Sequoyah in the context of "Cherokee language"

The Cherokee syllabary (Cherokee: ᏣᎳᎩ ᏗᎪᏪᎶᏙᏗ, romanized: Tsalagi Digohwelodohdi) is a syllabary invented by Sequoyah in the late 1810s and early 1820s to write the Cherokee language. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy as he was illiterate until its creation. He first experimented with logograms, but his system later developed into the syllabary. In his system, each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single phoneme; the 85 (originally 86) characters provide a suitable method for writing Cherokee. The letters resemble characters from other scripts, such as Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Glagolitic, but are not used to represent the same sounds.

The term Five Civilized Tribes was applied by the United States government in the early federal period of the history of the United States to the five major Native American nations in the Southeast: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminoles. White Americans classified them as "civilized" because they had adopted attributes of the Anglo-American culture.

Examples of such colonial attributes adopted by these five tribes included Christianity, centralized governments, literacy, market participation, written constitutions, intermarriage with White Americans, and chattel slavery practices, including purchase of enslaved Black Americans. For a period, the Five Civilized Tribes tended to maintain stable political relations with the White population. However, White encroachment continued and eventually led to the removal of these tribes from the Southeast, most prominently along the Trail of Tears.