What S Your Story Sequoyah

How did Sequoyah create a Cherokee alphabet? How did he improve the lives of the Cherokee? Cub Reporter interviews him to find out! Learn how Sequoyah overcame adversity in his childhood, and created the Cherokee alphabet, which helped thousands to become literate. Readers will see how to use interviewing skills and journalistic questions to reveal the story behind a famous American.

Cub Reporter uses his interviewing skills to tell the story of the man who created a Cherokee alphabet and endured the Trail of Tears with his people.

In the early 1800s, white settlers and missionaries were intent on bringing the English language to the illiterate Native Americans. Sequoyah was intrigued by these leaves of paper with strange marks that talked. Doing what no one had ever done before, Sequoyah set about creating a written Cherokee language—helping preserve the tribe's history and culture even today.

The story of Sequoyah is the tale of an ordinary man with an extraordinary idea—to create a writing system for the Cherokee Indians and turn his people into a nation of readers and writers. The task he set for himself was daunting. Sequoyah knew no English and had no idea how to capture speech on paper. But slowly and painstakingly, ignoring the hoots and jibes of his neighbors and friends, he worked out a system that surprised the Cherokee Nation—and the world of the 1820s—with its beauty and simplicity. James Rumford’s Sequoyah is a poem to celebrate literacy, a song of a people’s struggle to stand tall and proud.

Sequoyah created a way of writing the Cherokee language 200 years ago. Thanks to Sequoyah, the Cherokee today know more about their history and native language than almost any other tribe in North America.

A brief introduction to the life of the Cherokee Indian who created a method for his people to write and read their own language.

2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FICTION FINALIST Set in rural Oklahoma during the late 1980s, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a stunning and lyrical Native American coming-of-age story. With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother’s years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface. At least until he meets seventeen-year-old Rosemary, a troubled artist who also lives with the family. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah’s feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.

A biography of Sequoyah, inventor of a writing system for the Cherokee language.