Norton - Cherokee Myths and Legends: Thirty Tales Retold

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

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e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-1811-1

2014 Terry L. Norton. All rights reserved

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On the cover: The Historian, Eanger Irving Couse, 1902 ( 2014 PicturesNow)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

Invitation

Ye who love the haunts of nature,
Love the sunshine in the meadow,
Love the shadow of the forest,
Love the wind among the branches,
Love the rain-shower and the snow-storm,
And the rushing of the rivers
Through their palisades of pine-trees,
And the thunder in the mountains,
Whose innumerable echoes
Flap like eagles in their aeries;
Listen to these wild traditions.
From Introduction, Song of Hiawatha, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1855

An examination of sections on folklore in bookstores and libraries reveals that collections identified with Native Americans readily abound. This circumstance requires anyone offering a new collection to explain what differentiates it from others. The chief distinction between this book and others lies in the approach to authenticity and accuracy when original, print sources related to an indigenous group like the Cherokee are adapted or retold. Although the two terms are not mutually exclusive, authenticity concerns the faithful preservation of the cultural context in which the stories are set, whereas accuracy refers to the maintenance of historical veracity in details of time and place. Authenticity is usually more important in rendering stories of origins, magical transformations, talking animals, supernatural beings, and similar features found in folktales around the world. It must be preserved in adaptations of traditional literature when a works stated or implicit values do not reflect attitudes of the current dominant culture. Accuracy is more important when a traditional story purports to be a legend or a fictional tale set in a remote but historically identifiable context usually lacking magic and supernatural elements. An adaptation of legendary material should not cavalierly disregard the essential facts of history, insofar as these can be ascertained, even though many legends transposed into literary retellings by identifiable authors do ignore them. Accuracy is vitally important, especially when the writer asserts that the redaction is factually based.

As for this book, it contains retellings not only of stories recounted by the Cherokee themselves to James Mooney in the 1890s but also of stories told about the Cherokee. Two adaptations from Mooney are significantly integrated with accounts from earlier nineteenth century writers, John Haywood and Charles Lanman, both of whom are discussed later in more detail. The stories about the Cherokee comprise an anecdote conveyed by an Indian trader to colonial historian James Adair, a tale of the Seneca collected in 1883 by folklorist Jeremiah Curtin, and two upstate South Carolina legends highly reshaped by nineteenth century writers William Gilmore Simms and James Daniel. The adaptation of Daniels story is supplemented a great deal from research published in 1981 by historian E. Don Herd, Jr.

My method in retelling the material has been to tamper, sometimes heavily, with the original sources in order to render the stories derived chiefly from Mooney, Curtin, and Adair more authentic and those based primarily on Simms and Daniel not only more authentic but also more accurate for current readers. At first blush, such an approach to sources related to an indigenous group like the Cherokee would seem to violate the generally accepted dimensions of authenticity and accuracy, particularly in regard to an ethnographer like Mooney. However, this seeming paradox should resolve itself after a brief discussion of the core sources and aims of their authors.

The great majority of the stories here are adapted from efforts by James Mooney to preserve the folklore and traditions of the Cherokee. In the late 1890s, he arrived at the Qualla Boundary in western North Carolina where the Eastern Band of Cherokee lived, having evaded the requirement of the 1836 Treaty of New Echota that the Old Cherokee Nation be removed to territories west of the Mississippi by May 23, 1838. Mooney lived and worked among the Eastern Cherokee and developed enough trust with them so that he was able to record their myths, folktales, legends, and sacred rituals. Most of the lore was related to him by the few remaining adepts and traditionalists living at the time. As an ethnographer from the Bureau of American Ethnography, Mooney tasked himself with recording this material in as nearly an exact a manner as possible based on what native storytellers told him, sometimes through an interpreter. In his quest for accuracy, he had studied the Cherokee language and wrote what is still a valuable early account of the nationHistorical Sketch of the Cherokee, often published as a separate book. This body of work he set as a prelude within his longer Myths of the Cherokee (1900).

Along with the narratives that he gathered from the Cherokee, Mooney included and acknowledged other written accounts for additional stories in his Myths. Among these sources was the work of Henry Schoolcraftnineteenth century explorer, geologist, early anthropologist, and Indian agent for the Ojibwa. With the help of his wife, Jane, who was part Ojibwa, Schoolcraft had recorded a voluminous amount on the lore of Native Americans. One legend in his Algic Researches (1839) inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellows popular 1855 epic poem The Song of Hiawatha. Sometimes incorporating Schoolcrafts work verbatim and sometimes rearranging it, Mooney often relied on Schoolcrafts 1847 Notes on the Iroquois if the material contained legends about conflicts with other tribes and if these related to the Cherokee. Mooney also used verbatim anecdotes from Adairs 1775 The History of the American Indians and rearranged stories from the then unpublished manuscript of 1883 by Curtin on tales of the Seneca which the latter had collected for the Bureau of American Ethnology. Again, if the work of these two authors pertained to the Cherokee, Mooney included it in his Myths. He relied on other writers as well but usually for additional commentary or alternative versions of stories, material which he injected into his accompanying Notes and Parallels at the end of Myths. As previously noted, two of these authors, who are used in the present collection and whose anecdotes are fused with two of Mooneys stories, are the jurist and historian John Haywood, considered the father of Tennessee history, and the painter and travel writer Charles Lanman. Both produced works in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In contrast to the selections taken from Mooney, Curtin, Adair, Haywood, and Lanman, two of the stories retold here are, in their original versions, much more fictionalized and elaborately developed and derive from the work of white authors from South Carolina: antebellum literary giant William Gilmore Simms and the Reverend James Walter Daniel, who served as a Methodist minister in Abbeville toward the end of the nineteenth century. Their purposes were very different from those of Mooney, Curtin, and Adair, who aimed for accuracy and authenticity inasmuch as possible. Having literary aspirations, Simms and Daniel took local legends by white settlers that had slight historical references to the Cherokee of the eighteenth century. These writers then turned this material into highly remolded, romanticized adaptations in which the Cherokee are filtered through the lens of the Euro-American culture of the time. In his research, Mooney himself refers briefly to these preRevolutionary War legends from South Carolina as being connected with local names upon which the whites who succeeded to the [Cherokee] inheritance have built traditions of more or less doubtful authenticity.