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Another story that gives some respect to the women in the tribe - and I mentioned that it is a matrilineal society. There's a story of the Corn Woman. And she is a spirit that is sent down from heaven every year to come and walk in the fields of the Cherokee. And when she walked in the fields the corn began to grow, and it grew tall and beautiful.
And the Cherokee corn is a corn that is very, very special, because it is a corn that has ten rows of kernels on it. and most other ears have thirteen, that we are familiar with today.
So the Cherokee corn will grow ten, almost ten feet tall, and on those stalks it will have three or four ears of corn, where most [other kinds of] stalks have one or two, and it's beautiful in color. It's all the colors of the rainbow. And many people ask, "How did you paint that?"
And the Cherokees ate it. It's a very good corn.
Anyway, this Corn Woman would walk in the fields, and the corn would grow beautifully. One year they planted their corn and had gone out to watch it come up, and it didn't come up.
And they waited a week, and then two weeks, and it still hadn't come up.
So they prayed to the Great Spirit and asked where the Corn Woman Spirit was. And he said that he had sent her down two weeks before, and she was missing, evidently.
And so the people began to look. And they looked all over the earth known to them at that time, and they couldn't find her.
So they began to ask the animal kingdom if they would help search for her. So all the animals were searching for this beautiful Corn Woman Spirit when all of a sudden the raven dived down into a dark cave and was looking for her. And he found her in the bottom of the cave, all tied up. She was captured and prisoner of the evil spirit Hunger.
And he was dancing around her and laughing, knowing very well that if she didn't get out, that the Cherokee people would starve the coming winter.
So raven went back and reported to the people that he had found the Corn Woman Spirit. And they told the raven that only he and his family could get her free. So they told him to go down into the cave and perch on the ledges and hide from the evil spirit, and he did.
He took all of his brothers and sisters into the cave, and they were so black they couldn't be seen by the evil spirits, and they perched on the ledges and the rocks.
When the signal was given they all leaped down and pecked the evil spirit and made such terrible noises that they frightened him out into the sunlight. And like most evil, when he hit the sunlight he just melted away and disappeared.
They freed the Corn Woman Spirit with their big strong beaks, and when she walked out into the sunlight the corn of the Cherokees began to grow.
From that day forward, the Great Spirit in the heavens would not let her come down in person. And so it is today.
So when you look out at the cornfields and see the stalks of corn and their leaves saving in the wind, you'll know that the Corn Woman Spirit is walking through the fields of today.
Cherokees are unlike the Appalachian people, they don't take the raven and hang hum up on a stick and expect the other ravens to deduce, "Well I can't go to that field, that rave ate corn and he was killed."
That wouldn't stop them.
But the Cherokees give the raven a very special place: that he was the one that saved the fields of the Cherokee.
So therefore they feel that if he takes a few kernels of corn, that's ok. But if the raven is in the fields, and an animal comes into the field, the crows and the ravens will pitch such a fit that the people will know that someone is stealing their corn, so they can go down and chase them away.
So I imagine it's all in the way you look at animals and the circle of life as to whether they're necessary or need to be destroyed.
The Cherokee saw the importance of all animals and all people and so therefore they had a very special place. And that story, I feel, is told to each those lessons.
Story by Freeman Owle as obtain from "Living Stories of the Cherokee", Collected and Edited by Barbara R. Duncan
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