Description

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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.

 

About the Author

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Marcia Haag is a professor of linguistics at the University of Oklahoma. She is the coauthor of Choctaw Language and Culture: Chahta Anumpa (2 volumes) and the coeditor of Peter Perkins Pitchlynn’s A Gathering of Statesmen: Records of the Choctaw Council Meetings, 1826–1828.
 

Praise For…

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“Marcia Haag displays intimate awareness while skillfully articulating the complexities of Native American survivance in the southeastern U.S. . . . Throughout the seventy-seven works, there is a straightforward style embellished with poetic cadences and colloquialisms. These works offer a rare glimpse into a South too often overlooked or forgotten. . . . Care has been taken to record these gems in a context that respects their individuality and enhances awareness within and outside of their respective tribal communities.”—Douglas Suano Bootes, World Literature Today
 

“This book is a pleasure to read. The strong aesthetic appeal of southeastern Native narrative is apparent in the contributors’ fine renderings of the tales, and their commentaries show the importance of the stories in the lives and expectations of southeastern narrators and audiences past and present.”—Margaret Holmes Williamson, author of Powhatan Lords of Life and Death: Command and Consent in Seventeenth-Century Virginia
 

“This collection, which covers a greater diversity of tribes than most studies of [the Southeast], will be an asset to specialists, students, and those with a general interest in southern studies. Its presentation of storytelling with scholarly context is especially valuable.”—Lindsey Claire Smith, editor of American Indian Quarterly