Reading Diary A: Myths of the Cherokee

For this week, I decided to go with the Cherokee Stories, mainly because of the description on the main UnTextbook page. As I have mentioned in numerous other blog posts, I really enjoy reading stories about how other cultures think the world was created and the origins of things. The stories and ideas vary so vastly culture-to-culture, and reading about them is just so intriguing.

With that being said, one of the first stories in this unit that caught my attention was the story titled How the World Was Made, for obvious reasons. I thought it was such an interesting explanation, one that I've never really heard before. In the story, it mentions that the "cords" that are attached to the island were done by an unknown being because "nobody remembers who did [it]". I always think stories like that are so cool because it's so much harder to trace the origin; they just kind of seem to grow out of thin air. Another interesting aspect of the story was near the end when they mention that woman began reproducing so quickly that there were too many people in the world so that was why it was only allowed that a woman could reproduce once a year, which correlates with the 9 months (which sometimes seems almost like a year, haha) in which a woman is pregnant.

(Tobacco Field)

Another story I read was Tobacco and Strawberries, and I found it to be one of the more different stories I've ever read, mainly because I thought it would be a story of the origin of how each of them came to be, but it turned out to be much different. I felt that the first story about tobacco was more about how "no matter how small, you can still accomplish big things", rather than how the tobacco made it back to the midwest. The story about the strawberries didn't seem to be the origin as to just how the strawberries appeared. It just makes a statement about "red berries" appeared for the first time. Both turned out to be very interesting reads, though!