The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People’s Perseverance by Ellen Cushman (review)

The Cherokee syllabary is a system of writing that was created in the early nineteenth century and has achieved an iconic status among indigenous languages. It has become a symbol of both literacy and identity for Cherokee people because of its unique characters and the amazing story of its creation. A Cherokee man named Sequoyah singlehandedly created the syllabary despite much adversity and hardship. This system of writing continues to be a unique element of indigenous and typographic history, and this book seeks to tell that story.

Cushman’s The Cherokee Syllabary presents the impact of Sequoyah’s writing system. She argues that the syllabary is not just a sign system for the language; instead, she also casts it as a vehicle for history, culture, religion, and national perseverance. The book uses archival research coupled with ethnographic interviews to paint a portrait of the syllabary’s meaning to the people and within their communicative practices. The book is divided into eight chapters, each one treating a facet of the syllabary or a period in its history.

The first chapter deals directly with the historical moment in which the syllabary was created. Cushman relies on archival sources to create an argument that Sequoyah may have been an English speaker and literate in English but that he refused to use English. She offers this proposal as evidence of Sequoyah’s conscious political and cultural agenda to undergird Cherokee peoplehood through the creation and promotion of the syllabary. This argument is in direct opposition to stories that Sequoyah was not literate in any language when he created the syllabary, although it does lend credence to Cushman’s argument that Sequoyah was conscious of the impact his system of writing would have politically and culturally. There is very little documentation of Sequoyah’s life, so it is hard to ascertain the veracity of Cushman’s arguments on this point, although the idea is certainly alluring.

The second and third chapters survey the linguistic meaning, design, and arrangement of the syllabary. In these chapters, Cushman argues that Sequoyah had an explicit understanding of morphology and that his original script design incorporated this into the syllabary characters. She also argues that the original arrangement of the syllabary was based on deep linguistic meaning and that this is what contributed to Cherokee speakers rapidly learning the characters and the seeming overnight literacy achieved among Cherokee speakers after the introduction of the syllabary. These claims are quite interesting and also compelling when coupled with the original character forms and Cushman’s analysis. However, if I had to choose a single area in the book that could have been revised, it would be this one. Cushman extends her argument about the syllabary’s original design and arrangement to state that the syllabary is more than a simple sign system and that each character, on its own, has morphological value. In this context, I would wish to observe that the syllabary is quite efficient at capturing meaning but that there are morphemes in the Cherokee language that are not represented by the syllabary, that morphemes can be composed of more than one syllabary character, and that a single syllabary character can contain one or more morphemes. I wish that the author had said that the poly-synthetic nature of Cherokee means that changing a single syllable can change the entire meaning of a word, because that would have been a valid argument. Through these two chapters, Cushman shows that the origin of the syllabary is fundamentally outside of the English language and its conventional alphabetic writing system. The argument here supports the view that the Cherokee writing system is truly a product of Sequoyah’s genius and makes a compelling argument that the original design and arrangement allowed Cherokee speakers to learn the system quickly, but it does not lend credence to the notion that the syllabary is more than a simple sign system for the Cherokee language. [End Page 69...