Choctaw Tales, Part 2: The Creation Legend · The Journey's End at Nunih Waya · Raising the Great Mound
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part Two of our Choctaw Tales opens with the oldest-printed telling of how the peoples came forth from Nanih Waiya — the Muscogees first, then the Cherokees, the Chickasaws, and last the Choctaws, who stayed and made this land their home — as Isaac Pistonatubbee told it in his native tongue to Henry Sale Halbert. Then Gideon Lincecum's translation of the Skukhaanumpula, the traditional history related to him by the Choctaw elder Chata Immataha, carries the great journey to its end: the sacred pole dances and stands still beside the leaning hill, and a nation that has carried the bones of its dead through forty-three years of wandering gathers them into one great monumental grave — the mound of Nanih Waiya — and from that great grave the custom of the mound graves arises.
This episode tells a portion of Lincecum's translation, not the whole of it: the great council that consented to the mound, the mound of the sacred pole, and the later years at Nunih Waya are not told here. The translation's closing chapters, in which the Chickasaws attack the Choctaw hunting camps and the nation prepares for war, are excluded under this library's standing rule against enacted violence, and the plague that befell the Chickasaws on their own journey is likewise left out.
Stories in this episode:
0:36 Introduction
2:31 The Choctaw Creation Legend
4:31 The Journey's End at Nunih Waya
12:56 Raising the Great Mound
22:15 Of Mound Graves
Sources: "The Choctaw Creation Legend" by H. S. Halbert, in Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, Vol. IV (1901), and "Choctaw Traditions about their Settlement in Mississippi and the Origin of their Mounds" by Gideon Lincecum, in Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, Vol. VIII (1904) — Lincecum's translation of a portion of the Skukhaanumpula, as related by Chata Immataha — both public domain. Narrated by Benedetto.
Music: "Calm After the Current" (instrumental) — opening and closing theme, with a short excerpt between stories.
Choctaw tales, Choctaw folklore, Gideon Lincecum, Henry Halbert, Nanih Waiya, Chata Immataha, Skukhaanumpula, Native American folk tales, KacheliTV
