8 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 196 



of his personality were extracted by Mooney from the bulk of his 

 papers and filed separately. The father-figure of the minister- 

 medicine man is a famihar one to the Cherokee who have long been 

 disposed to institutionalize that individual who heals the soul through 

 Holy Writ, the body through appropriate conjurations. 



As a whole, The Inoli Letters are a testimony to a life largely spent 

 in the service of the Cherokee people at a particularly sad and difficult 

 juncture in their history, 



TRANSLATION NOTE 



The Sequoyah syllabary, as astonishing an accomplishment as it 

 intrinsically is, nevertheless is a relatively imprecise and therefore 

 ineffective device for the transference of oral values to paper. One 

 of its chief defects is its inability to designate which vowels are to 

 be voiced and which are to be unvoiced. It does not indicate the 

 length nor the pitch of syllables, crucial consideration in Cherokee. 

 There is but a feeble provision made for the aspirate and none at all 

 for the glottal stop; some symbols must stand for several consonantal 

 and vowel qualities; and several symbols bear unfortunate resem- 

 blances to each other. Moreover, many of the sjrmbols lend themselves 

 to idiosyncratic variations of the most fanciful nature. Rarely does 

 one, no matter what degree of reading facility he may possess, 

 attempt a manuscript in Sequoyah syllabary without first taking 

 note of what personal opinions the writer may have harbored in regard 

 to the formation of certain symbols (see Chafe and KUpatrick, 1962, 

 passim) . 



By and large, The Inoli Letters and the other above-mentioned 

 documents present a formidable task in mere decipherment itself, 

 not to speak of the determining of specific meanings. In general, the 

 calligraphy is inferior to that of Western Cherokee manuscripts of 

 the same period. We suggest that this is due to less familiarity with 

 printed Cherokee. The presses were in the Cherokee Nation, not 

 Qualla, and it is likely that the Western publications had a relatively 

 restricted distribution in North Carolina, But it is interesting to 

 note that Eastern Cherokee calligraphy of Ino : li's day more closely 

 resembled the original concepts of Sequoyah than did the Western 

 which was patterned upon the type faces that were in aU instances 

 simplifications, and in some cases gross distortions, of the Sequoyah 

 designs. 



Some of the spellings in The Inoli Letters place one in the difficult 

 position of having to decide whether one is dealing with errors or with 

 faithful representations of pronunciations current at the period 

 under investigation. And, in obedience to some law that decrees 

 that those individuals not overly skilled in the craft of writing must 



