Q & A with the team behind

A Q&

Filming Winnie Guess Perdue (Sequoyah descendant) and Joshua Nelson as they discuss her lifelong career as a dancer, educator and "Beloved Edler" of the Cherokee Nation.

with the team behind Searching for Sequoyah

By Daniel Hautzinger

On Sunday, November 21 at 11:00 am, WTTW airs Searching for Sequoyah, a documentary that explores the legacy and little-known life of Sequoyah, the visionary who created the Cherokee writing system despite being illiterate in any other language.

WTTW spoke to the documentary’s director and producer, James Fortier, who is Ojibway; co-producer and host/narrator Joshua B. Nelson, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and professor of English at the University of Oklahoma; and producer and writer LeAnne Howe, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation and professor of English at the University of Georgia, Athens.

The Guide: What are the challenges of telling the story of a fi gure who has become almost more a myth than a man, given the paucity of records about him?

LeAnne Howe: Story comes through family, and I think the Native way is to think about what the family says. So we thought, “We’ve got to fi nd some lineal descendants.” We knew we had to fi nd people who were related and carried those stories.

James Fortier: We thought that if we could bring the descendants into the storytelling itself, that would add a contemporary element that makes Sequoyah’s story come alive in the 21st century, and still be alive in the 21st century. And then of course there’s the whole search [for Sequoyah’s fi nal resting place] in Mexico, which is a great mystery—everybody loves a good mystery. That’s actually the portion of his story that’s the least understood.

My experience telling Native stories through documentaries in the past twenty-some years now is that there always seems to be a starting point where Native fi lmmakers are at a disadvantage because we have to educate nonNative people about our history and about our contemporary experiences today before we can actually tell this particular story.

Cherokee Nation citizen James Greg Bilby as Sequoyah in Searching for Sequoyah.

Joshua B. Nelson: It’s certainly a challenge, and the way of meeting that challenge is to embrace it. Taking the mystery itself and moving that to the heart of the structure was, I think, a real stroke of genius on James and LeAnne’s part. It was precisely that kind of narrative approach that helped guide the fi lm and move it along. When you’ve got a guy like Sequoyah who looms so large, to have these additional parts of his story fl eshed out was just really enticing.

The Guide: Growing up, how much did Sequoyah loom in your lives? How much did you know about him? unprecedented, but it took years working in Native literary studies to really start to appreciate the sweeping signifi cance of that accomplishment.

I think we didn’t know how to talk about how it was a big deal. I think of Einstein as a nice comparison. We know he’s a genius, that he revolutionized the world, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how, not living in the world of gravitational, physical considerations. With Sequoyah, I think it’s not until you get into considerations of how it is that language is sort of the repository of culture and coalesces people politically that we really start to appreciate the signifi cance of his achievement.

The Guide: What does it mean to you all coming from diff erent tribes and nations, working with a mostly Native production team and having so many Native scholars and people in the fi lm, to tell this story?

Fortier: In every documentary that I’ve done, I’ve striven to bring in as many Native voices in the process of making the fi lm as possible. Because I’m Ojibway and not Cherokee—I’m not even American, I’m Canadian—I wanted to involve as many Cherokees as possible, both in the development

Photo: Karl W. Schmidt

Fortier: Being raised in the Chicago suburbs, separated from my dad’s culture in Canada, I obviously didn’t grow up surrounded by Sequoyah imagery or mythology. But I do recall learning of his basic story. That kind of stuck with me. And then, as I learned more about my dad’s Ojibway heritage in my thirties, I started doing my own research into not just Ojibway history and culture, but into a broader sense of what’s going on in Indian Country, because as a fi lmmaker, I wanted to do these kinds of fi lms.

The Guide: Joshua, in the documentary you say that you have come to admire Sequoyah more than anyone else you have encountered in your scholarship. Why?

Nelson: There’s a personal element. I grew up in small-town Oklahoma, where what we celebrate is football. We don’t celebrate intellectual accomplishments. I was terrible at football, but I was great at reading books. To have this alternative model for the things that we could value, particularly in American Indian worlds, resonated powerfully with me over the years.

And he was always kind of an enigmatic hero. You never learn much more than that he invented the syllabary. We knew that that was a big deal and of the story and the research but on the set as well. [The animators are Joseph Erb (Cherokee Nation) and Jonathan Thunder (Red Lake Ojibwe), while the music is by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate (Chickasaw) and Jennifer Kreisberg (Tuscarora).] I just feel that the more Native voices, even if they don’t have a direct hand in formulating the story, everything combines and the production takes on its own Native characterization.

The Guide: What aims did you have with the documentary other than “searching for Sequoyah” and telling his story?

Howe: The thing that we talked about pretty consistently is, “What will this fi lm say to American Indians across the country? How will they benefi t, and what will it mean?” The answer I tell myself is that American Indians think so many things are dead, because it’s what they’ve been taught in school. My teachers in Oklahoma would say to me as a young person, “Oh, it’s too bad that by the time you’re grown, American Indians will all be dead.” What our fi lm does is speak to the idea that nothing is ever truly dead, and that the people will live on.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.