Hu! Behind my apartment two old houses were recently demolished. Some ancient cherry trees and many good blackberry vines were killed. The land is on a hilltop and it has one of the highest elevations in Vancouver. That is significant. One morning, as the sun rose, I walked around the big scar made by the machines and put an offering of tobacco inside a large coyote track. The trees were dead and the soil was angry. Countless small animals had been deprived of shelter and many had fallen prey to predators.
When I arrived home that evening, I found a delicate skull fragment on my porch. It was highly polished, snow-white and as beautiful as a seashell. It was symmetrically shaped and thin as a card. The eye socket was precisely centred. I accepted the gift. Do you wonder what am I talking about? You will find a clue in the following book review.
There is a particular book which is listed in the bibliographies of any serious book about the Cherokee. It is James Mooney's book, Myths of the Cherokee and Sacred Formulae of the Cherokees.
Mooney was an American ethnologist who lived two hundred years ago. He is less well-known than Franz Boas, but they were the same kind of men in many respects. Mooney has been invaluable to the Cherokee Nation. From 1887 to 1890, Mooney made notes and collected original Cherokee manuscripts. These were written by medicine men, in their own language. A Syllabary that had been invented by German/Cherokee George Guess, aka Sequoya, in 1821.
James collected almost six hundred items. At the time, those writings were the largest collection of Native American literature extant. Most of the myths and formulae were collected from members of the Kitu'hwa Society. They were Eastern Cherokee, mountaineers who lived in the forests and mountains of two regions known as Nantahala and Oconaluftee. They had chosen to hide when the main tribe was exiled to Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears. They had thus preserved much of their tribal knowledge.
Mooney's epic and exhaustive book contains over four hundred pages of myths, twenty-eight sacred formulae and a history of the tribe. It was within his book that I first encountered a Native written accounting of the story of my maternal grandmother's ancestors, the Texas Cherokee. It was on page 143 of Mooney's book. In July 1839, the cavalry of the Republic of Texas attacked. Many were killed and the survivors were chased across the Rio Grande into Mexico. Some women of mixed blood and fairer features survived and became the wives of the conquerors.
In those days past and up until not many years ago, a person in East Texas, could not safely admit to being a native American. When Mooney was writing his notes, many of these events were still in living memory. My grandmother seldom spoke of Cherokee culture. Rather, she exemplified its wisdom by example. I will always remember a special tea she brewed from dried sarsaparilla roots.
Time turns in a circle. Although conquerors always trample other civilizations and put them to ruin; scholars, bards, and griots are ubiquitous. They are those who remember the past. If not for these men and women of knowledge and memory, each successive dark age would last much longer. I give thanks to James Mooney, a man I never knew, who began his task as an unschooled, unsupervised amateur, beholden to no man. He preserved part of my heritage, seeking no accolades nor monetary gain, while other men attempted to destroy it. Hu!
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