Sovereignty Through Print: The Cherokee Syllabary
LUZENE HILL, MFA is a Native American (Cherokee) Artist whose work has been exhibited in Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe, NM), The British Film Institute (London, UK), Ucross Gallery, Ucross, WY, Eiteljorg Museum (Indianapolis, IN) etc.
By Luzene Hill
Luzene was my paternal grandmother’s name, and when I was named for her, I was defined by a Cherokee word. The literal meaning of that word is now lost, at least as far as I’ve been able to discover, but the name itself holds a part of my family history—one that has come to inform my art and has determined the direction of much of my work.
I grew up in Atlanta with my white mother and grandparents. We made regular summer visits to Cherokee, North Carolina, but I heard the Cherokee language spoken only on rare occasions. Both my father’s parents had been sent, against their parents’ wishes, to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, founded in the late nineteenth century by Colonel Richard Henry Pratt in the wake of the U.S. government’s massive forced relocations of Native peoples. Pratt infamously followed the motto “Kill the Indian, save the man.” The school required children to speak English only, enacting a program of nonvoluntary, often violently enforced assimilation that continued, in schools across the United States, until 1978, when the Indian Child Welfare Act gave parents the right to refuse having their children placed in boarding schools. As a result of their experience, neither of my grandparents spoke their language to their children, nor did they teach it to me. I was taught to have pride in my Cherokee culture, but it was an intellectual exercise, very different from growing up and living on the reservation.
I began studying art in my early thirties, but family responsibilities made it necessary for me to set the work aside for nearly fifteen years. When I returned to it, I was immersed in an abstract expressionist style, focusing primarily on the human figure. One day, however, in 1996, I was in my studio in front of the easel, and without any subject in mind, an image came to me of bones in an archaeological dig. Archaeology has always been an interest of mine, and I had visited various sites around Georgia—the Etowah Indian mounds in Carterville, the Ocmulgee mounds in Macon. Working from photos of digs in north Georgia, I created a series titled In de Soto’s Path. The work was shown in 1997 at the Santa Fe Indian Market, the largest market for Native American art. It was my first exhibition of any kind.
I continued drawing and painting, then moved into sculpture and multimedia installations. In 2006, hoping to devote more time to my art and to explore my Cherokee heritage, I moved to North Carolina. I wanted my work to contribute to the recognition and appreciation of Cherokee culture among non-Native people, but to do so, I quickly realized, I needed to begin by learning more about that culture myself, particularly the Cherokee language. Like hundreds of indigenous languages around the world, Cherokee is now endangered. A survey begun by the Cherokee Preservation Foundation in 2005 identified only 460 fluent speakers living in Cherokee communities, and 72 percent of them were over fifty years old. According to Bo Lossiah, director of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, and Hartwell Francis, director of the Cherokee language program at Western Carolina University, there are, to date, only about two hundred speakers of the Cherokee language in Western North Carolina.
Still, the language has endured remarkably, especially given the catastrophic abuses to which colonists and the United States government subjected its speakers. This tenacity of usage is in large part thanks to Sequoyah (Ssi-qua-ya), a Cherokee silversmith and scholar who, in the early nineteenth century, gave Cherokee a written form. Rather than creating an alphabet, Sequoyah made a syllabary—a system of symbols, each representing a syllable. The Cherokee syllabary is composed of eighty-five symbols.
Sequoyah created this linguistic form over a period of twelve years, completing it in 1821. It is, remarkably, one of only a handful of written languages ever developed by a single person. Soon after its formulation, a typeface, cast by a firm in Boston, would then be used to print the language. In a nod to the technology of the day, the typeface employed character forms made in part from the Roman alphabet, although the original form of the syllabary, as designed by Sequoyah, did not. It was the creation of the typeface that led to the printing, beginning in 1828, of the Cherokee Phoenix, ᏣᎳᎩ ᏧᎴᎯᏌᏅᎯ, a bilingual Cherokee–English newspaper. Its office was in the capital of the Cherokee Nation, New Echota, in what is now Georgia. The paper was in circulation for six years, leading up to the great removal (often labelled as the notorious Trail of Tears), when the U.S. government evicted Cherokees from their homeland, forcing thousands to march to what is now Oklahoma. At least four thousand died along the way. In 1835, the Georgia Guard confiscated the paper’s printing press and burned its office down.
In recent years the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, in partnership with the Cherokee Studies Department at Western Carolina University (WCU), has made a concerted effort on behalf of this written and spoken language. The Cherokee Language Revitalization Project, for example, supports the teaching of Cherokee at WCU and on the Qualla Boundary, home of the present-day Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. I began working with this Department in 2007, when I was asked to illustrate three children’s language-instruction books for them. In order to correctly depict Cherokee clothing, dwellings, and traditions, I worked closely with Native speakers and scholars.
From that experience I came to learn more about the language itself. Even though I am not a speaker, I was struck by the obvious difference to English sentence structure. In Cherokee, words that English speakers would place later in the sentence, such as the objects of verbs, usually come first—so that the sentence “I see a bear” might sound more like “bear I see.” This seems to me to reflect an outward-facing view of the world—the syntax suggests that the Cherokee speaker is part of a larger whole, and not necessarily the dominant, superior, or most important part. Through sentence structure, turns of phrase, and specific means of indicating relationships (which often cannot be translated precisely), the language reflects a distinct worldview, including what the Cherokee value: their culture, cosmology, healing practices, imagination, and humor.
Appropriation of Native icons and images diminishes and demeans our culture—and serves as yet another reminder of how Native people have been denied access to it themselves. Native American tribes exist as sovereign nations within the United States, and tribal sovereignty is usually asserted in regard to legal boundaries and in treaties. It became important to me to express our sovereignty through the use of the Cherokee language itself.
The sample folio that follows shows a spread from the book titled Spearfinger, which includes a page of the text, along with a page showing one of my line drawings that depicts Spearfinger’s transformative figure. I initially planned this book to be bilingual, Cherokee/English. However, as the book evolved, I felt this cultural myth should be presented solely in Cherokee. The syllabary, a fundamental symbol of Cherokee scholarship and achievement, conveys a strong language and culture, not a secondary one. It doesn’t require a side by side translation. It stands on its own.
