ABSTRACT
In assessing the oral literature of Native Americans of North America, it is always tempting to treat the collections from a given tribe or nation as a synchronic corpus to be accepted as “their lore,” if only because it is so difficult to deal with the diachronic reality that the materials change over time. Nowhere is that temptation greater than in the Southeast, because the last four centuries have been a period of extraordinary upheaval for the Native Americans of that area. The historic dimension of the collections is intimidatingly hard to deal with, but the importance of it make any simple synchronic picture suspect from the outset.
