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Signs of Cherokee Culture Signs of Cherokee Culture Sequoyah’s Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life Margaret Bender The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill & London © 2002 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Set in Cycles and Arepo Types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America Some material in Chapters 2 and 3 and the Conclusion is adapted from Margaret Bender, “From ‘Easy Phonetics’ to the Syllabary: An Orthographic Division of Labor in Cherokee Language Education,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 33, no. 1 (2002), © 2002 American Anthropological Association. A summarized version of some material in Chapter 3 is included in Margaret Bender, “The Gendering of Langue and Parole: Literacy in Cherokee,” in Southern Indians and Anthropologists: Culture, Politics, and Identity, edited by Lisa J. Lefler and Frederic W. Gleach (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002). The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bender, Margaret Clelland. Signs of Cherokee culture: Sequoyah’s syllabary in eastern Cherokee life / Margaret Bender. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8078-2707-x (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8078-5376-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Cherokee language—Writing—Social aspects. 2. Cherokee Indians—North Carolina—Social life and customs. 3. Sequoyah, 1770?–1843—Influence. I. Title. E99.C5 B44 2002 497′.55—dc21 2001059821 cloth 06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1 paper 06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1 For Bobby Blossom Contents Preface Note on Orthography Introduction One Pride and Ambivalence: The Syllabary’s Received History and Interpretation Two Reading, Writing, and the Reproduction of Cultural Categories: Three R’s of Orthographic Choice in Cherokee Language Education Three Talking Leaves, Silent Leaves: Syllabary as Code Four Reading the Signs: Metalinguistic Characterizations of the Syllabary Five What Else You Gonna Go After?: The Commodification of the Syllabary Conclusion Notes References Index Illustrations 1. Cherokee syllabary chart 4 2. Progressive-conservative continuums 37 3. Neon syllabary-decorated sign for a downtown Cherokee business 53 4. Sample syllabary clock face 60 5. The four orthographies used in Eastern Cherokee language education 63 6. Type of “code” puzzle used to teach spelling 70 7. Pages from Cherokee Hymn Book 79 8. John 1 from the Cherokee New Testament 123 9. Rebuslike interpretations of characters 127 10. Morpho-semantic manipulations designed to produce accurate syllabary spellings 128 11. Page from Cherokee Words with Pictures, by Mary Ulmer Chiltoskey 133 12. Frankoma pottery trivet with syllabary design 134 13. Sign on the door of Cherokee Elementary School in downtown Cherokee 135 14. Sign for a clinic in downtown Cherokee 136 Preface In 1992, I commenced research for a study of the Cherokee syllabary, the writing system for the Cherokee language completed by the monolingual Cherokee Sequoyah in the 1820s. I had a long- standing personal interest in the Cherokees, and I was interested in literacy in part because of my earlier experiences as an assistant second grade teacher and as a teacher of adult literacy. I was thus aware, before I ever went to the field, and even before I began exploring the literacy and orality literature in anthropology, that literacy was a powerful cultural resource, unevenly distributed in the United States, with extremely different cultural implications and associations for various groups in this society. I mention these experiences not only because they shaped my initial interests but also because they have lent insight to my fieldwork in ways that would have been hard to predict in advance. For example, the metaphor of the “code” that I use in Chapters 2 and 3 to describe a related set of modes of syllabary usage springs from my experience with codes used to teach literacy skills to young children. My experiences with adult literacy students made me sensitive to the possibility of alienation from particular types of reading and writing, or from whole writing systems themselves, and focused my attention on choices made among potential orthographies (writing systems) in classrooms and in cultural preservation efforts. As a student of Cherokee culture, I wondered whether the Cherokee syllabary, a source of native pride with a unique history, might have a different pattern of distribution and different symbolic associations than does the roman alphabet used in the reading and writing of English. Influenced by the movement in literacy studies toward more culturally specific, context-oriented approaches, and away from a general linkage of literacy as a singular technology with particular types of cognition (e.g., “logical thought”) and social organization (e.g., “civilization”), I set out to look for a “Cherokee ideology of literacy.” In the course of my investigation, I have learned the following: (1) There is no one Cherokee ideology of literacy but rather a range of specific ideologies that become apparent in different types and contexts of usage. (2) “Literacy” as associated with the Cherokee language is a multifaceted phenomenon, pertaining not only to the syllabary as a system but to a variety of styles of phonetic writing and in which reading, handwriting, and printing all have different connotations. (3) The various ideologies connected with literacy in Cherokee are not sociopolitical ideologies external to writing and, more generally, to language itself, that somehow penetrate or permeate language use; rather, language use itself is ideological, enacting categories that structure the Cherokee social world. Before I began this project, I hoped it would branch out from the potentially narrow approach of literacy studies to address the current nature of Cherokee cultural identity more broadly, but I could not then have envisioned exactly the form that the relationship— between writing in the syllabary and Cherokee culture more broadly —would take. At that time, I hoped to work ultimately with an Oklahoma community, perhaps doing some comparative study in North Carolina or spending some time doing language study in North Carolina before a more intensive field study in Oklahoma. The rationale for this plan was that I would find more fluent speakers in Oklahoma and hence more—and a greater variety of—syllabary usage in Oklahoma. The North Carolina community, I felt, was so heavily characterized by tourism and so predominantly English- speaking that use of the syllabary might be absent or limited. But I went to North Carolina first and decided to stay. The Cherokee language is still spoken by more Eastern Cherokees than most outsiders realize. In fact, I found that tourism itself played a major part in the fascinating cultural dynamics surrounding local language use and literacy. Among the most prominent themes that have emerged in my work are secrecy, privacy, and protection. Although I am not suggesting that tourism created these dynamics in Eastern Cherokee culture, it is certainly an integral part of their playing out. For it is by way of the movement among, and differences between, the various contexts of syllabary usage that the potential for privacy, secrecy, and protection is created in a community of a few thousand visited by millions of outsiders each year. Cherokee, North Carolina, is a community of many faces, only some of which are visible to the tourist passing through. So the syllabary appears in somewhat different modes of usage and presentation in the tourist shops in downtown Cherokee than it does in Cherokee language education, in local churches, and in homes. It is in the movement among these contexts that a range of Cherokee cultural identities (some relatively more public and some relatively more private) is negotiated. This is all to say that some of the very factors that made me reluctant to work in North Carolina—the tourism, and the seeming inaccessibility of dimensions of the community beyond tourism— ultimately became integral aspects of my topic. THERE SEEMS TO BE a generational cycle to the study of the Eastern Cherokees. James Mooney and Frans Olbrechts worked in this community in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, collecting myths and sacred formulas and studying local knowledge of traditional spirituality and medicine (Mooney 1982; Mooney and Olbrechts 1932). William Gilbert (1943) carried out a genealogical study of the community in the 1930s that focused on kinship, and the University of North Carolina’s cross-cultural laboratory, headed by John Gulick (1960), produced (or served as a departure point for) several studies in the 1950s and early 1960s, including the work of Ray Fogelson, Charles Holzinger, Harriet Kupferer, Paul Kutsche, and Bob Thomas. (See Gulick 1960 for a bibliography of papers generated by the project.) In the 1970s, Sharlotte Neely (1991) conducted research with the Snowbird community, an outlying Eastern Cherokee community that is considered to be highly traditional. The 1990s produced a new crop of ethnographic projects. Sarah Hill, in American studies, conducted work on Cherokee basketry that combined ethnographic and historical perspectives on Cherokee women (1997). Doris Hipps, in