William Jerry Cushman and the Hummingbird

How They Brought Back the Tobacco: A Traditional Cherokee Story

In the beginning of the world, when people and animals were all the same, there was only one tobacco plant, to which they all came for their tobacco, until the Dagulku geese stole it and carried it far away to the south. The people were suffering without the plant, and there was an old woman who grew so thin and weak that everybody said she would soon die unless she could get tobacco to keep her alive.

Different animals offered to go for the tobacco, one after another, the larger ones first and  then the smaller ones, but the Dagulku saw and killed each one before he could get to the plant. After the others, the little Mole tried to reach it by going under the ground, but the Dagulku saw his track and killed him as he came out.

At last the Hummingbird offered, but the others said he was entirely too small and might as well stay home. He begged them to let him try, so they showed him a plant in a field and told him to let them see how he would go about it. The next moment he was gone and they saw him sitting on the plant, and then in a moment he was back again, but no one had seen him going or coming, because he was so swift. “This is the way I’ll do it,” said the Hummingbird, so they let him try.

The Hummingbird Feeder outside Bill Cushman's window.

He flew off to the east, and when he came in sight of the tobacco, the Dagulku were watching all about it, but they could not see him because he was so small and flew so swiftly. He darted down on the plant—tsa!—and snatched off the top with the leaves and seeds, and was off again before the Dagulku knew what had happened. Before he got home with the tobacco, the old woman fainted and they thought she was dead, but he blew the smoke into her nostrils, and with a cry of “Tsalu! [Tobacco]!” she opened her eyes and was alive again.

It is not surprising then that very early documentation revealed the importance of tobacco as a main staple used by many tribes, described by Christopher Columbus in 1492 as a sacred plant to the Indians with a “life affirming, positive spiritual role, a food of the spirits.” Even in a more contemporary Cherokee account, tobacco was noted to carry the smoke’s message to the spirits in the sky as a means to provide protection, to bring luck or to keep things calm, or, in a more sinister approach, to conjure another person. Tobacco was truly seen by the Cherokee as a powerful medicine of many virtues and held at its center the very essence of being Cherokee.

- See more at: http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/united-states/bringing-back-tobacco#sthash.FXImXj7a.dpuf