Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820-1906

Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820-1906. By James W. Parins. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Pp. xvi, 276. Acknowledgments, illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, index. $34.95.)This book by the late James W. Parins, professor of English and co-founder of the Sequoyah National Research Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, will become the standard history of literacy and intellectual life among the nineteenth-century Cherokees. Parins combines synthesis with new research to tell how the Cherokees used the tools of their conquerors to adapt and survive in the face of the harrowing developments between the invention of the Sequoyan syllabary and the dissolution of the Cherokee Nation's tribal government in 1906. The culmination of decades of work, the book shows the rich fruit borne by the Cherokees' bilingual literacy. Printing presses and pens could not prevent the tragedies of removal and allotment, but they did further tribal unity, preserve memory of tribal custom, and foster a rich literary tradition.The first four chapters detail the spread of English and Cherokee literacy into the late nineteenth century, a fifth examines the relationship between the Sequoyan syllabary and the Cherokee language, and the final four chapters study Cherokee journalists and writers into the early twentieth century. The epilogue tells of recent efforts to further the language using digital media.The remarkable story of Sequoyah's syllabary never tires in the retelling. The grassroots movement to achieve literacy in Cherokee was by any measure unexpected and extraordinary, not only for the tribe, but in the history of indigenous people generally. When George Guess (who knew no English) began creating his syllabary based on symbols he found in an old spelling book, no Indian people in North America had a written language, and less than a quarter of mixed-blood Cherokees were literate in English. Within seven years of the syllabary's introduction around 1820, it was reported that almost all young and middle-aged men could read it, as well as many old men, women, and children. Sequoyah in the meantime had joined other Cherokees in a brief Arkansas residence. Young Cherokees traveled great distances to learn to read and write; the syllabary was so well formed that most could do so in three days. Symbols appeared on buildings, trees, fences, and in dirt floors. By the mid-1830s, as many as two-thirds of Cherokees were literate in Cherokee and/or English. Enthusiasm was such that missionaries who initially opposed the syllabary abruptly changed their minds when attendance at their schools dropped precipitously.Questions remain as to why Sequoyah's handiwork found such a warm reception. In 1800, a handful of Cherokees could write English and fewer than 300 could speak it. But within twenty years, literacy became critical to the tribe's survival. By 1827, the tribe had a written constitution. Many Cherokees learned English from Protestant missionaries. The literary scholar Barry O'Connell has argued that the impulse to learn Sequoyah's method came from knowing that missionaries planned to create a written language for them. Regardless, after removal, tribal leaders maintained a commitment to English literacy when they opened their own independent primary and secondary schools in the 1840s and 1850s. …