Living Stories of the Cherokee Read online

  » Lívínǵ Storíes of the Cherokee

  »Lívínǵ Storíes of the Cherokee

  Foreword by

  Joyce Conseen Dugan,

  Principal Chief,

  Eastern Band of

  Cherokee Indians

  With stories told by

  Davey Arch,

  Robert Bushyhead,

  Edna Chekelelee,

  Marie Junaluska,

  Kathi Smith Littlejohn,

  and Freeman Owle

  Collected and edited by

  Barbara R. Duncan

  The University of

  North Carolina Press

  Chapel Hill & London

  © 1998 The University of North Carolina Press

  All rights reserved

  Designed by April Leidig-Higgins

  Set in Joanna by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Living stories of the Cherokee / collected and edited by Barbara R. Duncan with stories told by Davey Arch . . . [et al.].

  p. cm.

  Includes biblographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-8078-241 1-9 (cloth: alk. paper).

  ISBN 0-8078-4719-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  1. Cherokee Indians—Folklore. 2. Tales—North

  Carolina. 3. Storytellers—North Carolina.

  I. Duncan, Barbara R. II. Arch, Davey.

  E99.C5L55 1998 97-35037

  398.2'089'9755—dc21 CIP

  Pages 10, 11, 29, 143, 189: Photographs by

  Barbara Duncan. Pages 12, 75, 193:

  Photographs by Ron Ruehl. Page 12 5:

  Photograph by Barbara Lau.

  cloth050403020165432

  paper15141312111110987

  (Literally, "Cherokee, they are saying")

  »Contents

  Foreword by Joyce Conseen Dugan

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  » Kathí Smíth Líttlejohn

  The Origin of Legends

  The Bird with Big Feet

  Me-Li and the Mud Dauber

  How the World Was Made

  The Origin of the Pileated Woodpecker

  The Playing Boys—the Pleiades

  Why the Turtle's Shell Is Cracked

  Why the Mole Lives Underground

  How the Possum Lost His Beautiful Tail

  Getting Fire

  First Man and First Woman

  The Valley of the Butterflies

  Spearfinger

  The Birds and Animals Stickball Game

  The Cherokee Little People

  Nunnehi, the Gentle People

  » Davey Arch

  Grandpa and the Turtle

  The Rattlesnake in the Corn

  Big Snakes

  The Old Man and the Birds

  The Brave, the Mighty Warrior

  The Strange Husband (The Owl Man)

  Legends of the Uk'tena

  Removal

  War

  Women

  Cities of Refuge

  The Origin of Strawberries

  How the Possum Lost His Tail

  Growing Up in Cherokee

  Jeannie and the Booger

  Grandpa and Grandma

  » Edna Chekelelee

  Cherokee Language

  The Trees Are Alive 1

  Mother Earth's Spring Dress

  The Deer

  Jesus before Columbus Time

  The Legend of the Corn Beads 13

  Santeetlah Ghost Story 1 3

  Storytelling 13

  Elders on the Mountains 13

  The Quail Dance 1 3

  Feathers

  The Indian Preacher

  The Trail of Tears Basket

  » Robert Bushyhead

  The Cherokee Language

  Medicine Stories

  The First Time I Saw a White Person—Mrs. Lee

  Yonder Mountain

  Sequoyah

  Formula against Screech Owls and Tskilis

  The Hunter and Thunder

  The Little People and the Nunnehi

  » Maríe junaluska

  The Origin of the Milky Way

  » Freeman Owle

  Introduction to the Nantahala Hiking Club Gathering

  The Nikwasi Mound

  Medicine and the Wolf Clan

  The Earth

  The Magic Lake

  Going to Water

  The Daughter of the Sun

  How the Possum Lost His Tail

  Storytelling

  The Turtle and the Beaver

  The Turtle and the Raccoon—Stealing Beauty

  The Trail of Tears

  The Origin of Strawberries

  Corn Woman Spirit

  Ganadi, the Great Hunter, and the Wild Boy

  The Story of the Bat

  The Removed Townhouses

  Sources

  »Foreword

  Many have written about our history and culture. Few of these people have come from our community, with the traditional knowledge and understanding of what it means to be a Cherokee. Our storytellers have grown to appreciate the knowledge and understanding vital to our continuation as a People. This work is important for that reason. Barbara Duncan has been a part of our community long enough to understand what it means for us to have an opportunity to tell our own stories—not recited from a history text but told through the voices of our members.

  In the work you are about to read, you will see how Barbara has come into our community and grown to become a scholar committed to providing the Cherokee storytellers with a voice. This voice could have been provided by others, but probably none who walk among us as our friend; often it is provided by those who feel the right to tell these legends as their own. Barbara has worked toward helping the outside world understand that these legends are important because they belong to Cherokees, not because someone outside our community can recite them.

  Through the years, these legends have grown and changed and become contemporary along with Cherokee people. You may have heard these legends on cassette tape. Soon you may hear them via computer, and in the next millennium we can only guess the media through which you will experience these stories. The critical message is that the stories continue. We have often looked toward our neighbors to help us with problems, and it is indeed a pleasure to find help in preserving our traditions as well.

  I hope you will enjoy this work as much as I have, and that you will continue our tradition of sharing these legends with your family and friends. The voices you hear are those of my friends and neighbors, and now they become yours.

  Joyce Conseen Dugan

  Principal Chief

  Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

  September 1997

  »Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the Tribal Council of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee for giving their approval to this project. Thanks also to Lynn Harlan, Cultural Officer for the Eastern Band, for helpful conversations.

  During the process of writing this book I was working on two other Cherokee projects for the Museum of the Cherokee Indian: a documentary video on the history of the Eastern Band and a new permanent exhibit for the museum. Both of these projects were collaborations between the Cherokee people and scholars of the Cherokee. In the process, much information was shared, and this book has benefited from all of our conversations and work together.

  Thanks to Ken Blankenship, director of the museum, for involving me in t
he process of the new permanent exhibit, and thanks to Ron Ruehl for involving me in the production of The Principal People, a documentary video, and for allowing me to combine research for the video and the storytelling book. I hope that the reader who enjoys this book and wants to know more about the Cherokee will seek out both the video and the new museum exhibit. The video, the exhibit, and, I hope, this book will help to acquaint the public with the history, the culture, and the worldview of the Cherokee.

  Thanks to the storytellers: Davey Arch, Robert Bushyhead, Edna Chekelelee, Kathi Smith Littlejohn, and Freeman Owle. Thanks to Marie Junaluska, translator, and to Jean Blanton, daughter of Robert Bushyhead. The storytellers have been paid for their contributions to the book, and a portion of the royalties will be donated to nonprofit organizations on the Qualla Boundary.

  In addition to the storytellers featured in this book, an equal number of Eastern Cherokee people are recognized by the Cherokee community as important public storytellers including: Lloyd Arneach, whose commitments did not allow him to be included in this collection; Freddie Bradley, who tells stories as part of his job with the National Park Service in Gatlinburg, Tennessee; Driver Pheasant, who works for the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in educational outreach; Tom Hill, a new storyteller; and others who are just beginning to be known as storytellers.

  Thanks to my friends and colleagues for essential and helpful conversations: Henry Glassie at Indiana University, Tom McGowan at Appalachian State University, Margaret Mills at the University of Pennsylvania, Glenn Hinson at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Sally Peterson at the North Carolina Museum of History, Duane King at the Southwestern Museum (who also told a version of "The Belt That Would Not Burn"), Joan Greene at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, John Finger at the University of Tennessee, Anne Rogers and William Anderson at Western Carolina University, attorney Ben Bridgers in Sylva, North Carolina, and Mary Chiltoskey and Jean Jackson from Cherokee.

  Thanks to the North Carolina Arts Council for permission to quote from interviews with Rev. Robert Bushyhead and his daughter Jean Bushyhead Blanton. Thanks to Peggy Bulger and the Southern Arts Federation for sharing videotape of Edna Chekelelee's performance in the Sisters of the South tour. Thanks to the Qualla Arts and Crafts Co-op for sharing videotape of the speakers' bureau workshop with storytelling. Thanks to the Museum of the Cherokee Indian and Ron Ruehl for permission to use videotaped material for some versions of stories.

  Thanks to David Perry, Elaine Maisner, and Pam Upton at the University of North Carolina Press for their support and understanding through this process. Thanks to my sister, Susan Reimensnyder, for help with Internet research and transcription.

  Thanks to my friend Hawk Littlejohn, for sharing his knowledge of Cherokee culture with me over the years and for being my friend. Thanks to my husband, John Duncan, for his support and to my two children, John Harper and Pearl, for sharing their mama with this book—your love makes everything possible. Thanks to the Creator.

  » Lívínǵ Storíes of the Cherokee

  » Lívínǵ Storíes of the Cherokee

  »Introduction

  Cherokee culture is alive in the hearts of the Cherokee people. It is stronger, richer, bigger, and more enduring than any book that can be written about it. Storytelling is part of Cherokee culture, and it, too, is alive and strong. Cherokee people have always told stories to their children, among their families, and in their community, but in recent years, Cherokee storytellers have begun to share stories with the general public at events outside the Cherokee community. This book presents several contemporary storytellers who are members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, located in western North Carolina. Kathi Littlejohn, Davey Arch, Edna Chekelelee, Robert Bushyhead, and Freeman Owle all grew up hearing stories from their families and from the community, and they learned to tell stories in that traditional setting. All of them, however, have also become skilled at telling stories in schools, in seminars, in workshops, and at festivals; it is their willingness to share Cherokee tales with the larger world that has made this book possible. Marie Juna-luska has contributed a translation into Cherokee of one tale, with phonetic transcription and syllabary.

  What makes this book unique is its focus on collecting stories that are being told today by living storytellers. It is the first major collection of Eastern Band stories to be widely published in almost a hundred years, since James Mooney's Myths of the Cherokee first appeared in 1900.

  The Cherokee have lived in western North Carolina for thousands of years. Archaeologists have found artifacts near the spring on Wayah Bald and in other places dating back to 9000 B.C. The Cherokee have most likely told stories for the many years that they have lived in these mountains. The 1 1,000-year-old artifacts on the mountain could have been left by the ancestors of the Cherokee, and their stories could have been the ancestors of these stories.

  Every culture in the world, from the Stone Age to the Space Age, has stories, music, humor, and spiritual ceremonies. Stories like the Gilgamesh epic from ancient Persia have existed in written and oral tradition, we know, for about five thousand years. The Bible has long been part of written and oral Judeo-Christian tradition—six thousand years for parts of the Old Testament and two thousand years for the New Testament. Cherokee stories could be this old. Stories endure.

  But every culture, every story, is only one generation away from extinction. Stories die, simply and quietly, when no one thinks they're important enough to take the time to tell. Stories can be preserved only by being included in living tradition.

  My hope is not to "save" stories from extinction, but to let people know that these stories are wonderful and important. I hope that future generations of Cherokee storytellers continue to find them so. This work celebrates the fact that the stories it presents—and many others—continue to exist in oral tradition a hundred years after James Mooney listened to them. In its pages the world at large can discover these wonderful, wise, funny stories still told by members of the Eastern Band, still living on their ancestral homeland. In their small community, both the stories and the storytellers are alive and abundant.

  In order to convey to the reader the fundamental oral nature of these tales and their beauty as they are told, they are presented on the page word for word exactly as they were spoken. Because the storytellers tell their tales in a rhythmic way, the stories are transcribed in lines of different lengths, like free verse, indicating pauses in the teller's speech. If you read them aloud, or listen to them in your mind, you will hear the stories as the storytellers speak them. Folklorists have been using this way of presenting stories, called oral poetics, since the 1970s to convey the voices of the people. When stories are rewritten to be more literary and "readable," they lose the beauty and style of the oral versions and their tellers, whose voices are drowned out by the conventions of standard English and the changes of the editor.

  Each of the main sections of the book is devoted to one storyteller, introduced by a short headnote containing biographical information and interesting comments on specific stories provided by the tellers themselves. The storytellers include men and women of all ages. Their stories and styles are all different.

  The book begins with Kathi Littlejohn, a young woman who tells tales in an entertaining and dramatic style. Employed by the tribe as Director of Health and Human Services, Kathi does most of her storytelling in schools. She has produced two cassette tapes and would like to teach more children to tell stories.

  Davey Arch is also young, but his repertoire includes more personal-experience narratives, especially stories about his grandfather, who was born early in the twentieth century and followed a very traditional lifestyle, living in the old Cherokee way. Davey also tells some of the stories he learned from his grandfather. A talented carver of masks, Davey speaks to many groups, demonstrates carving, and tells stories. Some of his masks depict events from the stories.

  Edna Chekelelee, who recently passed away at the age of
sixty-five, came from an older generation of storytellers. Unlike Kathi and Davey, Edna grew up speaking the Cherokee language and was as fluent in Cherokee as she was in English. Although she knew many old folktales about animals and ghosts and many stories describing historical events, later in life, as she began performing more in public, her stories took on the form you see here—short, poetic, humorous, and to the point. Edna came from the isolated Snowbird community, part of the Cherokee lands located in Graham County near Robbinsville, North Carolina.

  Reverend Robert Bushyhead also comes from an older generation of storytellers and grew up speaking the Cherokee language. He spent his adult life as a traveling missionary for the Baptist Church, and when he retired to Cherokee, North Carolina, he began performing in the outdoor drama Unto These Hills. He has dedicated the past several years to documenting, along with his daughter Jean B. Blanton, the Kituwah dialect of the Cherokee language and creating textbooks, videos, and other study materials to be used in the Cherokee schools. His lifelong interest in language and oratory are reflected in the style and content of his stories. He speaks in long lines with beautiful cadences, and his story about Mrs. Lee has the formal structure and development of a literary short story. His subjects are religion and Cherokee medicine, his experiences as a native speaker, and Sequoyah, who invented the written Cherokee syllabary in the early 1800s. In 1996 Bushyhead was awarded both the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award and the Mountain Heritage Award in recognition of his work with the Cherokee language. A group of elders meets monthly at his house to share stories and memories in the Cherokee language.

  Marie Junaluska is one of the few members of the younger generation who grew up speaking Cherokee. Recognized as an outstanding translator, she was recently elected to the Tribal Council. She has translated original articles from the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper into English and has worked as a language and culture teacher in the Cherokee schools. Marie has translated into written Cherokee two well-known stories from James Mooney's collection. One of them, "The Origin of the Milky Way," appears in this volume. The reader can see here the Cherokee language as it appears on the page, each symbol representing a syllable. Sequoyah, who spent twelve years devising the syllabary, is the only individual in history known to have created a system of written language without first being literate himself. At a tribal council meeting in 1821, Sequoyah and his daughter Ayoka gave a dramatic demonstration of the syllabary. The council approved Sequoyah's system, and nearly all tribal members became literate within a year.