♪ -I think that Sequoyah's story is one that resonates with Americans.

He works perfectly into this American "pull yourself up by your bootstrap" kind of story.

-Sequoyah has always been a giant mythic figure in Cherokee history.

-Sequoyah is really the first Cherokee genius.

-Sequoyah represents Cherokee ingenuity at its finest, Cherokee perseverance at its most intense.

-No one person has ever created a writing system in 5,000 years of human civilization, so it was an incredible feat not only for the Cherokee, but for humanity.

-We have a few heroes in our history, but Sequoyah is that one that we always want our kids to know about.

-He's been mythologized.

He's less a person or a man than an icon.

-He's this big figure in Cherokee life.

Everybody knows who he is.

-Sequoyah shows up in the documents far more than many Cherokee people and yet doesn't show up enough for us to piece him together.

-The man that invented the Cherokee writing system left behind very little written records handwritten by himself.

-It's a really unique contradiction in terms of who the man was versus what his achievements were.

-He was an artist.

He was a soldier.

He was a politician.

He was a diplomat.

-From his birth, which no one knows quite the date, through his death, no one quite knows.

So his entire life is shrouded in mystery.

-People said he was crazy.

People said he was doing something that was wrong.

Yet, here we are 200 years later still talking about him.

-He believed in the Cherokee people and believed in what the syllabary could do to keep us going.

-Like much of Sequoyah's life, Sequoyah's death is heavily mythologized.

-No one knows exactly where he died.

No one's ever found the body.

-I don't know what will happen when you go to search for Sequoyah in Mexico.

-Would we find his grave?

Would we find his descendants?

Would we find people who are carrying stories about him?

-When we search for Sequoyah, we search not just for the historical person, but we search for what he came to symbolize.

Because in a lot of ways the search for Sequoyah is the search for us.

[ Choir vocalizing ] ♪ ♪ ♪ -[ Speaking Cherokee ] Good to see everyone here.

Um, we are gathered extraordinarily here, I think, with a group of direct descendants of Sequoyah's, of George Guess's.

[ Speaking Cherokee ] I'm Joshua Nelson.

In my research on Cherokee culture, there's no one that I've come to admire more than Sequoyah.

We Cherokees revere Sequoyah's genius, despite the many mysteries of the man and his final travels.

But if one searches closely, his tracks are all around us -- through his descendants, in Cherokee art, literature, politics, and on the very land itself.

Across America, his name has morphed into a brand.

Our journey spans two countries and reflects the stories of three Cherokee nations.

If you were searching for something about him, what would you most like to know?

-How many wives he actually had.

-Ohh!

-[ Laughter ] -Sequoyah was a young Cherokee man born at Tuskegee on the Little Tennessee River about the time of the American Revolution.

♪ If you look at Timberlake's map that he drew in 1762, the village of Tuskegee starts with three houses off that corner of the bastion, about 50 feet out, so... -Okay, and so if we're thinking about where Sequoyah was born?

-He would be born out there in what's now covered by the lake.

Here at the museum, we look at circa 1776 as Sequoyah's birthday, maybe in 1777.

-Yeah.

-It's believed that he is the son of an English trader named Guess or Gist.

-One of the things I find really interesting about Sequoyah's heritage is how it changes according to who you talk to.

-This perception that he was half-white has been handed down since forever.

Well, since he was young.

-The obsession with paternity is also the legacy of racial bias.

The question is that Sequoyah somehow couldn't have been a genius as an indigenous man.

-Blood was not the determining factor.

-People understood that Sequoyah had a Cherokee mother, and that's all they needed to know.

-It didn't matter whether or not he had a white father by the last name of Guess.

He was culturally, linguistically, spiritually, intellectually, ideologically Cherokee.

-The most famous image that we have of Sequoyah comes from the paintings of Charles Bird King.

That painting itself was destroyed in the fire from the Smithsonian, so we don't even -- we don't even have that piece anymore other than the lithographs that have been -- existed in the reproductions.

-We'd really like to talk about your artwork you're kind of doing on the side.

Sequoyah shows up in a lot of your pieces.

Can you talk to us a little bit about a couple of them?

-So, I like to play with this image, create different versions of it.

So, I have one where he's like a "Simpsons" character.

There's another where he's doing the "live long and prosper" motion like Spock does from "Star Trek," because I imagine he was a very logical, smart individual, so I think he would have an affinity for Spock.

But his portrait is not him.

-Right.

-Some say it's someone else that sat in for him.

And then other artists through the centuries and decades have taken that image and done their own versions of it.

And it's that famous picture of him holding the tablet with the syllabary on it.

So, in my piece, he never sat for a portrait.

I painted him in a very almost abstract manner.

The idea of it was that we don't know what he looked like and his image is constantly changing.

Every artist has their own interpretation of what he looks like.

I like to play with -- Who was he?

What'd he look like?

No one really knows.

-But one of the things that we think we know fairly reliably is that Sequoyah was also an artist.

And so I wonder if you've read up a little bit on that part of the history and if that also kind of connects with the work that you're doing?

-Yeah, I've read some accounts where they talk about him being very skilled at drawing, especially drawing animals and the landscapes and that kind of thing, and then his work as a silversmith.

He had these skills that came in handy if you develop a writing system.

It is a form of graphic art.

Took a lot of thought and skill to do that.

-We really don't know a great deal about his history, his biography, prior to the invention of the syllabary.

Do we have ideas about why that is?

-The reason is because they are looking for somebody named Sequoyah.

His name wasn't Sequoyah before then.

His name was "Jisquaya."

"There's a bird inside."

He was born with that name.

And so later on, his family all said, "You're not taking care of your farm, your animals.

You're neglecting all of that.

So instead of you being called Jisquaya, we're gonna change your name to 'Sequoyah.'

'There's a pig inside.'"

You know, some say that he was born with a clubfoot.

They called him "the lame one."

I even read one account where he was shot in the leg, you know?

But according to Grandma, what she told me was he got hurt playing his favorite game, stickball.

He broke his knee, and it never healed back right, and that's why he limped.

-I wonder if you've got ideas about the political and historical and maybe to some degree military climate that Sequoyah is growing up in around here and what kind of influence that might have had on who he became.

-In that 1700s period, you had the blockhouse that is built just on the other side of the Tennessee River, and that's built to keep whites from coming in and encroaching in on Cherokee land.

It becomes a trading hub, a place to teach Cherokee women how to spin, weave, to teach Cherokee men, the Cherokee warriors to be farmers.

-It's a changing world.

It's a world in which Cherokee people are actively, very dynamically modifying their culture and modifying their lives with the changing world.

-Okay, and so if the option then becomes learning these new sorts of technologies and learning these new ways of being in a modern world, maybe we could see why it is that Sequoyah has kind of got his eye on new kinds of innovations, why he takes up blacksmithing and then keeps eyes out for other ways of navigating the world.

-Like everyone in humanity, they want a good life for themselves and they want a better life for their children.

-In 1814, Sequoyah and other Cherokees fought alongside American troops led by Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

Some have wondered if Sequoyah got the idea of creating a Cherokee writing system after seeing Jackson's soldiers writing orders on paper, or as the Cherokees would come to call them, talking leaves.

-There's a number of accounts that say that Sequoyah started his process in 1809.

Some estimates put that process starting earlier than 1809.

-So he's already started years before the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

Where were the soldiers he saw?

At the Tellico Blockhouse.

And that's where they have a blacksmith shop.

And so it would have been there that Sequoyah would have seen the officers writing orders.

He was seeing soldiers writing letters.

-Undoubtedly, he had had some exposure to written language before that.

-You know, we hear the story that Sequoyah was walking down a road, and as he's walking along, he finds all these papers, and what's on them -- there's German, there's Greek, there's French.

And he uses those characters to create his symbols for his syllabary.

-But... -But we know from the research, Sequoyah, he creates his own symbols out of his own mind, by his own hand.

They exist nowhere else in the world.

-He utilized a set of symbols to create a looping, curvilinear set of writing that was then adapted to the print form.

-Throughout this process, Sequoyah is struggling with a variety of problems that come up.

-It's very well-documented that he faced enormous obstacles in the creation of the syllabary.

-When he started off, he wanted to do ideographs.

He started trying to make a picture for every word and found that was really cumbersome.

So he modified it to the sounds of the syllables, and he settled on 86 characters.

-We understand that the process was conducted somewhat secretively.

-And throughout this process, he's a little bit derelict in some of his other responsibilities.

-His pursuit was a cause for some concern among his friends and relations.

-One story goes that they condemned him as practicing witchcraft.

They disfigured him.

They cut his face.

Some people eventually burned his cabin and destroyed his work.

-The fact that Sequoyah was able to parse out these unique sounds that Cherokee has and codify them within a syllabary is really amazing.

When you think about the fact that Sequoyah himself was not literate in another language, it becomes even more amazing.

-One really interesting thing about the way in which Sequoyah has been represented is as kind of this lone male genius out in the woods doing all of this amazing work that no other human being has ever created an alphabet on their own, he was thwarted by his wife.

-And I think that story fits nicely with also men's histories, and it is a kind of telling of history that it often excludes women.

-There are ways in which a lot of heavily gendered stereotypes and expectations come into play that really disconnect him from Cherokee tradition, where women have really profound and powerful influences on intellectual life.

-The two earliest accounts given by Sequoyah of his process to create the syllabary both point out the fact that his wife and child, Ayoka, participate in this process with him.

-He worked on this for decades.

That says something really significant about the kind of person he was, but also the kind of commitment he had to a community that he believed in.

-And, additionally, we forget the fact that his first student is his daughter, Ayoka.

-She was the one who realized the potential of the syllabary in that moment.

-It's his daughter who goes before the skeptical National Council with him to establish the efficacy of the syllabary's usage.

-Sequoyah, in his life's work, never limited his work to himself.

-And then what does he do with it when he's finished?

He gives it away to Cherokee people.

-So people go meet him at the salt springs, and he's out there with his charred stick on the logs showing them the syllabary, and that speaks to somebody who is alive with the power of possibility of what this writing tool can do for the people.

-It's introduced to the Nation.

The Nation says, "Yes, this is our official writing system."

It's adopted.

-What he did was astronomical, but it was for every Cherokee.

-And so people start learning it.

Part of the responsibility as you learned it, you teach others, so it spread rapidly.

-The community started using syllabaries in the handwritten form.

-It is said that the populace became literate almost overnight.

-I imagine Sequoyah teaching others the syllabary using leaves instead of paper or etching into the earth at their feet by tracing the figures with his cane, composing a new story from the land that first wrote his and ours.

A simple but profound lesson.

[ Speaking Cherokee ] "I write Cherokee."

-You know, "talking leaves" is an interesting idea.

The talking leaves come from the way in which white commentators kind of romanticized it that we've since kind of adopted.

It's a very evocative symbol, but I think so much of our traditions and so much of our lives come out of our relationship to the lands to which we belong.

-Sequoyah's invention takes language from its ephemeral form and places it in a permanent form.

-The story of the syllabary, the story of Sequoyah's life, It connects us with a past and it speaks into a future where we're present and where we're still communicating, we're still telling stories.

-Today, Sequoyah's descendants can be found among the only three Cherokee groups that are federally recognized through treaties with the U.S. government, including the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians located in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina.

Halfway across the country, the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians are both located in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

To learn more about the Keetoowah perspective on Sequoyah, I decided to visit one of Sequoyah's UKB descendants.

I want to talk a little bit more about your writing and your storytelling and where it kind of comes from and what you're trying to do with it.

I feel like in your writing you are really aiming to help reconnect people.

That is something that Sequoyah was doing, too, so I feel like in a lot of ways you really are trying to carry on that really important tradition.

-It probably is handed down somehow or another in my DNA to do that.

Having the name itself was hard enough.

I've always wanted to do things myself without having to lean on the fact that Sequoyah, just by happenstance, is in the family tree.

-Mm-hmm.

-But I even thought at one time -- I honestly thought about changing my name.

-Oh, you did?

-Yeah.

Yeah.

-Big shoes to fill.

-Yeah, yeah.

Too big.

=Sequoyah, tell us a little bit about your storytelling traditions.

-Everything that I do in my storytelling, I learned from Grandma.

In some of the funnier stories, I change my voice.

And my grandma used to do that.

She was one of the best storytellers that I ever knew.

-I'm really hopeful that maybe we can get a chance to sit in on a story if maybe you'd be willing to tell one to us.

Right now?

-Yeah.

Maybe we can get a good audience for you.

-Oh, okay.

[ Laughs ] So, anyway, I call this "The Saga of Foot Foot," and it goes something like this.

A long time ago, there was a rabbit named Foot.

He had two cousins named Foot Foot and Foot Foot Foot.

When they were through, Foot Foot said, "What are we gonna do now?"

Foot Foot Foot said, "I don't know about you, but I'm getting out of here."

Foot Foot said, "Getting out of here?

Why?"

Foot Foot Foot said, "Well, we got one Foot in the grave already."

[ Laughter ] [ Applause ] -Did you get it?

-By the early 1800s, encroaching white settlers poured into the Cherokee homelands, some seeking gold, starting rumors of a forced Cherokee removal.

-Even though his syllabary winds up being an incredible tool for the Cherokee Nation to use during the moment it's resisting removal, what is Sequoyah doing this period?

He removes voluntarily!

He chooses not to stay in the east and fight removal.

-When he was working on the syllabary itself before it was even finalized in 1821, he was working on it out west.

He went to the Arkansas territory.

-The Old Settlers are often also referred to as the Arkansas Cherokees.

Beginning after the treaties of 1817 and 1819, a trickle of Eastern Cherokees began moving west, first to Arkansas.

So those Old Settlers voluntarily removed.

-In those times of political turmoil there in the removal era, Sequoyah, like a lot of Cherokees, I think, saw the writing on the wall that removal was inevitable.

So for him to sign that, some people did see him as a traitor.

-In 1828, the State of Georgia further inflamed the situation by extending discriminatory laws over the Cherokee Nation and opening Cherokee land for white settlers and land speculators.

-This is also followed by Cherokee leadership becoming increasingly divided over resisting removal.

-Relocating out west was eventually favored by the Treaty Party, a faction of Cherokee leaders led by John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, and Stand Watie.

This existential threat to the Cherokee people drove a wedge between those who favored removal and those who wanted to stay and resist, led by John Ross and the Cherokee National Council.

Among those pushing for Cherokee removal was the newly elected president and former Cherokee ally, Andrew Jackson, himself a prominent landholder.

-Within two years, Andrew Jackson has signed the Indian Removal Act, and so, ultimately, this winds up laying out in the forced removal of Cherokees between 1838 and 1840.

-When Sequoyah invented the writing system, it was seen by many people as an act of Cherokee nationalism, and Sequoyah saw the Cherokee Nation as something greater than the political entity that it was.

I think he saw the language and culture as a unifying factor of what made people Cherokee, and people seem to have forgiven him for the treaty that he signed, and they welcomed him back into the fold.

-So, I have two stories that I really liked about Sequoyah.

One of them is the really central role that he played reconnecting the nation after the Trail of Tears and bridging the gap between the Old Settlers, the Treaty Party, and the folks who walked the Trail with John Ross.

-One thing we often forget is that the Old Settlers had established a new government for themselves in the West.

-If not for Sequoyah, we might have had a war then.

-And now you're expecting two governmental bodies to come back together.

-He really helped to bridge that gap, and, again, it was because he believed that our kinship ties and our relationships were what should be supreme, and that was very, very clear in everything that he did in trying to bring everyone together under a shared government.

-The Act of Union takes place in 1839 with the help of Sequoyah.

-I think the syllabary itself is one of the unifying elements of Cherokee history and heritage.

When people see the syllabary, even if they can't read or write it, they know what it is and they know it's Cherokee and they identify it.

-Reunification is a long, complicated, and violent process that really doesn't wrap up until the 1846 treaty.

-So his work as a diplomat is something that gets overshadowed a lot by his work in developing the writing system.

-Talk a little bit more about what family connections have to do with Sequoyah.

-Being family and being tied into Sequoyah and his legacy, it's fulfilling to know that, you know, I have an opportunity to keep that alive.

It's a spiritual language that has become on paper now so that we can utilize that as family, as community people in our everyday life.

-Winnie, we're here now with David Hampton, the leading Cherokee genealogist.

Everyone says you want to know Cherokee genealogy, you come see David.

Can you tell us why it is that genealogy matters so much to Cherokee citizenship?

-If you want to be a citizen of the Cherokee Nation here, then you have to be a descendant of someone on the Dawes Roll.

I had a base to start building on right from the beginning.

-And you ran Winnie's not that long ago, I guess.

-Yes.

Her father's a full-blood.

Her mother's a white woman.

So I did the research on her father's side, see how she descended from Sequoyah.

-And that got pretty firmly established.

Is that right?

-Oh, yeah.

Let's see.

Sequoyah would be her fourth great-grandfather.

-Fourth great.

-Your fourth great-grandfather.

David, can you tell us how reliable the genealogical records around Sequoyah are?

-There are some records which lists Sequoyah as an ancestor.

-About how many children do you think he had?

-I think he had at least 10.

I've heard people claim 20.

Maybe in a few years, we'll have some better researched information about exactly who all of his wives and children were.

-That was my next question.

Any idea about how many wives he had?

-[ Chuckles ] -Uh, probably around five.

-That many?

-I think so, yeah.

-Which one was Winnie's?

-Winnie's grandmother that was Sequoyah's wife was Lucy Campbell.

I believe that's very well-documented.

-I've heard that name.

Lucy Campbell.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

-When we talk about the Cherokee Nation, we are really talking about a kind of organically, physically related group of people.

And so we're wondering -- any potential connections between Winnie and I?

-I did find a second cousin of Winnie's dad who is also a cousin of yours.

-Oh, what are we looking at here?

-Well, we were looking at William Pritchett is the first cousin of Winnie's grandfather.

-Winnie's granddad's cousin, William Pritchett.

-And his wife, Annie Pumpkin, is a first cousin of Emily Murphy.

That's your, what, great-grandmother?

-Yeah.

Emma Murphy, they called her.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

First cousin to her?

-Yes.

-So those two families married just back in my great-granddad's time.

-That's pretty cool.

-That's pretty cool.

-David, thanks a million.

[ Speaks Cherokee ] Come on, cousin.

-We're out of here, cuz.

-Come on, cousin.

You made a big splash as a dancer when you were growing up.

-I did.

-How old were you?

-I was about 9.

-Mm-hmm.

In addition to appearing on the local channels, you made your way a little more nationally before it was all over, didn't you?

-When I was in high school, we had the opportunity to travel to New York City, and it was at that time that we appeared on the stage of "The Ed Sullivan Show."

-This is your dad.

-This is my daddy.

-What was his name?

-George Guess.

-George Guess.

-George Guess.

Uh-huh.

-So I'm guessing he knew that he was a descendant of Sequoyah's from pretty early on.

-Well, he did.

He grew up with that knowledge.

My daddy, he was an artist.

He was a silversmith.

So I had that in my background.

My mother, a teacher.

-He's reminding me of Sequoyah.

-Well, he is.

He is, isn't it?

-Tell us about this.

-Okay.

It was called the Indian Centennial.

So, Daddy was asked to portray Sequoyah teaching the syllabary.

-So in this picture, we see him as Sequoyah wearing a Cherokee hunting jacket, and he's got the turban on.

And the tablet.

Does he got a pipe?

-Yes, he does have a pipe.

-He does have a pipe.

-And my daddy carved that pipe.

-You and your family, and your father in particular, really had a kind of educational dimension.

-Totally.

That probably would have been the most major connection that we as a family felt with Sequoyah.

-I feel like in some ways you've used art and performance and dance as a way to help bring people together.

-I think that that has been an instrument for me to perform and to cultivate all of this knowledge of our culture and where we have been and where we're going.

So we recognize that Sequoyah influenced our lives.

-What is most touching to you about your connection to Sequoyah?

Maybe it's in literature.

Maybe it's in art.

-So, for myself, because I can't speak it, it's really, really important to me that there is something Cherokee in every piece that I create.

I incorporate the syllabary, whether it's in a clay pot or if it's on a gourd mask.

Long after I'm gone, my work is going to be left behind for people to see.

The Cherokee language is going to be there.

There will be proof that we have our own language.

-By 1839, Sequoyah's goal of Cherokee unity was further complicated by thousands of Eastern Cherokee holdouts hiding in the Smoky Mountains.

Furthermore, a group of Cherokees led by Chief Bowles had already migrated southwest into what would become the Republic of Texas.

-Some of the tribes that the Cherokees interacted with in Texas included the Kickapoos, who were closer to that region before the Cherokees arrived.

-The Kickapoo people originally started out on the East Coast.

We moved from the Great Lakes area down through Kansas.

There were Kickapoos that never wanted to settle down.

And Kickapoo describes how we live here and there.

-The Cherokee Nation is not a unified body, even though reunification has happened.

We still have what becomes the Eastern Band living in the East.

We also have those Texas Cherokees, and they at the same time are facing pressures within Texas to move further south.

-After the Texans defeated Bowles in 1839, they expelled the Cherokees and Kickapoos from Texas.

Some Cherokees reunited with the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory.

Others sought refuge with ally tribes in Mexico, where they could escape the harassment of the Texans.

-It was well known at the time that the Kickapoos were living a traditional lifestyle, so it was a safe haven that a lot of native people, traditional people found solace there.

-They requested to go to Mexico because the United States wasn't treating them right, and the Cherokees negotiated to send them to Mexico.

"We'll go to Mexico."

-One of the weirdest stories about Sequoyah's Mexico odyssey happened in 1903 when a prospector named Fancher stumbled across some human remains in a cave tucked in the Ouachita Mountains of Southwestern Oklahoma.

Fancher's story grabbed headlines with his claim that the skeleton was found with a Jefferson Peace Medal like the one pictured in the famous portrait, proving it was Sequoyah.

I wanted to see if there was anything to this lead.

Was it possible that Sequoyah's final resting place was a cave in the Ouachita Mountains?

Thanks for going to all the trouble to help us out with our research as we're trying to figure out where Sequoyah might have ended up, where we think maybe he definitely didn't end up, and what might have been behind that whole story.

-Good.

There's great stories.

There's untrue stories.

-Right.

-There's lots to play with.

So let's talk about it.

-Very good.

Back in 1903, there's a rancher, a miner, a farmer named Fancher?

-His statement is that there within the cave site was the remains of a person.

-Mm-hmm.

And he says that he's got one leg a little bit shorter than the other.

It's been injured or something like that?

-Yeah.

In his narrative, he went into great detail.

The ultimate item is a Jefferson Peace Medal.

"Jefferson Peace Medal?

Has to be Sequoyah!"

-He's locked in now.

-You know?

Yeah, yeah.

-He's thinking he's gonna put up a couple of signs maybe.

-[ Laughs ] Yeah.

-What suggests to us that this might not have been where Sequoyah wound up?

-Well, number one is, there's no Peace Medal ever associated with Sequoyah.

-So, Sequoyah's got a medal, but it's not a Jefferson Peace Medal.

-No, it's not.

It was presented to Sequoyah by the Cherokee Council in honor of his work in developing the syllabary.

-All right, Jeff, well, based on the preponderance of the evidence, I got to figure this ain't the medal and that guy that Fancher found ain't Sequoyah.

What do you think?

-I'm with you 100%.

-Deal's done.

-Yeah.

-All right.

Well, one more false lead debunked.

-[ Laughs ] Indeed.

Well, part of what we are interested in doing is, again, trying to fill in some of these blanks, some of these gaps that we don't know about Sequoyah.

And, so, we know the last place he headed was down south to Mexico.

And so I wonder if any of you have ideas about, what do you think we might find in terms of Cherokee connections down there?

-Do you suppose that there might be elders that would've had stories passed down even though they might not be Cherokee?

You know, maybe they would have shared stories.

-We'll keep an ear out.

-Wouldn't that be something?

-He wanted to find and reconnect with Cherokees who had left the Nation and gone south.

-And they're attempting to claim a land base through the government of Mexico.

-According to some sources, not only was Sequoyah traveling to Mexico to convince those Cherokees to join the new Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory, but he may have also been visiting some of his sons who were living among the Kickapoos in Mexico.

-It was a well-known fact that there were a lot of intermarriage between the Kickapoos and the Cherokees who joined us.

We didn't want to settle down in Oklahoma.

We moved through Texas and into Coahuila, Mexico, and we were given our land in Nacimiento.

-This was an act of really profound concern for kin who were geographically removed, and he had seen the way that the syllabary connected kin from the East to what's now the Nation in Oklahoma.

He knew this is something that could work.

-I remember when I was little, young, at my grandma's house going through some of her pictures and papers, and I remember seeing swirls, and I had no idea what I was looking at.

Years later, I saw the Cherokee syllabary, and I recognized those swirls.

Recently, I came across a passage and a book on the Mexican Kickapoos.

This book had a description of 12 Kickapoos that had learned how to use the Cherokee syllabary from Sequoyah's group, and one of those letters probably ended up in my grandma's house and that I saw when I was little, that, at the time, I just interpreted as swirls.

-As I mentioned a while ago, Hastings Shade -- he came to me one time and said that somebody had found what they thought was Sequoyah's grave over there.

He told me, in his family, it was said that we would know when it was time to bring Sequoyah home.

I kind of remember Grandma telling me almost the same thing.

There was going to come a day some day when we would find Grandpa.

-And bring him back to this community.

-She never said anything about bringing him back.

Hastings was the first one that I ever heard mention bringing him back.

-In a search for Sequoyah in Mexico, I don't know that we're going to find anything, and I'm not entirely sure that we should try because I think there are some mysteries that are better left unexamined.

I wonder if we would lose something by finding him.

Not to say I don't want to know.

I want to be the person who finds that cave.

-Winnie?

Thoughts about what we might find down Mexico way?

-I think at some time all of this will be disclosed.

It has been a long time.

And so I would say exercise caution and be open to what would develop from it.

♪ -After crossing the border at Eagle Pass, Texas, and making our way through the historic streets of Piedras Negras, Mexico, we headed southwest searching for Sequoyah's final destination in Zaragoza in the Mexican State of Coahuila.

♪ Winnie, what sort of indications do you think we might find down here?

What precisely are we looking for?

-The fact that we may go to the cave and seek that and actually find the area that the people here believe is where his final resting place is I think is just monumental.

In my mind, I've always had the picture of that cave, a mental picture, you know, since I was a girl.

-You reckon the people down there will know anything about Sequoyah?

-If he truly did roam in this area, then I think they -- I think we should expect that they know him... -Right.

-...and that there is a bit of a history, an oral history of him.

-What about Cherokee descendants?

You reckon there's any possibility of coming across those?

-When you're on this type of a journey where you're just seeking information and, in my case, seeking information about my family, then you don't know what to expect.

♪ -Our first stop is to meet with Zaragoza-based historian Alberto Galindo to look over some of his research and archival material that places the Cherokees in Coahuila.

[ Camera shutter clicking ] -All the territory of Acuña and Jiménez -- and all this, all this, all that together -- back then, it was all Zaragoza.

Plus part of Texas.

Archives in this town, which are very old and very, very rich -- I started looking in there trying to find Cherokees in there.

Okay.

Cherokees wouldn't help the Americans, the whites, to run off the Mexicans out of Texas.

And then when Texas becomes a republic, the Cherokees run away to Mexico because they were chased by the Texans.

That's how they also ended up out here.

It was a peaceful place.

Actually, all that we can say was free land.

I mean, everybody can just come.

-Right?

Okay.

I got it.

-Not only that, it was a fertile land.

There was rivers.

And nobody was gonna molest the Cherokees here.

-"Cherokique" it looks like.

-"Cherokique."

You're gonna find them like that or you going to find as "Cheroquis."

Colonel Bowles borrowing a horse.

-What's the date on that?

-August 7, 1833.

Right now I wouldn't be afraid to say there's more than 100 descendants of Cherokees here in Zaragoza.

Most of them don't know, and I talk with them, and I tell them that, "You're descendant of Cherokee," and they start looking in their own family records.

And I found out that they descended from Wolf clan, which is one of the clans of the Cherokees.

The ones that know about it, they're proud of it.

I've been trying to get the historians very interested in the different tribes.

Kickapoos were wandering everywhere, didn't actually have a real settlement anywhere.

And I think Juárez being an Indian himself, he kind of fell for them.

So when he gave him that grant, they came right away, and they end up running all the way to Rio Sabinas.

Sequoyah came here with his son, and his son probably was one of the witnesses when he died.

But as far as him marrying into the Kickapoo tribe, that's a big mystery.

More likely he could because Kickapoos were just one river away.

Kickapoos were already on the Rio San Rodrigo, so they were close.

And they always were following the rivers.

[ Choir vocalizing ] ♪ -Winnie, we found some archival documents that suggest that some people think that we should be looking around Nacimiento, further south of Zaragoza -- an hour and a half or so.

As it turns out, we found some other historical research that says there was a historical relationship between the Cherokees and the Kickapoo Indians.

And so we know that there's a group of Kickapoo living there in the mountains around Múzquiz.

This is a spot I think it would really be remarkable to see if there's any trace of Cherokee culture.

Most people seem to think that there's none at all, but I think it's worth a visit anyway.

-Oh, absolutely.

-Outside the Kickapoo Reservation just north of Múzquiz, we came across a town of descendants of escaped slaves from Southeastern tribes of the U.S. [ Camera shutter clicking ] Phil Deloria talks about Indians in unexpected places.

-Yes.

-I really didn't expect to see this kind of treatment of Seminole and Muscogee people, again, here in the middle of these mountains in Mexico.

I think it's just amazing.

Over here, we've got what I think is just a really remarkable and surprising kind of tribute to the Trail of Tears.

So we're talking again about this migration of the Southeastern tribes all the way down here to the state of Coahuila.

There's a lot of emphasis on the Cherokees.

Is this what you expected to see when you came to Nacimiento?

-Well, hopefully not.

We're familiar with these paintings, and yet now we're here in Mexico to chat with the people that are maintaining this museum and who live in this community.

And to hear their stories, it makes us realize that they are a part of this history.

-They're a part of our history, and now we're a part of theirs, and it's just so amazing to me that they've come from that same spot in the Southeast.

They have been all over this countryside.

[ Camera shutter clicking ] In 1939, when the Tulsa Daily World sent people down here with some folks from the Cherokee Nation, we found a document in the archives that was from their translator, a man named Juan.

And Juan said that when they were looking back up by Zaragoza that they should be looking for a cemetery near some chalk cliffs.

So Juan says he thought they were looking in the wrong place.

Juan thought that they should be looking down here around Nacimiento, to these limestone sorts of cliffs.

These graves are largely unmarked.

The folks from 1939 thought that might be the sort of grave that Sequoyah would be buried in.

Do you suppose it's maybe a place like this that Sequoyah might have come to rest?

-This is such a foreign, foreign landscape than what was our home in Indian territory and before removal in comparison.

There's a stark, stark contrast.

So because of that maybe, I just don't get a sense that this would be the place.

-Do you think that even with the Kickapoo connection that's maybe just 10 kilometers away from us, this still doesn't strike you as the kind of place that Sequoyah might have come to rest?

-I have nothing to substantiate this feeling that came over me when we drove up, but I have to tell you, I think that this is not the place.

-Well, the search continues then.

-I think you're right.

[ Camera shutter clicking ] -We had good luck in meeting with the daughter of one of the community members there at Nacimiento de los Negros, those Mascogos and the Black Seminoles.

I was really surprised to hear her say that there were more Cherokee descendants than we expected to hear about.

-Now, she was saying, too, that a lot of the Kickapoo folks who have Cherokee heritage don't identify as Cherokee in part because there's no sort of material advantage to it.

♪ We are in Zaragoza in the State of Coahuila in Northern Mexico.

When we rolled into Zaragoza the first time to scout things out, we were greeted by the mayor of the town, who had put us in contact with Alberto Galindo, the historian of Zaragoza.

♪ So we met the mayor of Morelos.

I feel like we have been very warmly received.

♪ Hello, Roberto.

-Hey, Joshua.

-Good to see you again.

-Good to see you again.

-So, I wanted to visit with you about the display that you've got here.

Tell us about what was going on.

-Okay.

This is actually part of the commemoration that we had in 2003 because Zaragoza was 250 years old, and we invited at the time the Cherokee Nation.

-And so just to clarify, the folks who showed up were from the Cherokee Nation of Mexico, is that right?

-Cherokee from Texas.

-From Texas.

Okay.

And there are a lot of folks who claim Cherokee heritage, but they're not necessarily citizens of those three federally recognized Nations, and I think that that's what we're looking at with these people.

And, so, what were they up to when they were here?

-They heard about Sequoyah being buried here in Zaragoza.

-This is very interesting to see, and I wonder if it was maybe that early 1939 trip or there was another one in the '50s where people were coming down looking for Sequoyah.

So there's a lot of historical records that point us right here to your town.

I think it'd be wonderful if more Cherokee folks, especially folks from the Nations there in Oklahoma, were to come out and see you.

-We'll be real excited about that.

And, of course, we'll make a big deal out of it, also.

-That'd be great.

I hope I can be there.

-Oh, you will.

You better.

[ Both laugh ] -Gracias.

-Thank you, Joshua.

-The mayor of Zaragoza recalled as a boy seeing a grave in the neighboring town of Morelos that he thought might be a lead worth checking out.

[ Camera shutter clicking ] So, we saw when we were at Morelos Cemetery, there are a lot of graves there that are unmarked.

Mucho gusto.

Señor Martinez... [ Speaking Spanish ] You and I talked the last time we were here in November, and we asked you if you knew anything about Sequoyah aquí.

-[ Speaking Spanish ] -Tell us a little bit about when you first became aware of this grave.

-[ Speaking Spanish ] -[ Speaking Spanish ] -All right.

So, you've also done a little bit of investigation on who the Cherokee buried at Morelos was.

-Looking in Zaragoza's archives, I found that there was a person named Lafayette, and he talks about his father being a doctor and being a Cherokee from Tahlequah.

-Yeah, so, in 1939, the Tulsa Daily World and some Cherokees went down to Zaragoza looking around, wherein they visited with a fellow named Napoleon LaFayette, and he talked about his father as "Doctor Cherokee."

So we wondered if maybe that person in the grave might be this Doctor Cherokee.

-Yes, he is.

He was born in 1862, and he dies at the age of 80.

-In 1940.

So, does this document tell us anything about Napoleon's father?

-It just says that his father's full name is Jose Jeremias Lafayette, and his mother's name was Ana Maria Rosas.

-He could have been part of the Mexican Cherokees who came out of Nacogdoches.

-He could have been one of the first Cherokees that Chief Bowles brought into Texas.

-Right.

-My question to myself was, did he adopt that Mexican name when he got in Mexico?

-Alberto, we're gonna take a look at a map here put together by our friends over at the United Keetoowah Band.

What they did was they went back and they looked at all of the folks who were on the rolls of the Old Settlers.

Some of these Old Settlers wound up moving down to Mexico.

And so they've charted them across here.

We see, you know, up in Tennessee is where Sequoyah was from.

But looking at this, we came across an interesting town that we did not know about before, and it's right here.

-La Fayette.

-La Fayette.

-My goodness.

-So it doesn't seem entirely out of the realm of possibility that there might have been some folks from Cherokee Country who took the surname "La Fayette."

-And went all the way to Mexico with it.

-And went all the way to Mexico the way some of these folks all through here did.

-That would explain.

-Winnie, you have come a long way to be here.

-I have.

-And so did this guy.

-We've been traveling, hopefully, in his footprints, and it is a journey.

-I wonder if Sequoyah thought that maybe this might be his last trip.

-It never occurred to him that he would not come here, be successful, make new friends, seek out fellow Cherokees, and return to his home.

-And go home.

You think -- -Return to his home.

-Okay.

[ Choir vocalizing ] -In Sequoyah's time and ours, the stereotype of Mexico as a dangerous place characterized by bandits and revolutions, corrupt lawmen, and drug trafficking stood at odds with the hospitality we received.

I wonder if during his own travels, Sequoyah experienced a similar generosity, one born of a kinship based on the ties that bind us as Cherokees and as human beings, one that could conquer our fears and our historic divisions, connect us across time and space, and finally reunites us in a reimagined Cherokee Nation.

Well, Alberto, let me offer a little reciprocity here and show you what we found.

-Okay.

-So, this is a book called "The Mysteries of Sequoyah," written by C.W.

West.

It says here that he was talking to Sallie Toney Davis, a descendant of Sequoyah's, and she says that he had five children and that the latter two married Mexican girls and went to Mexico from Texas.

You ever come across names Wagon Wheel or Lightning Bug?

-No.

No, no, no.

And that's -- that's good.

-So, this is from 1952 in The Tahlequah Star-Citizen.

And the headline is "Sequoyah's Grave Found By Former Residents In Mexico; Removal Sought."

And so this fellow, Omer Morgan, went down there.

"On the right above is Omer Morgan with three natives standing before the 'Casa Grande piedras vieja del Cheroque Indios.'

Big old stone house of the Cherokee Indians.

built by the Cherokees in 1842-1843 in Mexico."

Says here, "This is the house in which Sequoyah died."

-Oh, come on.

-That's what it says.

Says, "There are Cherokee letters on the chimney of the house, and stones were found nearby also with Cherokee inscriptions.

There is a large spring nearby, also a lime kiln and a stone quarry.

The house stands on a ranch five miles square."

You ever seen a house that looks like that?

-Yes, and that house is so close to the river, and that's where the hot springs are.

And it was so close to the land they let the Cherokees live in.

And when Sequoyah gets there, the families that helped Sequoyah was Salinas and Rodriguez.

They're the ones that tried to hide him.

And there is a lime quarry not too far from there.

-You're kidding.

If you were to describe the color of a lime quarry, what would you say?

-Chalky.

Chalky white.

-Very, very interesting.

So you can take us to where this is?

-Yes, I can.

-When can we leave?

[ Choir vocalizing ] ♪ So, tell us a little bit about where we are, if you don't mind, Alberto.

-Okay.

This place is a Cherokee settlement that was granted from the government when the Cherokees came back from Texas.

What I have found is the earliest records on Cherokees in this area is 1822.

But actually this place was founded way before that.

We're talking about the little town that's close here.

It was San Jose de los Pastinos, and it was an hacienda.

In 1777, there was over 600 people living around here.

At the time of Sequoyah, Kickapoos also lived here.

I think Sequoyah got here via Nacogdoches.

-Nacogdoches Mm-hmm.

-Nacogdoches.

San Felipe.

Then Austin.

And then San Antonio.

San Antonio, San Fernando, and then here.

-When did San Fernando becomes Zaragoza?

-In 1868.

-So, how is it that we wound up here at this spot?

-Because if Sequoyah was ill, I think that's when they brought Sequoyah because they were trying to hide him.

-Winnie, I'm interested to hear from you.

-When I first came here today, I felt a little bit of emotion.

The fact that he would come to this place I think is logical.

-Well, and it's hard to know from what we've seen in the record if he was staying here or if this was maybe just a place that they brought him for his final spot.

-Mm-hmm.

-What about this particular cave?

How did you find this exact spot?

-I'll give credit to the Cherokees themselves when they came first, and they said they were looking for this place.

-These were the folks who came from out of Texas?

-Yes.

Yeah.

-Okay.

So, this cave here, how far back are we going down in there?

-Well, it goes like 20, 30 feet.

But as you can see, it goes a little bit to the left.

-Mm-hmm.

-But you can see where a man can walk pretty easy down there, and that can be another room down there.

And then it should be just the entrance.

And then from there it might just narrow again and come up in the other cave.

-Do you think this is the spot that Sequoyah wound up in?

-I think so.

-You think so?

-I think so.

-Well, Winnie, there's a lot of evidence that suggests that this is a spot where Sequoyah himself might have been walking around.

I wonder, how does that strike you?

-When I was a little girl, my father took me into our lawn, and he walked off a circle.

And then he had me trace it.

He said one word to me.

"Go."

I now have come.

I-I feel like... this is the opportunity I never knew that I might have.

And just the thought that we would trace, not unlike that time when I was a child, Sequoyah's actual footsteps is revealing to me how emotional this is.

My children and grandchildren and your children and grandchildren will come here again.

This is not the end of a chapter.

This is the beginning.

Today is the beginning.

-With hundreds of caves in this area, we may never know with absolute certainty where Sequoyah was buried, and after overhearing one landowner suggest excavating the cave on his property, well, nightmare visions of highway billboards bringing tourists to the famous Cherokee's grave reminded me some mysteries really are better left unsolved.

-In some ways, there's a real beauty to the story, but also a real tragedy.

In trying to reconnect us, he was lost.

-He has become the symbol, the spark of intellectual pursuit in the Native world.

The spirit of Sequoyah moves forth.

-The search for Sequoyah is the search for a time and place and experience that we can't really go back to, and so if we find him, that doesn't really change that.

-We as Cherokee people, as ceremonial people, we have ways to send people on, and he didn't get to have those things.

Wouldn't it be nice to bring him home and put him to rest?

-After all the battles, after removal from our homelands in 1838, we Cherokees had a powerful weapon to sustain us for centuries -- Sequoyah's syllabary.

His gift, however freely given, imparts obligations to teach, to learn, to unite, to search among all our relations for Sequoyah's enduring spirit of genius.

[ Choir vocalizing ] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪