Documentary details life of Cherokee legend
The painstaking process of converting a complex language to writing, extensive travels to try to unite a displaced people, a mysterious end in a country far from home: these are just a few facets of the story of Cherokee visionary Sequoyah.
Those who know the Cherokee tribe had a written language have almost certainly heard of or seen a likeness of its inventor, but until recently, there has been little widespread information about his personal life.
“Searching for Sequoyah,” a newly released, hour-long documentary airing on PBS, explores the individuality and intellect of the man who invented a syllabary and then distributed that 86-character system to a nation which had become far-flung.
Sequoyah traveled extensively to introduce his system and to encourage unity among the Cherokee people, a group which had endured the Trail of Tears and traveled from their homelands in the Southeastern United States to Oklahoma and even into Mexico.
As James Fortier, the project’s producer, director and cinematographer, points out, before the documentary, there had been no nationally distributed depiction of Sequoyah’s life, and the story of his personhood, not just his accomplishments, was “long overdue.”
“What we wanted to do was take viewers on a journey to replicate his journey … that’s what we attempted to do in one hour,” Fortier says.
A team taking shape
LeAnne Howe, a writer and producer for the project is a Choctaw Nation citizen with Cherokee lineage. She is a professor of English at the University of Georgia at present, and she and Fortier began discussing the possibility of a documentary about Sequoyah back in 2002 while working on another documentary for PBS, “Indian
Diaries: Spiral of Fire.”
That project centered on the Eastern band of Cherokees today, but they realized as they ran across references to Sequoyah again and again that his story hadn’t been fully told and widely distributed. As Fortier recalled in an email to the Calhoun Times, “... that just seemed plain wrong, considering his accomplishments and his standing, not only in the Cherokee world, but sort of the larger ‘Indian Country’ world as well.”
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