The Cherokee script was designed in 1821 by Segwoya.

The alphabet is essentially syllabic, only 6 characters (a e i o s u) correspond to Roman letters: the font encodes these to the corresponding roman letter. The remaining 79 characters have been arbitrarily encoded in the range 38–122; the cherokee package provides commands that map each such syllable to the appropriate character; for example, Segwoya himself would be represented \Cse\Cgwo\Cya.

The font is distributed as Metafont source; it works very poorly in modern environments, and could do with expert attention (if you are interested, please contact the CTAN team for details).