Cherokee Legend

Eleven-year-old Mandie Shaw is nervous about her trip to visit her Cherokee relatives. The journey through a North Carolina mountain forest is full of dangers like stalking panthers, and she wonders if her dead father’s kinspeople will even like her once she arrives. But the trip to the Indian reservation is only the beginning of Mandie’s many adventures. When Mandie and her friends get lost in a secret cave, they discover a pile of gold left behind by a legendary Cherokee chief. Is it really cursed, as legend insists?

In Cherokee myth - as in other indigenous American traditions - the whole of creation is alive and able to communicate like humans and with the human beings who share their environment. Cherokee myths explain how the world came to be the way it is and imparts important lessons about Cherokee cultural values.