Tricksters. Living Stories of the Cherokee

Last week was dedicated the Anansi, the trickster spider of Africa and the African Diaspora, and for this week, I've decided to take a different approach, focusing on a specific storytelling tradition. Since I had just watched a brilliant documentary about the history of the Cherokee in America, I decided to work on Cherokee stories this week, and I was so pleased to see that the Internet Archive has this really excellent resource: Living Stories of the Cherokee, edited by Barbara Duncan:

The book features stories by the following Cherokee storytellers: Davey Arch, Robert Bushyhead, Edna Chekelelee, Marie Junaluska, Kathi Smith Littlejohn, and Freeman Owle. 

The book is organized into sections dedicated to each of those storytellers, and you will find all kinds of stories here. That means this book can give people a way to see the wonderful trickster stories of the Cherokee in a larger context, and there are sometimes multiple versions of the same story told by these different storytellers, like the story of how Possum lost his tail... and in some versions of that story, the trickster Rabbit is very much part of the plot against Possum, although sometimes it is the Fox who plays that role instead. The Turtle is also a trickster in some Cherokee stories, as you can see in the story of the Beaver's race with the Turtle; it is not "slow and steady wins the race" for this trickster Turtle, but that's all I'm going to say (spoilers!).

So, as the week goes by I will focus specifically on trickster stories from the Cherokee tradition, but I wanted to start the week off with this great book about Cherokee storytelling in general since I was so excited to see that this great book is available at the Internet Archive, just a click away. Enjoy!

Living Stories of the Cherokee

edited by Barbara Duncan