as both an object lesson in literacy in general and a glimpse into a unique phenomenon. Only one other place in the world—the northeastern corner of Oklahoma, where most of the Cherokee Nation was removed to in 1838–9—could have served as a possible site for Bender's research. Yet Bender manages to place her research amid larger questions about literacy. She argues that literacy needs to be studied for its local variations. She also demonstrates that literacy is not as simple as it seems. For example, one of the syllabary's functions is as a sacred language, but Bender learned that printed Cherokee, as in Bibles and hymnals, has closer associations with Christianity, whereas handwritten syllabary script, as found in individuals' notebooks containing medicinal formulas, carries connotations of magic and witchcraft.

Because Bender says little about how the syllabary was used in the past or how its uses have changed over time, Signs of Cherokee Culture cannot technically be considered ethnohistory; nonetheless, the book raises interesting questions that are ethnohistorical in nature. Bender points to an ironic development in the syllabary's history: Hailed at first as remarkably easy to learn, the syllabary is now perceived of as difficult. Part of the reason for this change is undoubtedly related to Bender's observation that many Cherokees now speak English as their first language. When learning the syllabary, they subconsciously depend on the English alphabet and treat the ubiquitous syllabary chart as a kind of decoder, which has the ability to transform Sequoyah's original phonetic system into other phonetic systems more familiar to English-language readers. English literacy has thus come to dominate Cherokee literacy, often subtly, and yet the syllabary remains a powerful symbol of Cherokee identity and culture. As Bender notes, the syllabary held the status of a political icon from its inception, but in the nineteenth century, many Cherokees in Oklahoma and North Carolina also used the syllabary as their first and only written language. Exactly when and how the syllabary as symbol overtook its pragmatic function as a means to remember and communicate fall outside the scope of Bender's book, but Bender does provide a starting point for further ethnohistorical research by [End Page 670] observing that the syllabary continued to have a long, complex life of its own long after the death of its inventor.

Although Signs of Cherokee Culture is the study of a unique phenomenon, the book should garner a wide readership across many disciplines and professions. Bender's own experience as a teacher of literacy, described in the preface, makes her especially sensitive to the perspectives of educators and literacy theorizers. Thus, although the book will be of interest to scholars, it is also likely to be of great use to language and literacy teachers and to anyone involved in native language preservation programs.

Nancy Shoemaker
University of Connecticut
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