Cherokee Phoenix, first issue

The Cherokee Phoenix is a newspaper credited with being the first Native American newspaper to be published. Its first issue was set in two writing systems at once: English and Sequoyah’s Cherokee syllabary, where each of 86 symbols stands for a consonant and vowel combination rather than a single letter. Sequoyah was a Cherokee man who could not read or write, and spent about ten years creating the system. He began with a pictograph for every word, found that unmanageable, and settled on a phonetic system that breaks Cherokee into its basic sounds.  Printing it meant casting type for a script designed for the hand, and the Phoenix became the first newspaper printed in an Indigenous American language.

Its first issue appeared while the Cherokee were already being pushed forcibly off their land. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was written into law, and the Supreme Court’s ruling for Cherokee sovereignty was ignored. Thousands, estimated to be a fifth of the Cherokee population, died along the Trail of Tears. Through this, the language was attacked more quietly. Federal boarding schools prohibited Cherokee and punished children for speaking it, so many families stopped passing it on. Printing beside English was a public claim that it, and by association the Cherokee people as a whole, belonged in public life during and preceding a time when access to public life was not guaranteed.

That claim became a precedent. Hundreds of Native American newspapers have followed since 1828, most owned, operated, and written by Indigenous people, at a time when papers at federally funded schools were under government editorial control. The Phoenix also modeled persistence through design. Its press was destroyed in 1834; its successor, the Cherokee Advocate, was paused in 1906 as Oklahoma statehood was imposed on tribal lands, and it returned once the Cherokee Nation government was reconstituted in 1976. In 2000, the nation passed an act protecting the paper from political control. Today it continues to publish, alongside many tribal papers doing the same. In each case, the existence of the publication is itself resistance, and the design carries that message. This standard has only become more relevant with modernity, where Indigenous people must still fight for equitable access not only to public spheres, but to their own culture and history. Therefore, Indigenous printed design, which keeps scripts and visual identities in public view, is not only relevant to design canon, but to a larger history of preservation and resistance.