Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club by Christopher B. Teuton (review)

Christopher B. Teuton is a leading scholar of Native American literature. Now he has produced the first major collection of Cherokee storytelling from west of the Mississippi since the work of Jack and Anna Kilpatrick in the 1960s. The work is particularly valuable for recording little-known traditions preserved by the traditionalist Keetoowah Society. As Teuton himself describes the book’s purpose, it “documents and perpetuates contemporary Cherokee oral traditional stories and practices, presents Cherokee oral traditional knowledge within a historical and contemporary context, supports Cherokee literary arts, and perpetuates the Cherokee language” (8–9). It is an ambitious agenda that the author/ethnographer sets for himself. He succeeds admirably.

The “club” of the title refers to Cherokee storytellers who get together to swap stories. In particular, it refers to Teuton’s four collaborators: Hastings Shade, Sammy Still, Sequoyah Guess, and Woody Hansen. These four master storytellers have traveled all over the fourteen-county area of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. They have also shared their knowledge with Eastern Band Cherokees in North Carolina and with members of the wider Cherokee diaspora in places as far-flung as Tennessee, Texas, New Mexico, and California.

After an introduction by Teuton, the book begins, appropriately enough, with a chapter on origins entitled Alenihv (“Beginnings”). Anyone familiar with the orature of the Cherokee knows their earth-diver creation myth, in which the little water beetle (“Beaver’s Grandchild”) dives deep to the bottom of the primordial sea to fetch land to the ancient ocean’s surface. James Mooney recorded a version of it in the late nineteenth century. The people also preserve a migration myth in their grand “Vision of Eloh” of traveling from “beyond the great waters” to their traditional homelands in what is today the American Southeast. In the process five of the twelve Cherokee clans were lost. The story is commonly assumed to be an ancestral memory of when the tribe split off from its more northern-dwelling Iroquoian kin. Here, however, Hastings Shade offers two much less known creation accounts, one an emergence myth associated with Kituwah, the mother mound of Cherokee in North Carolina, and the other a migration story in which the people flee a volcanic island “surrounded by water that was undrinkable,” suggesting a Cherokee belief in origins in the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico (56).

There is a wealth of knowledge here. While none of it is previously totally unknown (and thus not open to the misguided accusation of being “made up”), like Shade’s emergence story, much of it will surprise and delight—and no doubt anger some—persons who think they know the Cherokee and their traditions. There is the story of when Cherokee warriors drove away dark-skinned invaders long before the coming of whites. And there is Woody Hansen’s lament about Cherokees who are today “Wal-Mart warriors” who no longer know their culture and supply all their needs at the Tahlequah big box (104). Earlier I mentioned the loss of five Cherokee clans during migration. Here you hear the members of the Liars’ Club discuss those lost, like the Dragon Clan (Aniugatena), the Rattlesnake Clan, and the Nape of the Neck Clan. There are etiological myths here, offered by Shade, including “Why the Mole Lives Underground,” “Why the Crow is Black,” and “How the Raccoon Got His Mask and Ringed Tail.”

Cherokee Stories of Turtle Island Liars’ Club is, however, more than a simple anthology of oral tales. Much of the book is Teuton’s gentle, freewheeling—even affectionate—conversations with his four collaborators. These provide a texture and a richness. The effect is enhanced by the beautiful and abundant illustrations by master Cherokee artist America Meredith.

At the outset of this review, I suggested that this book is both valuable and important. Such adjectives, however, are inadequate to do it full justice. Though Teuton is still a relatively young scholar, he...