How the Milky Way Came to Be

On a clear night, when you look at the sky, you can see a million stars twinkling. You do know that we live in a galaxy of thousands of stars, don’t you? How cool is that! Our galaxy is called the Milky Way and here is a Native American myth about how it came to be. (Of course, if you tell your geography teacher this story, she may not entirely approve!)

Our story begins, as all good stories do, a long, long ago. It was a time when the world was still young and the sky had just a handful of stars. There lived an old man and his wife in Cherokee country. The old couple used to make cornmeal for a living.

They would gather dried corn and pound it to meal. They did this by placing the corn in the hollow stump of a tree and pounding it with a long wooden pestle. The cornmeal was stored in large baskets and sold to others in the village in exchange for meat or hide for clothing. Cornmeal was used to make warm bread and hot porridge in the dreadful cold of the winters.

One morning, the old man’s wife went into the storeroom to get some cornmeal. To her surprise, she found the basket toppled and all the cornmeal spilt on the floor.

‘Come here and take a look at this,’ she called out to her husband.

‘Someone’s been here in the night, that’s for sure,’ muttered the old man as he regarded the scattered cornmeal all over the floor.

Now, those were the early days of the world and no one even dreamt of stealing. The old man and his wife were greatly upset as such a thing had never happened before. ‘Wait!’ he stopped his wife as she proceeded to gather the corn. ‘Look!’ In the middle of all that scattered corn were large paw prints.

‘Looks like a dog’s . . . but they’re so large,’ said the old woman. She looked at her husband. They knew at once it was not an ordinary dog. This was a dog from another world—a dog, perhaps, belonging to the Great Spirit. ‘We have to tell the others,’ said the old man.

Soon, the whole village had heard the strange story. ‘We don’t want the spirit dog coming to our village,’ they said.

‘Let’s scare it away so that it does not come here again,’ said a young man. ‘Yes, let us!’ chorused the villagers. They gathered drums and turtle-shell rattles and, when the night came, hid in the old man’s room where the cornmeal was kept.

It was very late in the night when they heard a buzzing sound like that of many birds’ wings flapping. They looked through a window and saw the form of a giant dog swooping down from the night sky. It flew straight into the room and began to ransack the corn basket once more, eating great mouthfuls of cornmeal in quick gulps.

The people jumped out of their hiding places and began to beat their drums loudly. The rattlers, in turn, added to the cacophony. It was almost as if there were a thousand bolts of thunder going off all at once. What a din it was!

Shaken, the giant dog left the cornmeal and ran as fast as he could down the narrow path that led all the way up a hill. The people followed, beating the drums and clanging the rattles. The dog ran until it reached the end of the path on top of the hill.

From there, in a great leap, he made for the sky, the cornmeal spilling out of the sides of his mouth. The great dog bounded across the black night sky and quickly disappeared from sight. But the cornmeal that spilt from his mouth made a pathway across the sky. And each grain of cornmeal became a star. The Cherokees call that pattern of stars gi li’ ut sun stan un’ yi—the place where the dog ran. And that, dear friends, is how the Milky Way came to be. (Now, remember, do not ever tell this to your geography teacher!)