Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after "Literacy in American Lives"

1. Elias Boudinot and the Cherokee Phoenix: The Sponsors of Literacy They Were and Were Not

13 1. Elias Boudinot and the Cherokee Phoenix: The Sponsors of Literacy They Were and Were Not Ellen Cushman Fig. 1.1. Newspaper masthead of the second issue of the Cherokee Phoenix The Cherokee Phoenix is the first newspaper published by an Indian tribe in the United States, and it included the Cherokee syllabary, the first indigenous writing system, in many issues (see fig. 1.1).1 Invented by a Cherokee silversmith, treaty signer, and student of the language named Sequoyah over a ten-year process (Cushman, 2011c), the Cherokee syllabary was accepted by the Cherokee tribal council in 1821, though it was another five years before the Cherokee syllabary would appear in print. In between times, Cherokees learned, read, wrote, and communicated in script using Sequoyan in great numbers. Samuel Worcester, a Moravian pastor to the Cherokee, estimated that three-fourths of the people were fluent with the writing system before Sequoyan moved to print (Worcester, 1828b). Interestingly, “there had been no schools, and no considerable exertions of any kind, certainly none that were systematic, to effect this” high reading and writing rate in Sequoyan (Worcester, 1828b, p. 330). Worcester believed the rapid dissemination and uptake of this writing system were due in large part to the instrumentality of the writing system. First, it corresponds fairly well to the sounds of spoken Cherokee, and second, the small number of syllables were easily represented by the eighty-six original characters in the writing system (Worcester, 1828b). Research on the Cherokee writing system confirms Worcester’s thinking about its instrumentality. Margaret Bender’s (2002) ethnography of Ellen Cushman 14 Cherokees in the Qualla boundary of North Carolina suggests that adult Cherokee language learners develop facility with the writing system because it represents fairly closely the sound units. She found that the reading and spelling practices of Cherokee readers and writers suggested to her that there might be semantic meanings encoded with each character (p. 122). Following these leads, I conducted a linguistic analysis of each character in the writing system to show the potential meaning resting latent within each character that becomes activated by its positioning in a word (Cushman, 2011a). The instrumentality of the Cherokee writing system might well be one reason why its use has persisted (Cushman, 2011b). Sequoyah’s writing system originally contained eighty-six characters with eighty-five being retained when it moved into print in the Cherokee Phoenix. Commissioned by the Cherokee Nation in 1826, the typeset used to publish the Cherokee Phoenix and the press itself were finally ready by 1827. Because the punches and matrices took some time to cast for the Cherokee typeset, the Cherokees set about building a log house for the press and hiring staff in the nation’s capital, New Echota, in what is today Georgia. In January 1828, the press, types, and other materials necessary for printing the paper arrived in New Echota, with the first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix being published in February. Two years before the press had even arrived at the nation, Elias Boudinot had been charged by the Cherokee Nation to serve as the first editor of the Phoenix, to secure funding from outside sponsors for procuring the typesets in both English and Cherokee, and to establish an office in New Echota. Through an exploration of Boudinot’s role as editor as well as an analysis of the content of the Phoenix, this chapter provides an understanding of the ways in which the work of literacy sponsors requires the consent and support of those sponsored. Drawing upon data gathered over five years of ethnohistorical research, this chapter illustrates Boudinot’s role as an editor of the Cherokee Phoenix to nuance the notion of literacy sponsorship and to further develop understanding of regional histories of literacy. Deborah Brandt’s notion of literacy sponsors offers detailed portrayals of individuals who come to develop reading and writing skill sets through their sponsors, who, in turn, gain some advantage from their forms of sponsorship . Brandt’s notion allows scholars to view the influence of large-scale economic and political forces through individuals’ choices to facilitate or limit particular reading and writing practices. Sponsors are “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way. . . . Sponsors are delivery systems for the economies Elias Boudinot and the Cherokee...