Extra Reading Diary: Cherokee Stories

Cherokee Stories

The First Fire: The world was a dark place when the Thunders set fire to a a tree on Earth. The animals held a council in order for them to find out how to bring the fire back to them. Many animals volunteered to bring it back. But one after one, they failed to bring the fire back. Pretty soon, the rest of the animals were making excuses to not fetch the fire. A water spider volunteered and wove a little bowl from its thread and brought a piece of burning coal back to the others. Ever since, there has been fire.

(Water Spider, Source:UnTextbook)

The Moon and The Thunders: This story has a bunch of mini stories about the sun and the moon. Every culture seems to have a different idea of how the sun and moon came to be. My favorite was the one where the sun and moon are siblings and the moon acts as the sun's lover. The moon doesn't show his face or reveal his name, so the sun rubs ash on the moon's face and the next day when the moon rises, the sun sees the ash and knows that her brother was her lover. From then on, the moon always avoided the sun, but on rare occasions when they had to be near, the moon would always make himself small as a crescent so it would be hard for him to be seen.

Tobacco and Strawberries: A tobacco plant was stolen by a goose and all the people and animals were upset. One woman was close to dying due to not having any tobacco. All sorts of animals tried retrieving the plant, but the goose kept killing them. A hummingbird volunteered and was able to bring back some tobacco leaves and keep the woman alive. In the strawberry story, a woman left her husband and he mourned for her. The Sun pitied him and set traps for the woman by placing beautiful fruits on the side of the road. It all failed until she came to strawberries, fruit that she has never seen before. She looked back and felt an overwhelming memory of her husband and decided to go back to him.