Choctaw Tales, Part 3: The Council of the Bones · The Dispersal and the Settling · The Growth of the Settlements
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part Three of our Choctaw Tales steps back to the deliberation that made the great mound of Nanih Waiya possible. The minko has seen that the nation's burden of bones — the sacks of their dead, carried through forty-three years of wandering until the dead outnumber the living — will break the people if the journey goes on. The leaders' council will not touch the question, and the old Isht ahullo warns that the spirits will answer any casting-away of the relics with hunger, disease and death. So the chief dismisses the council, calls the whole nation to the dance ground, and asks them plainly, in bright sunlight, to gather their fathers' bones into one beautiful resting place — and an old man who has carried his own father's bones since boyhood rises to answer him. Then the telling follows the nation in the years after the mound was finished: the dispersal to the hunting grounds, the planting of larger crops and the building of good houses, and the growth of the settlements along the creeks of their new home.
This episode tells a portion of Lincecum's translation, not the whole of it: the mound of the sacred pole and the departure of the conjurers are not told here, and no completeness is claimed for the Skukhaanumpula, the traditional history Chata Immataha related and Lincecum translated only in part.
Stories in this episode:
0:36 Introduction
2:02 The Council of the Bones
19:54 The Dispersal and the Settling
21:37 The Growth of the Settlements
Source: "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 — public domain. Narrated by Orson.
Music: "Lightning Crash" (instrumental) — opening and closing theme, with a short excerpt between stories.
Choctaw tales, Choctaw folklore, Gideon Lincecum, Nanih Waiya, Chata Immataha, Skukhaanumpula, Council of the Bones, Native American folk tales, KacheliTV
