Br'er Rabbit - Cherokee Origins

Cherokee Origins

Although Joel Chandler Harris collected materials for his famous series of books featuring the character Br'er Rabbit in the 1870s, the Br'er Rabbit cycle had been recorded earlier among the Cherokees: The "tar baby" story was printed in an 1845 edition of the Cherokee Advocate the same year Joel Chandler Harris was born.

Rabbit and Hare myths abound among Algonquin Indians in Eastern North America, particularly under the name Nanabozho. The Great Hare is generally regarded as the supreme deity among tribes in eastern Canada.

In "That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community" by Jace Weaver, the origins of Br'er Rabbit and other literature are discussed. To say that a story only originates from one culture and not another can only be true when a group of people exist in complete isolation from others. Whereas, the Cherokee did live in isolation from Europeans in the far past, it's also true to say that a substantial amount of interaction happened between, not only North American tribes, but also between Europeans and, more often, those from the slave population during the 18th and 19th Centuries. That being understood, it is impossible to ascertain whether the Cherokee story pre-dated, independently, the African American story. Stories are told around communal fires in the evening and would have been told to travellers and visitors – they are the memorable currency of diplomacy.

In the Cherokee tale about the briar patch, "the fox and the wolf throw the trickster rabbit into a thicket from which the rabbit quickly escapes." There was a "melding of the Cherokee rabbit-trickster ... into the culture of African slaves." "In fact, most of the Br'er Rabbit stories originated in Cherokee myths."