Indigenous Textuality Studies and Cherokee Traditionalism: Notes Toward aGagogaRhetoric

Abstract

This essay demonstrates how recent scholarship in indigenous textual studies provides concepts that enable us to conceptualize the cultural, political, and textual contexts in the publication of a new book of Cherokee traditional stories and teachings. The author explores three “teachings” shared with him by a group of his Cherokee elders as they collaborated on a book of Cherokee stories and teachings, Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club. These teachings concern the Cherokee storytelling rhetoric of gagoga, or “lying”; the networked communication of the sgadug, or a community that comes together for mutual benefit; and the continuing importance of print interventions within the Cherokee public sphere.