Print, Power and the Cherokee Phoenix

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Adoption of Sequoyah's syllabary in 1825 created an immediate practical problem: printing it required a typeface that did not exist anywhere. Missionary Samuel Worcester, working with the Cherokee Nation, had metal type cast for all eighty six characters at a foundry in Boston, and in doing so made choices Sequoyah himself had not: he reordered the characters for teaching purposes and rotated some letterforms to avoid visual collisions with English type. The Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper anywhere, began printing at New Echota in 1828 using that typeface, running Cherokee and English in parallel columns under editor Elias Boudinot. Linguist Ellen Cushman has argued that Worcester's standardization subtly reshaped the system, bending its internal logic toward a more Latin-alphabet-style ordering and obscuring relationships Sequoyah's original handwritten characters may have encoded. How much of that original design survives in the printed, standardized syllabary used today remains an open question. What is not in doubt is the newspaper's impact: it gave the Cherokee Nation a public voice in its own language at a moment, on the eve of forced removal, when that voice mattered enormously.