The Animals' Ballgame

The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, together with the nearby university in the capital city of Tahlequah, is gearing up for what has long been billed as the Nation's (Tsa-la-gi; Tsa-ra-gi; Ji-lo-gi; Chi-la-gi; Chalaque; Cholukee; Ani-yun-wiya; or whatever variant one prefers) "First Ever Cherokee Writers' Gathering." Word has gone out far and wide for more than a year, advertising and proclaiming it, and at the same time beseeching all who are writers to come and take part in it. Web pages have glowed about it; the blogosphere is filled with information about it; mass mailings have ensued; and word-of-mouth is trumpeting it all far and wide. It promises to be, so the Nation's own website declares, the greatest get-together of Cherokee writers ever assembled. And in the magnificent auditorium in the W. W. Keeler complex on the university campus in Tahlequah—the town "set like a jewel among gently rolling hills" (as a noted scholar once wrote)—the writers, the would-be writers, and wannabe writers are assembling in vast hordes and precipitous multitudes.

At last the day of assemblage dawns, and the vast entourage of Cherokeeness comes forth into the auditorium like a fleet of unleashed Achaean warships upon the besieged Trojan city and plain. First, there are the hordes of CNO-identified writers and artists surging onto the scene in all their beastly prominence, coming forward in vast accompaniments, in virtual clutters and clowders and nuisances and destructions and kindles and litters and pounces (as in cats of all sorts and varieties), in warrens and droves and buries and traces (as in rabbits), in gazes and nurseries and rafts (likewise of beavers) and bevies and romps (ditto for otters), in drays and scurries (of squirrels), and gangs and herds (the many-hoofed majesties in all their varieties). In a word, the scribblers are coming!

The symposium's premier topic—l ong decided on and thereby duly appointed—i s to be a panel in which several differing versions of the justly famous and well-known tribal story of "The Animals' Ballgame" will be presented—most prominently, that of the famed non-Cherokee and non-Indian anthropologist James Mooney, as well as later versions by the eminent Cherokee storytellers Lloyd Arneach and Kathi Smith Littlejohn. There are to be readings of these versions, as well as renditions of still other variants. Already, quite a gaggle of volunteers have advanced themselves as commentators and elucidators. The enduring question: which of the three—and possibly more?—variants is the correct one?

Once, in the long-ago time, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and all other Cherokees spread far and wide spoke the same language and almost, at most times, thought the same thoughts, as only an extraordinarily unified people tend to do. However, with removals, expulsions, exiles, schisms, and wanderings far afield, they had all been scattered like so many wind-blown leaves, mainly through the American Southland, of a diaspora that occurred at the time of The Road Where the People Cried northwestwardly out of the southwestern portion of the traditional Cherokee homeland of the Alleghenies and Appalachians, across rivers and creeks of Tennessee, then across Kentucky, and over the Ohio River and into Ohio and Indiana and Illinois and then into Missouri and then southwestwardly into Arkansas and on into eastern Oklahoma—leaving not only the dead and buried, but also the runaways from the caravans and all to be counted by the enumerators as part of the four thousand lost.

Most visible and preeminently recognizable of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma is Professor Jonah Erskine, renowned Cherokee scholar and novelist, author of nearly sixty books on Cherokee history and lore, emeritus professor (self-retired at the early age of forty-five) from prestigious Cherokee Nation University, father of ten Cherokeelets, uncle to two dozen more, tribal elder of seventy-one now, slow-moving (but oh, so deceptively so in his comportment), a man at ease with himself and his world—the perfect Cherokee attainment—and an everyday habitué of the très stylish Inn of...