Living Stories of the Cherokee Read online

  »Storytellíng Events

  Today, stories are told by Cherokee people at home and in public, and more are known and told than will ever be recorded. In the town of Cherokee, North Carolina, stories are told in the schools, at the Cherokee Museum, at the Oconaluftee Living History Village, at the Tsali Manor retirement home, and at various events during the year, including a monthly meeting of elders at Robert Bushyhead's home. Although children may not live in extended families as often as they did in the past, they are hearing more traditional Cherokee stories in school.

  Throughout the year, classes about Cherokee language and culture are available. In the spring, storytellers visit the schools to share stories during Cultural Heritage Week. During the Fall Festival, held the first week in October, Cherokee culture is celebrated in many ways. Outside of the Cherokee community, Cherokee storytellers and craftspeople appear at regional festivals like Mountain Heritage Day at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, at the Giduwah Festival in Asheville, and at powwows throughout the region.

  Stories in this book were collected during storytelling events both inside and outside the Cherokee community. I heard Kathi Littlejohn tell stories at the Cherokee Elementary School and Freeman Owle speak publicly in Franklin, North Carolina, in a performance sponsored by the Nantahala Hiking Club. Edna Chekelelee performed on a "Sisters of the South" tour sponsored by the Southern Arts Federation, and Kathi and Edna addressed the Cherokee Speakers' Bureau (Kekasuyeta) about stories. I also conducted personal interviews with each of the storytellers. These and other storytellers now travel the country sharing Cherokee history and stories with executives, doctors, schoolteachers, other American Indians, and the wider public in settings that range from concert halls to living rooms to reenactors' rendezvous.

  In traditional Cherokee culture, as in other cultures with living traditions of storytelling, stories are often sprinkled throughout conversation, embedded in the flow of events and casual talk. They make a point or teach a lesson relevant to the events or the conversation in progress. For example, if a child starts bragging, at some time either then or maybe later that day the story about the possum's losing his tail will come up—told in a way that doesn't embarrass the child with a direct rebuke, but in a way that makes the child understand that the moral of the story is meant to apply to him or her. These private storytellings occur frequently and are just as important, in terms of collecting and understanding stories, as public events.

  Public storytellings take place when storytellers visit schools or lecture halls and speak to an audience that might or might not be from the storyteller's own culture. Because this book is intended for a general audience, it focuses on public events featuring well-known storytellers. In the past several hundred years, authors and anthropologists have at times sought out "Indian secrets" in order to titillate audiences and make money. In contrast, this collection is solidly based on information that Cherokee storytellers either have already made public or have chosen to make public through this book.

  The first time I heard a traditional Cherokee story, I was riding with Hawk Littlejohn in his pickup truck. We had met at the Smithsonian Institution, and I had come to visit him and his family in Murphy, North Carolina, in 1980. Hawk and I were on our way to the feed store and had been chatting about our past experiences with people. I had just recounted some of my problems with relationships when Hawk lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke into the cab of the truck, and said, "You know, once there was an old man crossing over Soco Gap.

  "That's going east from Cherokee towards Maggie Valley. And it was the fall of the year, and it was cold. And just as he got over the top of the gap, and was starting down, he looked down and saw a rattlesnake laying there beside the trail. And it was frozen, about froze to death. And because he was ani-yunwiya, one of the real people, he had compassion on his relative. And he reached down and picked up that rattlesnake and put it inside his shirt to warm it up. Well, he was coming down the mountain, and he felt the snake move a little bit. And he came down a little further, and the snake moved a little more. Come on down the mountain, and the air was getting warmer, and the snake was moving around. Come on down a little more, and the snake was moving around, and it bit him. And he reached inside his shirt and pulled the snake out and said, 'Why'd you bite me? I picked you up and saved your life, and now you've bit me and I might die!' And the snake said, 'You knew I was a rattlesnake when you picked me up.' "

  I sat there for a minute taking this in. "You knew I was a rattlesnake when you picked me up," Hawk repeated.

  "Uh huh," I said, "and this means?"

  "If you know somebody's a rattlesnake," he said, "you don't have to pick them up." And I learned a story and a lesson.

  »Storíes ín Cherokee, Storíes ín Enǵlísh

  The stories that James Mooney collected from the Cherokee more than a century ago were told in the Cherokee language. Today these stories are told publicly in English, although in some families they are still told in Cherokee. Why is this? Has the change in languages changed the stories themselves?

  Mooney was "salvaging" cultural materials. His employer and publisher, the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology, had sent its staff to actively collect American Indian materials throughout the country because it knew that other agencies in the federal government were trying to acculturate American Indians * as rapidly as possible and, in the process, eradicate much of their traditional culture.

  In the late 1800s, all Cherokee in western North Carolina spoke Cherokee, and many of them read and wrote it as well, thanks to the adoption of Sequoyah's syllabary in the 1820s. About one in four Cherokee spoke some English, and some were also fluent in reading and writing it. But beginning in 1884 and continuing into the late twentieth century, the federal government actually prohibited the speaking of native languages in government-run schools. As a result, only about a thousand members (one in ten) or fewer of the Eastern Band now speak Cherokee as their first language. In recent years, however, interest in all aspects of traditional culture, including language and storytelling, has blossomed. Since the Eastern Band took over the administration of its schools—two elementary schools and a junior/ senior high school—from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1990, Cherokee language and culture have been taught in the schools for the first time. Children are learning to speak and write Cherokee in classes, and adults are speaking it more at home, often in response to their children's enthusiasm.

  To tell the stories in English is to change them somewhat, simply because Cherokee and English are different in many ways. The Cherokee language is centered on verb stems that may have as many as four prefixes and four suffixes. Some prefixes and suffixes are determined by the speaker's relationship to the one addressed, by the direction in which the speaker is facing—east, south, west, or north— or by the inanimate or animate nature of direct objects. Because these concerns are not reflected in the English language, the stories come out somewhat differently. Also, Cherokee speech is full of puns. Humorous comparisons occur when an accent or an inflection is changed, altering the meaning of a word, and of course this play on words does not translate into English.

  Still, the English versions are full of meaning and memorable characters and events. Most important, they have become traditional tellings in themselves as English-speaking parents and elders pass them on to younger generations.

  »Eastern and Western Cherokee Storíes

  The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina and the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma share language, culture, history, and stories. Among the western Cherokee, stories, medicine formulas, and other folklore have been extensively collected (Jack and Anna Kilpatrick have been particularly active collectors), and storytelling there continues to be very much alive. Although Eastern and Western Cherokee came from the same ancestors less than two hundred years ago, the geographical separation has brought about some differences in both language and storytelling.

  The Western Cherokee language, a dia
lect separate from Eastern Cherokee, originated in the Overhill dialect spoken by the Cherokee living in east Tennessee, north Georgia, and the far western parts of North Carolina such as present-day Graham County, where this dialect is still spoken. Eastern Cherokee is the Kituwah dialect, which originated in what James Mooney described as the Middle dialect spoken in the "Middle towns" along the Oconaluftee and Little Tennessee Rivers in western North Carolina, where the ancestors of today's Eastern Band lived. The separation of more than 150 years has amplified the differences in the two dialects, but even today Eastern and Western Cherokee people easily understand each other and use the same Cherokee syllabary.

  Like the language, the stories have remained essentially the same. The Western Cherokee storytelling tradition has added tales from the turbulent period following Removal, such as those about the legendary "outlaw" Ned Christie. The Eastern tradition has retained more place names in stories, because those places are nearby and familiar to the storytellers and their audiences, though they have lost significance for the Western Cherokee.

  » Genres

  Folklorists have distinguished among genres for their own purposes in understanding and talking with each other about stories. We consider a "legend" to be a story about a historical person or place that is told as though it is true; legends may take the form of scattered comments rather than a coherent narrative. A "myth" is a narrative that explains large philosophical questions of life and death and origins. A "folktale" is a narrative about a person or animal character who goes through a series of events, often a quest. A "fable" is a short animal story with a clear moral, like Aesop's fables. A "parable" or "allegory" is a narrative with symbolic parallels and meanings for every aspect of the story, such as Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan or the New Testament parables told by Jesus.

  Folklorists also recognize, however, that cultures construct their own classifications of their stories, based on what is important to them. Among the Cherokee, the word "legend" is often used to describe any traditional story, perhaps due to the influence of Mary Chiltoskey, the white schoolteacher who collected many stories and referred to them all as legends, meaning old stories told as if they were true. Edna Chekelelee, however, once told me that there are four kinds of Cherokee stories: happy stories, sad stories, bad stories, and legends. The happy stories include all kinds of animal stories and folktales. Sad stories are about events with unhappy endings, and these include accounts of the Trail of Tears. Bad stories are about people who did things that were considered to be bad, like abandoning children. Legends, or "legend stories," are about things that happened very long ago, including myths and stories of strange supernatural events.

  »The Storíes Themselves

  The stories collected here include all of the above genres, or kinds of stories: myths, legends, folktales, fables, and at least one allegory. They are the stories that the storytellers wanted to tell for this book.

  Also included are what folklorists call "personal experience narratives" and "oral history." Davey Arch's stories about his grandfather's experiences as a young boy are tales that Davey was told and will probably tell his children and grandchildren—and they are traditional, too. People of all cultures will recognize stories like this from their own family experiences. Folklorists consider such stories traditional because they are told over and over again in the same form, shaped by the artistry of the teller and the aesthetic of the tradition. Like all stories, they are reshaped a little bit each time they are told, but they remain essentially the same, just as cornbread turns out a little different every time, even though you use the same recipe. Although stories of this type are specific to one person's life or family, they are recognized by other Cherokee as part of a genre that is shared by many people. For example, many older Cherokee people's accounts of their boarding school experiences mirror the experiences and stories of Robert Bushyhead.

  Although they are unique to each individual, personal-experience narratives are told in a stylized fashion, with a rhythm different from everyday speech. Telling them in a memorable and entertaining way—an audience is needed, after all, to make this a story— requires as much artistry as relating a possum story or complex myth. Freeman Owle's story about what happened to his great-great-grandfather on the Trail of Tears is both a personal-experience story, a family tradition, and also what scholars call "oral history," the recounting of personal events that are part of a larger historical event. Five hundred years ago Cherokee people were probably telling stories about their grandparents and about "recent" historical events. Particular stories and particular kinds of stories last because we need them in order to learn how to live our lives in the present.

  Cherokee stories are shaped by Cherokee culture, including its values and aesthetics and its southern Appalachian environment. Like other American Indian stories, these tend to group events and details in fours or sevens, rather than in the threes common in European folktales. This pattern occurs because the numbers four and seven are sacred to the Cherokee, as they are to many other American Indians. Four is sacred because of the four cardinal directions, east, south, west, and north, each of which is associated with a color and other particular qualities. Seven is sacred because it adds the directions of sky and earth and "the center" to the four cardinal directions. There are seven Cherokee clans, for example. In the rhythm of the stories, phrases, incidents, and details tend to fall into groups of fours as well. There are no princesses in these tales because the Cherokee did not have princesses.

  Readers will notice that different versions of the same story, told by different storytellers, are included. This duplication shows that some stories are especially popular and also allows the reader to make comparisons. "The Origin of Strawberries," told by both Freeman Owle and Davey Arch, is told by Kathi Littlejohn as "First Man and First Woman." "How the Possum Lost His Tail" is also told by all three of these storytellers. "The Ball Game of the Birds and Animals" is told by both Kathi Littlejohn and Freeman Owle. Looking at the different versions, you can see how individual story tellers use details and dialogue in unique ways, and you can see how a story can be at once very different and yet the same. These are great stories, and people love to tell them and hear them. They share some of the lessons considered most important in Cherokee culture: getting along with people without getting angry and acting impulsively; refraining from bragging; and remembering that everyone, no matter how different, has an important role to play.

  Living Stories of the Cherokee is intended not to provide extensive analysis of Cherokee stories and culture, but to document and celebrate the stories and their sound. Because it is the first major collection of Eastern Band stories in a hundred years, I hope it will be useful to scholars of Native American studies and Cherokee studies, to anthropologists and folklorists. The book also provides materials useful to scholars interested in the role of women in Cherokee culture, the place of storytelling in culture, and a host of other specific topics such as medicine or clan relationships. The index is designed to quickly guide the reader to specific topics of interest.

  »What Makes a Storyteller?

  It is the process of learning stories in a traditional setting, from family and community, that makes a storyteller "traditional." Some of the storytellers represented here occasionally take stories from the pages of James Mooney's collection and other printed sources, but all have grown up in a storytelling tradition and learned how to tell stories from parents, grandparents, and the Cherokee community— at home, at family gatherings, at work, and in the course of daily life. To a folklorist, this makes them traditional Cherokee storytellers. In these situations, much information beyond just the story is imparted, including the values of the culture, its aesthetic, and its style of telling—timing, emphasis, inflection. None of these can be learned, by even the most skilled nontraditional storyteller, from reading a story in a book.

  Cherokee stories are still being told, in English and Cherokee, in these traditional settings. Dozens
of older women and men tell their stories to the children who come to visit them in the afternoons at the Tsali Manor retirement home in Cherokee; grandfathers and grandmothers tell stories to their grandchildren; and the children themselves, who are learning these stories, tell them to their friends and, perhaps one day, will tell them to their own children.

  »Oval Poetícs and Transcríptíon

  The stories in this collection are presented on the page as free verse because that style best represents how they are told. They are transcribed directly from the storytellers' words. The storytellers all speak in a rhythmic style that becomes obvious as soon as one starts to write down the words. I have not changed any of the words to make these stories more "literary" or to force them into "standard" English. Punctuation and capitalization follow regular English usage in order to help readers follow the story. The storytellers, like most of us, occasionally speak in sentence fragments. The stories are arranged in lines that represent the natural breaks in the storytellers' speech. If you will read them aloud, or at least listen to them in your mind, you will hear the voices of the storytellers.

  This method of transcribing stories from traditional cultures is called "oral poetics," and it was first used by Dennis Tedlock and others in the 1970s. When I studied folklore and the ethnography of speaking with Dell Hymes at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s, Hymes was using this format to record the Native American tales he was collecting and studying. Henry Glassie presented stories from Northern Ireland in the same way in Passing the Time in Ballymenone and Irish Folk Tales.