A Listening Wind: Native Literature from the Southeast

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.

“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