“‘Yes,’ Agili said, ‘Sequoyah is right. It is possible for us to learn to speak English. The missionaries can teach their writing to you, just as they taught it to me. They tell us English is much better than Tsalagi and I think they may be right. We need to forget Tsalagi and just use English. Then when we know English well enough, we can write as they do and make our own talking leaves.’

“Agili thought he was agreeing with me, but he was not.

“‘No,’ I said. ‘No, no! That is not what I mean. I do not want to give up our own language. I want to do this in Tsalagi.’

“I did not want to give up our language for English. That is why, though I can understand some of the white man’s tongue, I have never truly learned to speak or write it. I love our beautiful language, the language of our grandparents, of our stories and songs. It is the language of the land itself, as musical as the singing of the birds and the wind in the trees. It seemed to me that if we forgot our language, we would forget how to be Tsalagi people. We would gain knowledge but lose ourselves. If we were to read and write, we needed to do it in our own way. English was too hard. Tsalagi is the language we talk in. It is the language we think in. We needed to be able to read and write Tsalagi. Then everyone in our nation would be able to learn it. With such reading and writing we could rebuild our nation and keep it strong. We would not have to rely on the white men to keep track of our dealings with them. We could send messages back and forth to one another. We could hold on to our histories and our stories and we would do so not in the language of our enemies, but in our own tongue and in our own way.

“But back then, no one agreed with me. In fact, my friends looked at me as if I was insane.

“‘Sequoyah, that is not possible,’ Agili said.

“‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Look.’

“Then I took a pin from my headcloth. I picked up a flat stone.

“‘Watch,’ I said, ‘I will make a word.’ I scratched a picture of a bird with the pin. ‘You see,’ I said. ‘What is this?’

“‘Tsisqua,’ one of my friends said.

“‘Of course,’ I said. ‘See how easy it is!’

“But Agili shook his head. ‘Cousin, what kind of bird? Buzzard? Hummingbird? And what is it doing? Is it flying? Is it eating? Is it a dead bird or is it alive? And what if it was a flock of birds? Would you draw all of them.’

“They all laughed at that. And I had to agree. They were right. It was not as easy as just drawing pictures.