This is Sequoyah, a Cherokee American who lived from about 1770-1843 and is a rare example of an illiterate person who created a written language.
Sequoyah was born in what is now Tennessee and demonstrated skill in a wide variety of crafts: he made jewelry, invented better dairy farm equipment, and forged iron. Observing the way the white Americans employed writing, Sequoyah became certain that having access to written words had given these people an enormous advantage in building up power.
Wanting the same edge for his people, he set about inventing his “Cherokee syllabary,” which matched up various sounds in his native tongue with (eventually) 85 different symbols (see second slide). He likely began to invent his syllabary in 1809, and he finished in about 12 years. The Cherokee people he showed the script to soon promoted it. Sequoyah was given a medal by the Cherokee National Council in 1824, and the written language of Cherokee took off. By the 1850s, almost all Cherokee Americans were literate. Sequoyah’s invention helped his people become one of the first literate indigenous nations in the United States, and inspired others to invent their own written languages.
