Cherokee Stories of the Supernatural

Stories of personal experience of supernatural events are a highly-valued form of verbal art for Cherokee speakers. Both the people who tell them and those who listen regard such stories as entertaining and instructional. These stories even reflect some of the tensions that exist between traditional Cherokee culture and modern American social life, and they provide linguists with valuable examples of "good" Cherokee language as it is used by speakers. Cherokee stories of the supernatural are distinguished from other Cherokee stories by their subject matter, style, and the circumstances surrounding their telling; good stories are told with a minimum of verbal response from the audience. Speakers dislike being interrupted, so they very skillfully exploit the resources of the language to avoid ambiguity and keep audience interest. Good stories of the supernatural provide examples of carefully-structured, rhetorically-sophisticated, and highly-regarded Cherokee speech, often with meanings related to contemporary life, morals, and values. Literary art in Cherokee is still being created today and reflects the modern life of the Cherokee using this more traditional means of cultural communication. (Contains 22 references.)