Mould, Tom and Rae Nell Vaughn, editors. Choctaw Tales: Stories from the Firekeepers. UP of Mississippi, 2025

Abstract

The Pearl River—a natural feature that, along with the Nanih Waiya mound in Central Mississippi, prominently features in Choctaw storytelling—straddles the border of Louisiana and Mississippi. At the same time as I was reading Choctaw Tales: Stories from the Firekeepers, I drove over a wide and high bridge that straddles the southernmost part of the Pearl River, surrounded by meadows and marshes, and envisioned the history behind this waterway. Several Choctaw stories collected in this volume, including “Manlike Creature,” a tale about a benign humanoid “with a tail,” have the northern portions of the Pearl River, near Jackson, serve as their setting (137). The stories in the volume foreground the sacred Nanih Waiya mound, the place where Choctaw creation myth says the tribe began. Several such stories, including “The Little People in Nanih Waiya Cave” and “Doors in Nanih Waiya Cave,” center on an individual, whether a grandfather or uncle recalled in the story or otherwise, who encounters a parallel world or the infamous “little people” who live in the mound (152-53).