The 2023-2024 Chieftains Lecture Series is sponsored by the family of Jody Selman, a founding member of Chieftains Museum/Major Ridge Home.
Presented by Dr. Ellen Cushman, “To Write A People: The Cherokee Syllabary and Cherokee Identity Past and Present,tells the story of the creation, development, and continued vitality of the Cherokee syllabary from its introduction by Cherokee metalworker and inventor Sequoyah, its print transmission in publications like the Cherokee Phoenix, to its present civic and cultural use among the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes. The presentation traces the creation, dissemination, and evolution of Sequoyah’s syllabary from script to print to digital forms, thus illustrating how it has remained and continues to be a principal part of Cherokee identity. The lecture also highlights the unique character of the Cherokee syllabary through demonstrating its origins in distinctly Cherokee syllables and Cherokee meanings over Euro-American alphabetic writing systems.
Ellen Cushman is the Dean's Professor of Civic Sustainability and Professor of English at Northeastern University. She is also a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and has served as a Cherokee Nation Sequoyah Commissioner. Her research explores the ways individuals and communities use reading and writing to endure and create change.
She has written numerous articles and several books on the relationship between writing, rhetoric, language perseverance and preservation, and cultural persistence. Among these are her book, The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People's Perseverance (University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), which traces the instrumental, cultural and historical legacy of the Cherokee syllabary.
Her current research takes up Cherokee philosophies of collective change and reevaluates the commitment to civic-mindedness at the heart of American literary and rhetorical studies. The book project is entitled Cherokee Lifeways: Hidden Literacies of Collective Action (working title) and will be the first monograph to treat the common writings of Cherokee people as evidence of a lived ethic of individual persistence and a people's collective resilience.
Additionally, Dr. Cushman is currently co-leading a team developing a digital archive to support indigenous language learning through the translation of Cherokee language manuscripts housed in museums and archives around the country. The Digital Archive of Indigenous Languages Persistence (DAILP) project has been generously supported by grants from the National Archives, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Henry K. Luce Foundation, and Northeastern University.