Leonard McMurry, Sequoyah, Bronze, Undated. Courtesy Oklahoma Hall of Fame Archives.
Sequoyah
(1767 - 1843)
Profession: Educator & Historian
Hometown: The Cherokee Nation
Inducted: 2017
Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee syllabary and credited with the emergence of literacy within the Cherokee Nation, was born in the 1770s in Tuskegee, a small Cherokee village in Tennessee. As a young man, Sequoyah was intrigued by the "talking leaves" that the British settlers were always reading and writing on. He realized that the Cherokee people did not have a way to write letters to loved ones or to record their history and current events. Though illiterate himself, Sequoyah had begun to develop a syllabary of 85 symbols by 1809. In 1821, he introduced this new written language to the Cherokee people, who eventually embraced the practice of writing.
Written works in the Cherokee language soon flourished. In 1828, the first bilingual newspaper in the U.S., the Cherokee Phoenix, was printed in both English and Cherokee. A few years later, most of the Cherokee Nation were reading and writing their own language daily. Following the successful adoption of the syllabary, Sequoyah briefly lived in a Cherokee community in Arkansas.
After the signing of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, Sequoyah relocated to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, where he provided aide to displaced Native Americans from the Southeast. In his lifetime, Sequoyah was a prominent political figure within the Cherokee Nation and the United States. In 1824, the National Cherokee Council awarded him a Silver Medal for developing the Cherokee syllabary, which he proudly wore until his death in 1843. In 1917, the U.S. honored Sequoyah by placing his statue in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C., one of only two Oklahomans featured.