Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880

5. Public Writing II: The Cherokee, a “Reading and Intellectual People”

( 123 ) chapter Five public writing ii The Cherokee, a “Reading and Intellectual People” of all the native communities affected by the coming of print and alphabetic literacy to Indian Country, perhaps none has garnered more notoriety than the Cherokee. This is for good reason. Unique among indigenous nations, the Cherokee developed in 1821 a syllabic written form of the Cherokee spoken language not derived from the Roman alphabet. Not long after, the Cherokee tribal government mandated the establishment of a Cherokee national printing press, to be operated at the nation’s center in New Echota, Georgia. It would produce works in both the new syllabary and English. Thus, not only were the Cherokee leaders involved in the establishment of a very sophisticated indigenous scribal and print system, but also, because of increasing pressure from American land speculators backed by the State of Georgia, they found themselves at the center of a print culture debate over the legal status of Native nations residing in the United States.Their unusual historical position as a tribal community that had adopted a written national language led to their participation in two groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions that forever changed the nature of federal Indian policy in America. The Cherokees’ spirited and literate battle for sovereignty during the 1820s and 1830s was so impressive that non-Indians were forced to acknowledge them as a “civilized”tribe. And yet, under U.S. law, they remained a “domestic dependant nation” and “an unlettered people.”¹ Although there was a profound irony in the public perception of the Cherokee in the nineteenth century—considered simultaneously the most civilized Native society in America and yet “unlettered”and “dependant”—at the time, most non-Indians simply thought of the Cherokee as the leaders of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muskogee, Seminole ). If they had heard of Sequoyah—the man who invented the Cherokee ( 124 ) Public Writing II syllabary—at all, they thought of him as “the American Cadmus.”² Yet all contemporary figurations of Cherokee society essentially erased traditional and ceremonial practices, as well as substantial Cherokee oral tradition. In their place was erected a progressive model of literacy civilizing the Indian.As early as 1825, Elias Boudinot, a literate Cherokee leader, would take pains to differentiate his nation from other Native communities.Claiming that “traditions are becoming unpopular,” he took issue with newspaper accounts that “associat[ed] the Cherokees . . . [with] the . . . ‘Southern Indians.’” Boudinot felt that, unlike the Cherokee, southern nations like the Muskogee were in “rapid decline.”³ However, as the following chapter will demonstrate, despite their admittedly special standing in the history of the book in Indian Country , the Cherokee were no less susceptible than any other Native nation to the social strains produced by the uncomfortable yoking of traditional cultural practices with new, alphabetic ones. The Cherokee, like the peoples of the Columbia Plateau, the Seneca under Handsome Lake, the Shawnee and Delaware led by Tenskwatiwa and Tecumseh, and the Muskogee during the Red Stick War, experienced periods of intense factionalism, nativism, and revitalization that went hand in hand with battles over the proper uses of scribal and print literacies. In order to better focus our attention on this aspect of Cherokee public writing, I first compare the lives of two Cherokee leaders from very distinct factions within the broader development of Cherokee literacy during the 1820s—Sequoyah (ca. 1767–1843) and Elias Boudinot (1804–39). I then move on to explore how the different forms of literacies these two men enabled and advocated in the Cherokee Nation contributed to the formation of a highly contested “Cherokee public.” The political rifts erupted into full-blown civil war during the 1830s. But in the 1840s, the Cherokee Nation rose again in the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi within a complex public sphere that embraced a range of literacy practices, from print constitutionalism to manuscript coteries. The Two Faces of the Cherokee Public The Cherokee public sphere took shape, as did so many in Indian Country, within the contexts of colonial warfare and missionary evangelization. Like the mission presses on the Plains, in the Columbia Plateau, and in the Indian Territory, those established in the 1820s in the Native Southeast would have unintended consequences for the Cherokee Nation and its language. In 1817, Public Writing II ( 125 ) the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (abcfm) established its first station in the Southeast at...