Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars' Club paints a vivid,
fascinating portrait of a community deeply grounded in tradition and
dynamically engaged in the present. A collection of forty interwoven
stories, conversations, and teachings about Western Cherokee life,
beliefs, and the art of storytelling, the book orchestrates a
multilayered conversation between a group of honored Cherokee elders,
storytellers, and knowledge-keepers and the communities their stories
touch. Collaborating with Hastings Shade, Sammy Still, Sequoyah Guess,
and Woody Hansen, Cherokee scholar Christopher B. Teuton has assembled
the first collection of traditional and contemporary Western Cherokee
stories published in over forty years.
Not simply a compilation, Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars'
Club explores the art of Cherokee storytelling, or as it is known in
the Cherokee language, gagoga (gah-goh-ga), literally translated as
"he or she is lying." The book reveals how the members of the Liars'
Club understand the power and purposes of oral traditional stories and
how these stories articulate Cherokee tradition, or "teachings," which
the storytellers claim are fundamental to a construction of Cherokee
selfhood and cultural belonging. Four of the stories are presented in
both English and Cherokee.