The Swimmer Manuscript and What It Does Not Give Away

Cherokee religious life centers on a body of sacred formulas, addressed to healing, protection and right relationship among people, the land and the unseen world, that are the working knowledge of ritual specialists called didanawisgi. Those formulas are not printed here. In the late nineteenth century the ethnographer James Mooney worked among Cherokee communities in the southern Appalachians and later in Indian Territory, recording formulas from named practitioners, most notably a manuscript kept by a practitioner called Swimmer, and publishing some of that material through the Bureau of American Ethnology. His work, along with the wider ethnographic record he helped build, remains a foundational public source on nineteenth century Cherokee religious life.

The Cherokee nations have never treated that publication as an invitation to reuse the formulas themselves; they remain the living property of practicing didanawisgi and their successors, transmitted the way they always were rather than read out of Mooney's pages. What is public is that this tradition exists, that it survived the trauma of removal to Indian Territory in the nineteenth century, and that it continues today within the Cherokee Nation, the United Keetoowah Band and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, each a federally recognized government carrying its own share of a living religious life.