Matthew Tooni

Partial Transcript: All right. Well, my name is Matthew Tooni, and I'm thirty years old. And I've lived here all my life in the Qualla Boundary, and I live in the Paint Town Community. And I'm active in my culture, and along with some of my best friends that I grew up with.
And I'm a storyteller, and I'm active—you know, play in the Unto These Hills outdoor drama. So, that's just a little bit about me, and I also play the flute too.

Partial Transcript: There's a whole lot of—there's only about a handful of younger ones that are wanting to learn. And it's hard to get a lot of them to learn because of you other distractions. Whether it’s jobs or social media all these other things that are a little bit more fun and exciting, I guess they would consider.
So, that's why it’s important to me to carry on that culture and to make it sure that it keeps going. Because it's who we are. We've been doing it for well over 10,000 years or so, and it’s survived. It's thrived up until this point. And even though a lot of Westernized cultural influences from American society and before that British, and Colonial society. Our culture has managed to thrive.
And now it's just—I feel like that there aren't many of us that care. Care enough to—to do it. But I think as long as there's us we're on the right way. We're trying to get a lot more younger folks to be active and to care, you know. Because once it's gone then us as a people, we're not going to be around. It's all tied together; language, stories, dances even our crafts. There's meaning behind designs and why they did them. There's reasons why we dance. There's reasons behind the stories. The stories connect us to our connection to the land—to landscapes. There's—I could show you places where these stories—where part of these stories happened.
And that's something special. I don’t—not a lot of folks can do that. Can say this is where that happened, and I feel very strongly about my culture.

Partial Transcript: Okay. All right. Well, let's—I'll give—I'll try and give a couple of examples around that connection. There's a place just down the road, it's called Rattlesnake Mountain, and our word for it is, atsilawoi—atsilawoi [ᎠᏥᎳᏬᎢ-- Cherokee syllabics].
And they said that a long time ago that there used to be a fireball that would fly around that mountain. And it goes to a story about this medicine man who was from the Shawnee Tribe. We caught him, and he was a prisoner. We were just getting ready to kill him. But he bargained with us and told us that if we let him live that he would go get this jewel, and this jewel was almost like a ruby quartz crystal.
And you can only find it on one of these monster serpents we call, Uktena [ᎤkᏖᎾ -- Cherokee syllabics] And we figured well, that's—he's going into his death anyway, you know. So we decided that we'll let him live, and he went on his way. He started here, and then he went on south towards Andrews, and he went down there.
And he lived upon the ridge, and on the ridge, he saw a big grey lizard. Just, you know, just sitting there. He told the people, "Come look at this." And the people, they went out, and they looked at it, they got scared and ran away. He didn't, he sort of just waived it off and kept walking. He—it wasn't what he was looking for.
He got into Murphy, and in that area, he found monster leeches that were living in the waterways there. And he told the people, "Come see." They got scared and ran off. He kept walking. The further he got down there—towards Cohutta Mountain, he came across giant bullfrogs, black snakes, just real big monstrous behemoths. But when he did get to Cohutta Mountain in Georgia, he went up that mountain, and at the very top was that snake.
That snake was coiled up, basking in the sun. So what he did is he snuck back down and got to the base of the mountain and dug a trench so long and so deep and wide for that snake to fit in. And he set it on fire. And he made his way back up that mountain, and he got that snake's attention.
And they said that snake was standing probably about sixty, seventy feet above him. And he starts chasing him down that mountain, and he's running, and that snake is gaining on him. And he finally reaches the bottom of that mountain. And he made a big leap over that trench he built and rolled unto the other side.
The snake though was going so fast that it didn’t have time to slow down and sort of turned and rolled. And when it hit that trench, it started thrashing about. And its blood started spurting out, and it was almost acidic. Whatever it hit, steam would, you know, rise up from there. And there was a drop—a small drop of blood that hit that man in the forehead and they said that where that drop hit a snake grew out of his forehead.
And he didn’t know it for all his days of living he didn’t know, but everybody else could see it. Well, he waited for a few days, and he went back to collect that jewel. And sure enough there it was. He got it, and he put it in a deerskin, wrapped it up, and brought it back here. And then he gave it to the people, and they put it up on that mountain. And that's why we call it, atsilawoi.

Partial Transcript: All right. Well, that—you know, our culture and water is—can be considered—there's a lot of spirituality in it. Before we partake in any ceremonies or dances, we go to water. And we pray, and as we pray we wash, and that's washing any bad feelings or anything that's bothering you off of you so that you can have a clear mind before participating. And that's the main thing, was that it's respected.
We call him—we call the water, Gv⁠nah⁠i⁠da⁠ ⁠a⁠s⁠ga⁠ya [ᎬᏀᎢᏓ ᎠᏍᎦᏯ -- Cherokee syllabics], a long man, because his head starts in the mountains way back, and as he comes out, and he grows until his feet reach the ocean. And it was something to be respected. It was a source of life. We can't live without water. And it’s almost sort of a purification when it comes to water.
There was a time they said these spirits they call them, Nunnehi [ᏄnᏁᎯ--Cherokee syllabics] went to these towns, and they told them that there was something bad going to happen. And they were talking about The Removal in 1838. And they told the people, they said, "Well, you can either come with us or you can stay here and go through that." And the people, they decided that they would go with them, and the Nunnehi told them that they would come and get them in seven days. And they had to sit in the townhouse for seven days, fasting and praying.
And some of them—they did that. There was one townhouse that was lifted up right off the ground and went into the sky. Another town went into the mountain. And this one town went into the water. All that town made it into the water except for one boy. And that boy got to the river too late. He had seen his parents go into the water, but that portal was sealed. He was here alone. And they said every single evening, he would go to that particular spot in the water, and he would look down, and he would see his parents and his parents could see him. And he did that, you know, as a boy and growing up.
And that’s one of the reasons why the water is respected because it connects everything. We believe in seven directions. There's your four cardinal directions, but there's also above, the center, and below. And the water we believe has the gateways to that lower world. If a pool—if there's a spring, and it's blue, and it’s a real crystal-clear blue. That's a strong medicine. It has certain healing powers. And you—that spring has to be respected. You can't just go in and bath or things like that.
And one of those springs is at Red Clay—Red Clay State Park in Tennessee. But yeah, everything that has to do with water has to do with something more spiritual. It deals with our health overall. It deals with the purification of our spirits. It helps us wash it helps us keep clean. Water is a pure—a pure thing. And that’s why you can't take it for granted. You can't take as just a resource to just do what you want with it. It has to be respected. So that’s a little bit about what water is.

Partial Transcript: If there is, I don’t know. Because when you say rituals, to like—I automatically think about portals and things like that. The—I don’t know those—I don’t really care to know those. Those are—that’s dangerous grounds, you know, right there.
David Weintraub
I was just thinking about any particular ceremonies—?
Matthew Tooni
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we have songs—water songs that we do. Especially before we go to the ceremony, you know. Even going to water is a ceremony in itself. To prepare for the actual ceremony. But yeah there are certain songs that we—that we sing, and they're prayer songs. You pray while you're singing, while you're washing yourself.
David Weintraub
Could you sing me one of them?
Matthew Tooni
No, I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing that information.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, the seven generations thing the—I think that’s very important because you're not thinking of yourself. We only have a short time here on this earth, and by thinking that—by that forward-thinking and that approach I feel like you're doing it right. Because if you have more of a selfish impulse about you and it's just me—me—me—me, then you're going to use up the resources that can keep your family and their family and all the way down the line.
You are not thinking about them. You can't think of yourself as an individual. You have to think of the people because the people make the home. And some folks might think, "Well, I'm going to live forever." And it doesn’t work out that way, you know, you can't take anything with you.
And so it's best to leave something better off than what you found it. And—because once we use up a resource here, it's gone, it's not coming back. And that forward-thinking of those seven generations idea, I believe is a wonderful idea.
And it doesn’t just go to natural resources. It doesn’t go to that. It goes into your language. It goes into your ceremonies, your dances everything that makes you a person. Everything that makes you a people. You have to think that way in order to make it work.
Because everything that we have was given to us. We didn’t have it when we started. It’s a gift. Everything about this life is a gift. And you talk about the seven generations, and I feel like we've sort of gotten off of that idea and got into more of an—it's me, myself, and I mindset. And it's hurting us by doing that.

Partial Transcript: All right. Well, this one—this story isn’t particularly a friendly story, but— as I have mentioned a while ago, there's portals in the waterways, and they say everything in the lower world is the same as it is here it's just a little bit different. It’s a little bit—I don’t want to say backward, but for lack of a better term that’s what it is.
They say there was this old man. He was pretty sickly—about near death. And nobody wanted to take care of him. They figured, "Well, he's going to die anyway. We'll just leave him alone". And they left him to die in his house.
As he was taking his few and final breaths there was this woman who showed up. He didn’t know who she was, and she went—walked to his bed, and looked at him, and she said, "Get up." That man said, "I'm close to death. I don’t have the strength to get up". That woman took her hand and held it out, and she said, "If you hold my hand, you will get strength."
Well, he mustered all the strength he had to do that, but sure enough, as he grasped her hand he could feel himself get stronger, and he was able to get out of bed. And the woman said, "You come with me—you're going to come home with me." And they walked—and they walked to the river's edge. And she said, "All right, you're going to follow me in." And as he was walking, he had seen a village underneath the water, and they walked, they got through that water, and just as he went down he came out of the water, and into the lower world.
And he said that the people down there spoke the same language that we did. But he noticed something different. When the hunters came back, they were coming back with people, and they had them tied up like you would have tied a deer to a carrying pole. And there were people that he knew. And he realized that he was in the village of water cannibals.
The water cannibals come out of the waterways and into our world, and they hunt us. And it’s almost like they're taking the spirit of the body to feast on and what is left here in this world is just a husk that just withers and dies after a few days. Well, he had seen that, and the woman noticed that too. She noticed the look on his face and realized that he couldn’t eat what they ate.
So, she fixed him a meal out of beans and bread, and that’s what he ate, and he got well again. He was healthy. And it was about time for him to go and that woman said, "All right when you get back to your world you can't tell anyone for seven days. If you say anything about what you have seen here before those seven days have passed, then you will die".
The old man he said, "All right," and he made his way back into this world, and his neighbors, everybody in his village, they were looking for him. And they kept asking him, "Where did you go? Where have you been? We thought an animal got hold of you. We thought they dragged you off". But he wouldn’t say anything. They said all he did was point to his throat as if something was wrong with it.
And he did that for seven days. But after those seven days passed, he began to tell what he saw in the water and where he went. And that’s how, you know, we knew of the water cannibals.

Partial Transcript: They also say that there were snakes that lived in the water. And just on the other—in the bend around here just behind the Pizza Inn and those shops right there. They said there used to be a pool there that a snake lived in.
And in 1838, they were still having council down in Giduwa, and they were inside the townhouse, and they heard a big racket out in the—near the river. And they sent somebody out to check it out, and they looked, and they saw two big snakes fighting in the water.
And they used to talk about a giant mud turtle that used to live in Birdtown in the water it caused a great flood at that time. And they also say if there is a cloud-burst, you know, it's like this but it just all of a sudden starts raining. They say something big is moving out of the—out of its home—it lived in the water and that big—and that rain is to sort of like cover it as it moves through to find another home. It—when they do it, it kind of sounds like a big cannon that is being fired. And that’s—they say that is those snakes that are moving out of their home.
There was this man, who was fishing at the back of the mountains, and he found himself a nice little pool, and he figured he would fish there. He was in ankle-deep water. He wasn’t catching anything at the start but a little while went by, and he started catching fish. One right after another—one right after another. What he didn’t realize is that that water was now above his—above his knees and when he found that out he figured he better get out of the water.
So he got out, and he ran up the bank a little bit and found a big tree to hide behind. And he said that when he did, he peeked around, and about twenty feet above him was a big green snake. That snake was living in that pool, and it was pushing the fish up to where he could catch them. Now, that man finally made it out of the mountains. I don’t think he ever went back there again. (laughs)
My grandpa, he said that whenever he was younger, he and his daddy they would go fishing and they went to a pool and his dad told him to cut a twenty-foot pole. And he got that pole, and his dad put that pole all the way down until the water was right up to his shoulder. It never touched the bottom. And they told my grandpa that they shouldn’t be fishing there because of the potential of a snake or something else living in that water. So there's things that live in the water, and we just don’t see them.

Partial Transcript: To keep that connection to where you live. To keep that connection to who you are. You know, if it wasn’t for these stories we wouldn’t know how to conduct ourselves. Not all of them have morals to them, but there's something about them and it can—it ties yourself to the place you live in. It gives you a stronger and deeper connection.
And just like the trees it almost makes yourself rooted into that environment, and that was one of the things that happened at the very beginning. They said that everybody lived together in one spot until a big argument happened.
And they couldn’t get the dispute settled. So, the creator began to send dreams to them, and in these dreams, they began to see different landscapes, different places.
And they decided that they were going to split. There was going to be a big split. Some of the people went out east. Some of them went out west, north, and south.
When the people got to their destinations, they looked around, but they had no idea what the landscapes were about they didn’t know where they were. They were lost.
So again, the creator sent down dreams and, in these dreams, came stories, and those stories were meant to tie you to the place that you were going to live in. And from there they were passed down. So that's—you know that’s that connection.