ORAL TRADITIONS, SOUTHEAST

Oral Traditions, Southeast

Although displaced from the land they celebrated, Southeastern indigenous people had stories, songs, and forms of oratory that were once incredibly rich and advanced. This diversity reflected the vast size and density of populations interacting with one another, as well as the region’s thriving towns, trading paths, unique waterways, and ancient agricultural base. Nowhere else except possibly in California did so varied a pattern of intermingling cultures emerge, with Creek, Choctaw, and other so-called Civilized Tribes, roving Siouan bands, Algonkins from the north, proud neutral states like the Yuchi, and remains of ancient empires (for example, Calusa, Natchez Indians). Not all of these tribes were “Indian.” Very ancient European contributions to New World DNA are reflected in the X-gene recently discovered by population geneticists. C. S. Rafinesque in his Ancient History long ago proposed Kentucky and Tennessee as the center of an antediluvian Western-style civilization, as evidenced by their numerous mounds, circular stone temples, and other monuments. Curtis’s The Indians’ Book (1907) first popularized American Indian oral traditions, creating the earliest anthology of “oral literature.” But inclusions from Southeastern Native people were few, and they have continued to be underrepresented.

It is hard for modern-day readers to imagine the world of Native speakers. Word of mouth enjoyed the same primacy as a medium of knowledge and means of religious practice as do literacy and Scripture in Old World religions. Storytelling, chant, song, ceremony, “talks,” and visions were originated and perpetuated by the common people rather than reserved to a privileged few. Religion permeated everything. Orality ensured the communal, continual, and egalitarian nature of tribal religions (a better term might be “spiritualities”). For Indians, oral tradition is sacrosanct, like transmission of texts and writings in the West and Orient. If Christianity is book-based, the religions of the Southeast are oral-based. Paper, books, and laws were quickly recognized as inimical to indigenous ways. Language itself was taught to people by God (Creek: “Master of Breath”). The second highest rank in any community was the politico-religious dignitary called “speaker” (Cherokee: skalilosken), and all towns had criers and greeters, usually wise old men skilled in tribally specific markings and intertribal protocols. The equivalent term for priest or scribe is “keeper.” Even laws (Adair’s [1930] “beloved speech”) were oral. There is no theology in Indian society because nothing is written (Deloria 1994). By the same token, there are no lawyers: forensic oratory, so prized in the West, did not develop (Kennedy 1998). History is the story of the people as a whole—men, women, and children. It rarely follows the Latin model of deeds of famous men (res gestae). Only occasionally is it a Herodotean collection of times and travels. Never does it approach the Augustinian City of God model. The past is seen as a place rather than a time. Indeed, most stories are about places—mountains, caves, streams, pools, lakes, cliffs, islands—often as a way of explaining their sacredness.

Contemporary authors heavily influenced by their people’s oral traditions who occasionally pursue religious themes include Te Ata (Chickasaw: Baby Rattlesnake), Jim Barnes (Choctaw), Ward Churchill (Creek-Cherokee Metis), Robert Conley (Cherokee), Todd Downing (Choctaw), Jimmy Durham (Cherokee), Momfeather Erickson (Cherokee), Jack D. Forbes (Powhatan-Delaware-Saponi), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), Joy Harjo (Creek), Jamake Highwater (Cherokee-Blackfoot), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Betty Mae Jumper (Seminole), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa-Cherokee), Ralph Salisbury (Cherokee), and Marcellus Bear Heart Williams (Creek: The Wind Is My Mother: The Life and Teachings of an American Shaman). Recording artists with a spiritual bent are Rita Coolidge (Cherokee), Joy Harjo (Creek), Lisa LaRue (Cherokee), Bill Miller (Mohican), and Ulali (Saponi?). Marian Anderson, the opera singer who popularized Negro spirituals, was a black Cherokee. (For storytellers, see Duncan 1998.)

Scholars today divide American Indian stories into sacred and entertaining, truth and fiction, but it is unclear whether such distinctions were observed by Native storytellers or originated as a Western construct projected onto American Indian culture. Generally, the whole body of oral tradition of a given tribe or clan is seen as being of one piece and purpose. Indian sign talk has two words for truth—“something I know and have verified and am telling you from my heart” versus “something I have heard tell but cannot vouch for myself.”

Probably the most important oral traditions are creation, emergence, or origin stories (called “cosmogonic myths” by Mooney [1982]). Each is the distinctive patrimony of a cultural group, defining, for instance, what it means to be Cherokee, or Creek, or Yuchi. Before conquest by the white man, Indians deemed stories sacred, having a spirit and life of their own. They had to be passed properly and intact to worthy receivers if passed at all. Oral traditions were regarded as gifts from the spirit world (Cherokee: kalu[n]lati; lit., “the Up-Above Place”) or from ancestors (usu.: “the Old Ones”), held in common, often owned by a clan. Most begin and end formulaically—for example: “One time long, long ago . . . and that’s all there is.” They were not viewed as individually authored works fixed in media and subject to interpretation and variety. Versions were highly standardized and static across generations, often incorporating archaic vocabulary and performed ritualistically with rattle, stick, or drum. No mistake or departure from the original wording was allowed. The presence of words for wooly mammoth and other extinct megafauna shows their extreme antiquity.

Both esoteric knowledge and everyday communications were occasionally written down or otherwise preserved in material forms. However, these acted as only a personal mnemonic device, not a codification or publication. The same could be said of calendar keeping and astronomy, highly engrossing activities at religious sites like Coosa, Echota, and Nanah Waiyah Mound. Conjurors (Cherokee: adawehi; lit., “they fly around”—they often became owls) made medicine maps showing spiritual pathways; couriers carried wampum belts reminding them what to say; and all girls received religious-instructive dolls (similar to the katsina of the Hopi).

The Yuchi carved ancestral and animal heroes out of stone, making totem figurines that were used in the sweatlodge and around the fire to tell stories. Clans kept “talking” rocks, crystals, and other heirlooms in their treasuries, each object with a legend and a lesson. Various accounts containing migration records and other tribes’ embassies were preserved in the inner sanctum of council houses and chiefs’ lodges and displayed and recited on special occasions. The Walam Olum of the Delaware Indians represents that people’s annals and is kept even today in various longer and shorter compilations, on wampum belts, prayer sticks, and birchbark. The oldest version resides today in Canada with William Commanda, chief of the Seven Algonkin Nations and spiritual head of all North American Indians. Wampum belts were originally made from purple and white mussel beads sewn with seaweed on cotton or hempen fabric. Preserved as emblems of sovereignty, they were among the first things destroyed by invaders. The last such known to the Cherokee were remade by the Keetoowah Society in Oklahoma after many of the other sacred bundles were removed to Scotland. Few if any of these artifacts survive.

Winter was the prime time for storytelling, whose main purpose was the moral instruction of the young. The sexes were usually separated. Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories capture just such a scene. They are based on Yuchi and Cherokee stories mixed with African and European traditions from a middle Georgia plantation. The trickster in the Southeast is usually the rabbit, sometimes the fox, corresponding to the spider among the Lakota, the coyote in the Southwest, and the jackal in Africa. The oral traditions of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Shawnee, Yuchi, Natchez, and Seminole are still rich today beyond measure, though dying out and constantly endangered by failure to be passed along. Moreover, there is an ingrained resistance to translating into English or sharing with outsiders. Much survives in unlikely places, such as Puerto Rico and on other islands in the Caribbean, where the last members of a tribe might have been deported as slaves by the English.

Traditionally, the Cherokee imbued the owl (huhu, uguku, uku) and panther (chlu[n]tachi) with special powers because those two animals stayed awake during the creation of the world. The principal chief of the nation was the Uku. Many stories are told of how the panther guided the people on their migrations. Baby boys were cradled in panther skins to make them good warriors. Among the Muskogee, there were three distinct cat clans. Even today the principal chief on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation in Florida keeps a Florida panther as his mascot and symbol of office; the most recent under Chief Billy was named Harjo (“warrior”). The trees that stayed awake in the same creation story were the cedar, pine, spruce, laurel, and holly; there was a taboo against using them as fuel.

The “old ways” among most groups lasted until the early 1800s. Not until 1810 was the first Cherokee converted to Christianity. About the same time clan justice was repealed, and a traditionalist ghost-dance movement began under chief Pathkiller. Although the Spaniards thought original Indian populations remarkably spiritual and pious, by the mid-1700s, Adair [1930] complained that they were almost completely “apostacized” and quite irreligious. Curiously, missionaries and Indian agents discovered many Jewish practices, especially among the Southeastern tribes. When D. S. Buttrick conducted ethnological collections around 1820, his informants made more of Moses than Jesus. It is likely that the “mixed blood” hierarchies dominant at the time of Indian removal were mostly descended from crypto-Jewish traders and Melungeons (largely Portuguese Jews, according to recent DNA studies). Sequoyah’s father was a crypto-Jewish trader, spy, and linguist from Baltimore, Nathaniel Gist. (A Gist cousin in Kentucky married into the rabbinical Gratz family of traders in Philadelphia and Lancaster.) Crypto-Judaism, like Native American spirituality, was entirely oral, being an underground religion.

Religious instruction was usually the duty of maternal grandparents, who disciplined children by scratching them with gar teeth or turkey claws. Among migratory Siouan bands intersettled with the major tribes (for example, Biloxi, Occaneechi, Saponi, Catawba), vision quests and coming-of-age ordeals were common. All tribes believed in sharing dreams and enacting or avoiding the prophecies contained in them. Young people were taught to speak slowly and deliberately in public. Indian speech is exceedingly polite. Few “curse words” exist in American Indian languages. Traditional Indians will not utilize oaths, either privately or publicly. The Cherokee’s strongest oath was “I affirm it, I so say, I have spoken” (to-e-oo-ha or skeh!). Taboos and euphemisms were frequent; for instance, the Cherokee called the white man the “Nothings” and addressed poison ivy as kanali, “friend,” upon entering the woods.

For the most part, Southeastern Indian language was down-to-earth and plainspoken. Metaphors and similes were uncongenial to traditional speakers because of the Indian worldview, which was profoundly holistic. Southeastern Indians do not divide the world into the natural and supernatural. Nor do they distinguish between the physical and the metaphysical. The visible and the invisible have the same order of being. Mind and body, matter and spirit, are non-Indian dichotomies. Everything is spirit, and all spirit is one. All things are related (taha ganino in Tihanama; cf. mitake oyasin in Lakota), and man is not the crown of creation but just one being in the circle of life. Accordingly, students of Indian eloquence have usually suspected (white) editorial tampering when a piece of writing contains beautiful and elaborate figurative language and symbolism. Chief Joseph’s words, for instance, were greatly “improved.”

The following is an English version of the Cherokee origin story in its entirety, as told to the author by Paul Russell of Hartsville, Tennessee, about 1995. It offers many features common to other legends—a certain unadorned style, circular structure, emphasis on place instead of time, a teaching purpose, argumentation based more on credibility than logic, and thoroughgoing “solemnity”:

Before the Great Flood there lived a man and his wife in a land now below the waters called Lami. There were no Cherokee at that time. The people of that place were a single nation with one tongue. Many had become wicked. They turned to witchcraft to satisfy their desires. This man and his wife kept to the old ways and were faithful. They had a dog that was loyal to them, that they loved very much.

The dog spoke to the man and his wife in their dreams. One night it told them the world was going to be destroyed. They should make preparations to save their family. The man did not want to believe this. When he saw the dog in the morning he asked the animal what he meant. The dog whimpered and cowered and tried to show fear. The man shook his head. He petted the dog but the dog was not to be comforted. Finally, the dog took the man down to the river and jumped into the rushing water. To show the man what he meant, he tore his arm and leg muscles with his teeth and drowned. The dog gave his life to save the lives of his people.

The man now knew what he was to do. He began building a boat. He put food and other necessities on it. The neighbors laughed at him because the ocean was far away even though they lived on an island. The stream was too small to carry his boat. When the man tried to warn them, they made fun of him for talking with dogs! It began to rain, and they ridiculed him all the more. The man quietly gathered his family and loaded their things onto the boat.

The flood waters swept them down the river to the sea. It rained for many months. There were earthquakes, and the entire earth was covered with water. Finally, their boat came to rest on Monterey Mountain. This is why the Cherokee still live in the mountains, because they are afraid of another flood. They do not like to live where there are no cedar trees either.

The man and his wife had children, and the children had children. The Cherokees spread out to the east and settled the Cherokee outlet to the sea along the Savannah River. They are called the Principal People [ani yu(n)wiya] to show they are all descended from this couple. The original Wolf Clan is still the most common.

Similar stories in this vein are the Muskogee migration narrative (Gatschet 1969), origin of the races story (with different tribal versions, although the red race is always the Maker’s favorite), the Cherokee story of Kanati and Selu (Mooney [1982]—notice “Divine Twins”), the story of the origin of medicine (the animals visit illness on mankind in revenge, while plants help the Indians—Cherokee), and a creation story in which a water beetle (Cherokee) or muskrat (Seminole) brings up land and a spark of fire out of the primordial waters.

In deliberative oratory, treaty making, and polemics (which is to say, the bulk of all discourse in the postcontact period), the separate creation of the Indian was a favorite topic, as was the avowed role of speaking for the Great Spirit. Models in the Southeast were Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa (twin brothers whose grandfather was a white trader among the Creeks), Hillis Harjo (Josiah Francis, their cousin); Attakullakulla, Oconostota, Dragging Canoe, John Ridge, Young Tassel (John Watts, who had flaming red hair), Elias Boudinot, John Ross, and Sam Houston (Cherokee); Alexander McGillivray and Red Eagle, or William Weatherford (Creek); Red Shoes, Pushmataha, and Moshulatubbee (Choctaw); James, George, and Levi Colbert (Scottish crypto-Jews) and Piomingo (Chickasaw); and Billy Bowlegs, the several Wildcats or Big Cats, and Osceola (Seminole).

Unusual productions are autobiographies of a people, oral histories in the first person plural that speak for all Indians (see Perdue 1993). Some modern-day “speakers” or “seers” such as Archie Sam (Cherokee-Creek-Natchez Indian, 1914–1986) have been placed on videotape and even broadcast. The intertribal body of knowledge passed to them—the seer tradition—can concern past, present, or future and pertain to any of three worlds, or dimensions—upper, middle, or lower. A prophet (for example, Josiah Francis) is thus someone who sees the future, correctly interprets the past, or discerns the meaning of current events. Often he is helped by medicine beings such as the Tie-Snakes, which appeared from a pool of water to the Tuckabatchee Creeks when Tecumseh pressured them to go to war.

Oratory, like song, formed part of ritual ceremonies, “an attempt to order the spiritual and physical world through the power of the word, whether chanted, spoken or sung” (Ruoff 1990). Songs could be social or sacred, personal, tribal, clan-owned, or intertribal. The first question asked of a returning traveler was often, “Did you learn any good songs?” The Creeks looked to the Choctaw as a source for new songs and dances for their annual busks. Ornate speeches were expected at child naming ceremonies, military decorations and promotions, dedications of new lodges, conciliation and friendship ceremonies, chiefs’ councils or peace talks, and treaty-making deliberations. Short speeches were proper for general assemblies and festivals, bonding ceremonies (weddings), military harangues, ballplay pep talks and victory speeches, funeral orations, busks or giveaways, and sweatlodge ceremonies (Cherokee: asi, “winter house”). Medicine men speeches were in special languages that could not be translated. Powwow vocables such as “hey” and “ho” preserve fragments of these languages. Strangely, certain communications were heard once and never repeated (chiefs’ songs, death songs). Some were even uttered in imaginary languages and composed of animal cries.

Charms and sayings are an additional area of traditional language. Researchers have found a paucity of proverbs in most preliterate societies. Riddles are practically unknown. Most sayings are about breaking a taboo, couched in a deliberately ambiguous fashion. Southeastern Indian humor is spontaneous and sophisticated. There are some good samples in Adair [1930], while in modern times Cherokee vaudevillian Will Rogers has been justly celebrated. Humor was not thought inappropriate even to serious occasions.

The following genres can only be barely mentioned here: stories about the Little People, or Indian fairies, or other races (Moon People), animal fables (“How Possum Lost His Tail,” with a moral about boasting, is probably the best known Cherokee story), clan and family tales, ancestor exploits (often today about the Trail of Tears), “anomalous creature” or monster stories (for example, the Tlanuwa, or Great Hawk, at Chattanooga), witch tales (Stonecoat), never-ending or audience-participatory stories (very popular among Siouan tribes), love stories, travelers’ tales (“In Mexico there live six different tribes of Indians and they are all cannibals . . .”), war stories (many about the Iroquois, or Northerlies), women’s stories, and dramatizations (sometimes pantomime).

Donald Panther-Yates