Reading Notes: Great Plains, Part A

Eagle (Jack Seeds on Unsplash)

The story that I was most fascinated with from Part A of the Great Plains unit was "The Eagle's Revenge." Although this story was shorter--only 300 words--there was a lot packed into the smaller space.  It begins with a hunter who is woken in the middle of the night to discover an eagle outside his teepee, eating the deer he had caught and left outside.  To recover his deer, the hunter shoots the eagle.  The next morning, the hunter shows the deer and the eagle to the rest of his tribe, and the chief calls for an Eagle Dance in celebration.  During the Eagle Dance that night, a strange man appears at the circle, but no one has seen him before or knows where he comes from.  The tribe assumes that he has come from another Cherokee village far away.  The stranger tells a story about how he killed a man, ending his story with a yell.  At the same moment that he yells, one of the dancers in the circle drops dead.  The stranger tells another story about how he murdered someone, and yet again, one of the dancers dies when he yells at the end.  For seven times, the stranger repeats this, thus killing all of the dancers.  The rest of the tribe watching are too terrified to leave, seeing the whole thing.  After killing each of the dancers, the stranger disappears again into the night.  The tribe doesn't discover who the stranger was for some time after, when they learn that the stranger was the brother of the eagle that the hunter killed, exacting revenge for his brother's murder.

This story sounded terrifying to me, mostly because the tribe had no idea what was happening when the stranger showed up and started killing them.  It would be interesting to consider the story from their perspective of not-knowing and fear.  One creative way to retell the story might be from the perspective of an elderly woman telling the children a ghost story before bed, or something like that.  Perhaps she could have been there during the dance.  I think the frame story of a "ghost story" would be a good way to increase the intensity of the horrific deaths.

Bibliography: "The Eagle's Revenge," Great Plains unit, Katharine Berry Judson.