Eleven tellings of the Choctaw people, taken from the two books that carried them into print. Henry Sale Halbert, who lived among the Mississippi Choctaws for fifteen years and spoke their language, printed the legends of Nanih Waiya, the sacred mound, as the Reverend Peter Folsom and the Six Towns teller Ilaishtubbee gave them to him. At Bayou Lacomb in Louisiana, the tellers Pisatuntema, Heleema and Ahojeobe told their myths to David I. Bushnell Jr. of the Smithsonian Institution, who printed them in 1909.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
The prophet's pole leans each morning toward the day's road, until at Nanih Waiya it stands still — and a great rain parts two brothers into two kindred nations. The first Choctaws crawl forth from the mound and are laid along its rampart to dry in the sun, and a crow and an orphan child bring corn into the world. Kwanokasha, the little spirit of the cave, offers every wandering child a knife, poisonous herbs, or the herbs of healing. And a hunter who will not leave a stranded alligator to die carries him to the water on his own shoulder — and is repaid with the teaching that made him great.
Stories in this episode:
0:54 Introduction
2:52 The Migration Legend
6:20 The Creation at the Mound
7:26 The Law of the Iksa
8:54 How Corn Was Found
10:31 Creation Myth
12:40 Kwanokasha
15:03 Kashehotapalo
16:07 Okwa Naholo
18:35 Why 'Possum Has a Large Mouth
20:10 The Hunter and the Alligator
23:14 Hoklonote'she
Sources: "Nanih Waiya, the Sacred Mound of the Choctaws" by H. S. Halbert, in Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, Vol. II (Oxford, Mississippi, 1899), and The Choctaw of Bayou Lacomb, St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana by David I. Bushnell, Jr. (Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 48, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1909) — both public domain. Narrated by Indomitable Minecart.
Music: "Ancient Canopy" (instrumental) — opening and closing theme, with a short excerpt between stories.
