Oral presentation of the story is like performing art. In my opinion, the beautiful aspect of listening to the story is that the listener’s emotion and focus can be influenced by the narrator. Moreover, it would be even more exciting when the listener hears the story narrated in the Nation’s language because it allows me to connect deeper with the story.
Listening to the origin stories of the Cherokee, the Hopi, and the Lakota, I noticed that the People make many connections between the animals and the habitable land. In the Cherokee Creation Story (Crystal Bridges, 2021), mountains and lands were created by the buzzard and the water beetle, and fire was made accessible to all creatures by the water spider. In the Lakota Emergence Story (National Park Service, 2018), bison helped Earth settlers find necessary things for living. This is very interesting because I think it shows a reciprocal connection between the Indigenous People and nature and the importance of nature to them. Another detail that I noticed is the emphasis of balance in the Cherokee Creation Story (Crystal Bridges, 2021), especially when the creator advised them to “walk in balance” so that the cords that hang the earth would not snap. On the other hand, although the word “balance” is not mentioned in the Hopi Origin (PBS LearningMedia, 2018), in the story, humans had to find the center of the world, which, to me, could be understood as the most stable part of the world.
In chapters one and two of “Cherokee Women: gender and culture change, 1700-1835” by Theda Perdue, the author describes how the balance is observed in the Cherokee culture, for example, how they handled murder and death. If a person kills someone from a different clan, the killer or the killer’s clan member must die to restore the balance (Perdue, 1999, p.50). This also shows that the Cherokee people consider the responsibility as a clan unit instead of individual, which makes me think about their kinship. I find the kinship in this society very complex and strange at the same time. For example, in the book, the clan’s members are akin but not, in a marriage, the husband from the other clan (Perdue, 1999, p.43). I am wondering if all the women in the same clan have some blood-related relationship and how the clan is formed in the first place. Another aspect that captured me is the division in responsibilities between men and women. Although it may seem that women do most of the work, it later appears to me that more responsibilities come with more power and ownership.
References
Crystal Bridges. (2021, February 13). Cherokee Creation Story. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfcznspMFeA
Lakota Emergence Story. (2018, February 26). National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/wica/learn/historyculture/the-lakota-emergence-story.htm
Perdue, T. (1999). Cherokee women: Gender and culture change, 1700 – 1835 (1st Bison books printing). Univ. of Nebraska Press.
The Hopi Origin Story| Native America. (2018). PBS LearningMedia. https://iowa.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/hopi-origin-story/hopi-origin-story/
Hi Thy!
I think it is so useful to approach storytelling as a type of performance art– the practice of using vocal inflections, narrative cues, and descriptive details truly makes these stories come to life. I especially appreciated how Sina Bear Eagle, who told the Lakota emergence story, explained that although the small details might change as the story is passed down, the messages and lessons stay the same. This is what matters the most, and it’s just a reality of telling stories. As a historian, I think there is so much value in approached stories as historical sources because of the way that they blend the past and present together. They are also useful tools to thinking about the generational scale of storytelling, and the connections built between storytellers and listeners.
I think these stories were also a perfect bridge with Cherokee Women, as you describe above. Through stories, we can learn so much about the social worlds, perspectives, and lives of Native communities. Kinship can be very confusing to understand, especially when we are not used to matrilineal culture. Women in a clan would be biologically related to one another, but their marriage would be to men of another clan. This means that women determined familial lines, and clans had strong organization around female ancestry.