Myths of the Cherokee

James Mooney's Myths of the Cherokee, published in the Bureau of American Ethnology's Nineteenth Annual Report in 1900, is the foundational ethnographic record of Cherokee oral tradition, compiled from Mooney's own fieldwork among the Eastern Cherokee and still treated as the standard reference collection today. Its strength is that Mooney recorded the material directly from Cherokee tradition bearers at a time when much of it was still actively transmitted. Its limit is that it is a work of its era's ethnographic method, filtered through Mooney's own transcription and organization rather than a Cherokee-authored account, so a claim about how these narratives are understood within Cherokee communities today needs a source representing that perspective directly.