Uprooted Moving Fire Stories
Moving Fire Circle Activity
Campfires remind us of the ceremonial and cooking fires our ancestors carried with them from their homelands to Indian Territory. Stories, songs, and soundscapes provide us with new ways to appreciate tribal histories and realities.
- During this activity, you will reflect on what you learned in Uprooted.
- Listen to or read the transcripts below for Cherokee and Ponca stories about removal.
- Then use this organizer to capture your new understandings and begin to develop a found poem about tribal history.
Audio Transcripts
Cherokee Marbles Story
Narrator: Candessa Tehee (Cherokee Nation)
[background: “Orphan Child” sung by Cherokee National Youth Choir]
Cherokee people were deeply tied to the land around them.
When I start thinking about what Removal means, I think that, now that I’m a mother, I have three children, thinking about trying to keep them safe and not just for my own children but for other children in the community.
So, during a time like the Trail of Tears, which really was an ethnic cleansing of the Southeast, how in the world do you keep your babies safe?
There’s a story that I was told that a girl and her siblings and they were in one of those early detachments traveling.
Her brother, her little brother, carried, maybe they were beads, maybe they were marbles, some, you know, little toys he could keep in his pocket.
As they were traveling, he became weaker and was overcome with illness.
Until finally, one night they stopped and the next morning he did not wake up.
There were some people who were buried along the way.
But, for some reason her little brother was not one of the individuals that they had time to bury.
They left him on the side of the road.
So, they go further down the road and they make camp the next night.
The sister can’t stop thinking about her brother, so she steals out of the camp and goes back.
The ground is frozen so she can’t bury her brother.
What she does instead is she took his toys and his marbles with her as a way to remember him and as a keepsake.
And she passes them on down through her family because she wanted to make sure he would never be forgotten.
I have a ten-year-old boy.
I think about him when I think about this story.
I think about the way in which according to our clan system, that we as women have a responsibility for the others in our clan.
That sister, she tried to do everything she could to honor and respect her brother.
But in the end, all that she could do was pass his story forward so we all remember him.
Ponca Removal Story
Narrator: Oliver Little Cook (Ponca)
[background: “Children’s Song” sung by Oliver Little Cook]
Ling-ha means little.
Ling-ha or Ling-he, however you use it, that means no more or it’s gone, so, that’s what this song is talking about.
The Ponca Tribe, we were moved from our homelands in Nebraska, northern Nebraska and southern South Dakota.
Our move began in 1876.
There were two movements.
There was a lot of death along the way.
Like, probably a lot of other tribes, we lost people on the way.
We lost elders, sick people, and children.
I had an elderly aunt and she used to always tell stories.
In her older age, she would like for someone to come visit with her and she would tell stories.
She would tell about her grandmas and grandpas, when they walked down here, and they actually walked.
She would tell some of the things that happened, that went on.
So, I asked her one time, how did the tribe get along then?
What kept them together?
She said, the only thing that kept us together was our relationships with each another, our clanship, our relationship with one another.
We supported each other, helped one another, seen about one another, cared for one another.
Just all the qualities we look for today–that’s what they had.
So, that’s what kept our tribe intact.