James Rumford - Sequoyah: The Cherokee Man Who Gave His People Writing

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Sequoyah THE CHEROKEE MAN WHO GAVE HIS PEOPLE WRITING by James Rumford Houghton Mifflin Company Boston Translated into Cherokee by Anna Sixkiller Huckaby,
with the author's deep appreciation. Copyright 2004 by James Rumford All rights reserved. For information about permission
to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions,
Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. The illustrations were done with ink, watercolor. pastel, and pencil on drawing paper
adhered to a rough piece of wood, the texture of which was brought out with each pass
of chalk and colored pencil. To solve the complex issues of color and composition in
"tall" pictures, the author turned to the works of the Navajo Quincy Tahorna (19201956),
the contemporary Chinese artist He Jiaying (b. 1957), and the Japanese woodcut master
Hiroshige (17971858) for inspiration.

The English translation of the Cherokee words in the illustrations:
[pg. 7] Sequoia tree; [pg. 10] spoons and forks; [pg. 14] Sequoyah working;
[pg. 16] troublemakers; [pg. 20] Ayoka and Sequoyah; [pg. 22]
Sequoyah and the first letters; [pg. 26] the first line of "Amazing Grace,"
a favorite hymn of the Cherokee. www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com The text of this book is set in Walbaum. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rumford, James, 1948
Sequoyah: the man who gave his people writing / by James Rumford.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-618-56947-3
1. cm.
ISBN 0-618-56947-3
1.

Sequoyah, 1770?-1843. 2. Cherokee IndiansBiography. 3. Cherokee language
Writing. 4.

Cherokee languageAlphabet. I. Title.
E99.C5S5875 2004
975.004'97557'0092dc22 2004000980 Printed in Singapore
TWP 10 9 8 7 6 To my father,
Sydney Rumford,
who would stop
the car to read
every historic
marker and who
would certainly
have told us
this story. California, 1958. Look at the tall trees, says my father. They are redwood trees.

They have been alive for thousands of years. They are called the Giant Sequoia. Where did the name come from? It came from the name of a Cherokee Indian man who was alive when the United States was new. This Sequoyah must have been famous, we say. He must have fought bravely and led his people well. He must have been as tall and as strong as these trees.

Yes, my father says, but not as you might think. This man called Sequoyah was crippled. He was born in eastern Tennessee in the 1760s, the son of a Cherokee woman and a white man he never knew. For much of his life, Sequoyah was nobody famous. He was a metalworker who could turn iron into chisels and drills and Georgia silver into forks and spoons. Sequoyah was not a chief, but he loved his people like one.

He wanted them to stand as tall as any people on earth. He did not want them to disappear in the white man's world. He did not want their Cherokee voices to fade away. When he was fifty, they say, he decided to capture the people's voices in writing. But Sequoyah, they tell us, knew no English and couldn't readnot even the letter A. "I will invent writing for our people," he said. "I will invent writing for our people," he said.

Everyone laughed. "Writing will make us strong." No one believed him. Sequoyah began drawing hundreds of symbols, one for each word. He scratched them on slats of wood and filled his cabin with shingles of writing. "He is crazy," the people jeered. "We should teach him a lesson," the neighbors hooted. "We should teach him a lesson," the neighbors hooted.

They saw no use for writing. "Let's burn down his cabin," they cried. "We have to make him stop." So they burned his cabin down and turned his writing into smoke. But Sequoyah learned a different lesson. Sometimes disaster happens for a reason. Sometimes it says: "Follow a different path." Sequoyah, they say, gave up drawing a different symbol for each word.

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