One of the questions that I get asked about is the reference to the story about ani, or strawberries, in We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga. And so I talked to people about how we need to have balance in our lives. This is like a central Cherokee value and being of good mind. And so that story talks about how first man and first woman get in an argument, and she does not want to hear what he has to say any longer so she takes off.
And, to get her to finally stop running in the opposite direction, Unetlanvhi, or Creator, starts putting impediments in her path, there are obstacles. And there are a variety of different berries, and she just kind of keeps moving on past them. But then when her feet start getting tangled in the strawberry vines and she smells this wonderful smell, she bends down to pick them up, and she tastes them, and if you’ve ever had a sun-ripened strawberry — not the store-bought stuff, a sun-ripened strawberry — you will stop in your tracks and just savor that sweet goodness, right.
And she starts picking these strawberries. She forgets that she’s upset with him. She wants to share them. She turns and she’s heading back, and he has been trying to catch her to apologize. And so strawberries are a symbol of love, but also of forgiveness and coming together. I make that reference in there, again, not that — if you don’t know that story, you can certainly find it out easy enough, but it’s just another kind of way to weave culture into the story in a way that Cherokee people very much understand it, others I hope are curious to find out, well, what is that story? Let me read that.
