Indians of North America Theda Perdue The Cherokees (2004)

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.The children in mission schools did not always behave inways that earned them the missionaries approval.Cherokeechildren were very uninhibited: Boys and girls swam togetherwithout clothing and played games together wearing littlemore.They talked openly about sex and made off-color jokesto each other.Missionaries also found them vain andcomplained that they loved the pretty clothes and ornaments36 THE CHEROKEESthat the teachers thought were frivolous.The missionaries,however, had to use care in punishing children.Cherokeeparents rarely disciplined their children and never usedcorporal punishment.If they discovered that a missionaryhad spanked a child, they often withdrew the child fromschool.Therefore, the missionaries resorted to another formof punishment: They required students to memorize Bibleverses appropriate to their infractions.Missionaries and agents were remarkably successful intransforming the Cherokees culture but only because manyCherokees had decided that these changes were in their ownbest interest.Parents sent their children to school, even withthe understanding that they might become estranged fromthem, because they wanted their children to be able to dealmore effectively with whites.In time, many adult Cherokeesbegan to adopt new ways.Women learned to spin and weave,while men opened stores and operated ferries and toll roads.At the same time, civilization gave Cherokees new ideas,like nationalism, and new strategies to resist growing pressurefor their land.The Cherokee Nation officially adopted the civilizationprogram of the U.S.government because Cherokee leadersbelieved that if their people were culturally indistinguishablefrom whites, the white people would permit them to live inpeace in their homeland.The Cherokee government supportedthe work of the missionaries and sought to further theeducational opportunities of its citizens.With the help ofmissionaries, the Nation managed to buy a printing press andtypefaces in both English and in the alphabet invented by theCherokee Sequoyah.Sequoyah had been born about 1770.He had a traditionalCherokee childhood and never learned English.He did recog-nize, however, the tremendous advantage English speakersenjoyed by being able to write their language.He wanted hisown people to have that advantage.About 1809, he beganCherokee Civilization 37Sequoyah (c.1770 1843) is perhaps the most famous Cherokee.He isknown to people throughout the world as the creator of the Cherokeesyllabary the system that allowed the Cherokee Nation to have awritten language for the first time in its history.work on a Cherokee alphabet.Sequoyah struggled for morethan a decade.Finally, he arrived at a system that worked, andwithin months, he had developed eighty-six symbols (laterreduced to eighty-five) that stood for Cherokee syllables.Because Sequoyah knew no alphabet, he invented his ownsymbols for Cherokee.Some of these symbols resemble thosefrom the alphabet in which English is written; some appear tobe adapted from the Greek alphabet, which Sequoyah may have38 THE CHEROKEESseen at a mission station; others seem to have been createdby him.Whatever their origins, the symbols of the Sequoyahsyllabary, as a writing system based on syllables is called,provided an efficient way to write the Cherokee language.TheCherokees enthusiastically adopted Sequoyah s syllabary andsoon used it in place of a rival writing system developed bywhite missionaries.The system was remarkably easy to learn:Anyone who spoke Cherokee fluently could reportedly readand write the language in a few days.The Cherokees quicklybecame a literate people.In 1828, the Cherokee Phoenix, a bilingual newspaper, beganpublication under the editorship of Elias Boudinot, a youngCherokee man who had been educated in mission schoolsin the Cherokee Nation and in New England.In columns ofalternating Cherokee and English, Boudinot printed the lawsof the Nation, local news, world news, human interest stories,Bible passages, editorials, and advertisements.Subscribers tothe paper included not only Cherokees but interested whitesin the United States and Europe.(For additional informationon the United States first Native American newspaper, enter The Cherokee Phoenix into any search engine and browsethe many sites listed.)The Cherokee Phoenix, the Sequoyah syllabary, and themission schools pointed to the success of the civilizationprogram.Another outgrowth of the program was the develop-ment of commercial agriculture among the Cherokees [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Linki