Choctaw Tales

Including stories from the 1700s to today, Choctaw Tales showcases the mythic, the legendary and supernatural, the prophecies and histories, the animal fables and jokes that make up the rich and lively Choctaw storytelling tradition. The stories display intelligence, artistry, and creativity as Choctaw narrators, past and present, express and struggle with beliefs, values, humor, and life experiences. Photographs of the storytellers complement the text. For sixteen tales, the Choctaw-language version appears in addition to the English translation. Many of these stories, passed down through generations, address the Choctaw sense of isolation and tension as storytellers confront eternal, historical, and personal questions about the world and its inhabitants. Choctaw Tales, the first book to collect these stories, creates a comprehensive gathering of oral traditions from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. Each story brings to life the complex and colorful world of the Choctaw tribe and its legend and lore. The shukha anumpa include tall tales, jokes, and stories of rabbits, turtles, and bears. The stories of the elders are populated by spirits that bring warnings and messages to the people. These tales provide a spectrum of legend and a glimpse of a vibrant, thriving legacy.

Choctaw variant of Aesop's fable, The Tortoise and the Hare, in which Turkey assists Turtle in defeating Rabbit.

This complete overview of the Choctaw people, from ancient times to the present, includes sections on history, cuisine, music and dance, current issues, oral traditions and language, social relationships, and traditional world view. Endeavoring to replace stereotypical images with a more accurate understanding of Native Americans, Culture and Customs of the Choctaw Indians explores the traditional lives of the Choctaw people, their history and oppression by the dominant society, and their struggles to maintain a unique identity in the face of overwhelming pressures to assimilate. The book begins with a historical overview of traditional Choctaw life, belief systems, social customs, and traditions. Moving to contemporary Choctaw communities, it looks at the modern-day Choctaw and the important issues they face. Separate chapters cover cuisine, social and kinship systems, oral traditions, arts, music, and dance, as well as current issues and tribal politics. Readers will see how many Choctaw people blend traditional beliefs with participation in and knowledge of the dominant society and economy, while continuing to speak and teach the Choctaw language and traditions in homes, churches, and schools.

The perfect book for every Mississippian who cares about the state, this is a mammoth collaboration in which thirty subject editors suggested topics, over seven hundred scholars wrote entries, and countless individuals made suggestions. The volume will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about Mississippi and the people who call it home. The book will be especially helpful to students, teachers, and scholars researching, writing about, or otherwise discovering the state, past and present. The volume contains entries on every county, every governor, and numerous musicians, writers, artists, and activists. Each entry provides an authoritative but accessible introduction to the topic discussed. The Mississippi Encyclopedia also features long essays on agriculture, archaeology, the civil rights movement, the Civil War, drama, education, the environment, ethnicity, fiction, folklife, foodways, geography, industry and industrial workers, law, medicine, music, myths and representations, Native Americans, nonfiction, poetry, politics and government, the press, religion, social and economic history, sports, and visual art. It includes solid, clear information in a single volume, offering with clarity and scholarship a breadth of topics unavailable anywhere else. This book also includes many surprises readers can only find by browsing.

"Chukfi is a trickster worthy of the name, and this fresh, funny tale makes an excellent addition to the genre." (starred reivew, Kirkus Reviews) Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2014 Silly kids, tricks are for rabbits! Chukfi Rabbit, that is. The laziest—and hungriest—trickster rabbit there is! Deep in Choctaw Country, Chukfi Rabbit is always figuring out some way to avoid work at all costs. When Bear, Turtle, Fox, and Beaver agree on an everybody-work-together day to build Ms. Possum a new house, Chukfi Rabbit says he's too busy to help. Until he hears there will be a feast to eat after the work is done: cornbread biscuits, grape dumplings, tanchi labona (a delicious Choctaw corn stew), and best of all, fresh, homemade butter! So while everyone else helps build the house, Chukfi helps himself to all that yummy butter! The furry fiend! But this greedy trickster will soon learn that being this lazy is hard work! A classic trickster tale in the Choctaw tradition. Greg Rodgers is a storyteller and writer. He is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and tells stories in schools, libraries, festivals, and tribal events throughout the country. He is currently completing a PhD at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Leslie Stall Widener lives in north Texas in a one-hundred-year old farmhouse with her husband, also an illustrator. When she was a child, she explored every inch of her grandparents' Oklahoma farm, an allotment her grandmother received for her Choctaw ancestry. Leslie's latest book, a collaboration with her sister, is an illustrated history of fashion.

A Listening Wind, a collection of translated original texts and commentary edited by Marcia Haag, highlights the large array of Indigenous linguistic and cultural groups of the U.S. Southeast. A whole range of genres and selected texts represent language groups of the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Yuchi, Cherokee, Koasati, Houma, Catawba, and Atakapa. The traditional and modern Native literature genres showcased in A Listening Wind include stories that speakers perceive to be in the past (or “fixed”), genres that have developed alongside these stories, and modern story types that have sometimes supplanted traditional tales and are now enjoying trajectories of their own. These texts have been selected to demonstrate particular literary themes and the cultural perspectives that inform them. Introductory essays illuminate how they fit into Native American religious and philosophical systems. Overall this collection discloses the sometimes hidden connections among genres as well as their importance to language groups of the Southeast.

When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s. By the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks. Avid supporters of the Confederate States of America, the Nation passed a measure requiring all whites living in its territory to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and deemed any criticism of it or its army treasonous and punishable by death. Choctaws also raised an infantry force and a cavalry to fight alongside Confederate forces. In Choctaw Confederates, Fay A. Yarbrough reveals that, while sovereignty and states' rights mattered to Choctaw leaders, the survival of slavery also determined the Nation's support of the Confederacy. Mining service records for approximately 3,000 members of the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles, Yarbrough examines the experiences of Choctaw soldiers and notes that although their enthusiasm waned as the war persisted, military service allowed them to embrace traditional masculine roles that were disappearing in a changing political and economic landscape. By drawing parallels between the Choctaw Nation and the Confederate states, Yarbrough looks beyond the traditional binary of the Union and Confederacy and reconsiders the historical relationship between Native populations and slavery.