Wilma Mankiller

Wilma Mankiller Quarter

What a name. 'Killer' is a common enough nickname, but it generally doesn't mean that someone actually killed a person. Being as Wilma is a Cherokee Indian, I am sure one of her ancestor's came by the name legitimately. Of course, on a long enough time scale, we could all find someone in our ancestry that could have earned the name. Wikipedia has a page about her. Via Dad's Deadpool Blog.

Now I'm looking at this image and I notice the third line of the inscription. What the heck is that? Russian? No, silly, it's Cherokee. From Omniglot:

Cherokee syllabary

The Cherokee syllabary was invented by George Guess/Gist, a.k.a. Chief Sequoyah, of the Cherokee, and was developed between 1809 and 1824. At first Sequoyah experimented with a writing system based on logograms, but found this cumbersome and unsuitable for Cherokee. He later developed a syllabary which was originally cursive and hand-written, but it was too difficult and expensive to produce a printed version, so he devised a new version with symbols based on letters from the Latin alphabet and Western numerals.

Sequoyah's descendants claim that he was the last surviving member of his tribe's scribe clan and the Cherokee syllabary was invented by persons unknown at a much earlier date.

By 1820 thousands of Cherokees had learnt the syllabary, and by 1830, 90% were literate in their own language. Books, religious texts, almanacs and newspapers were all published using the syllabary, which was widely used for over 100 years.

Today the syllabary is still used; efforts are being made to revive both the Cherokee language and the Cherokee syllabary, and Cherokee courses are offered at a number of schools, colleges and universities.

Ask Google about Sequoyah and you open a whole can of worms, like this one.