Fantasy(?) Literature
Wili Woyi



National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar
Saddleback College
Summer 1997

Robert Kopfstein, PhD
Liberal Arts
Alannah Orrison, PhD
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Saddleback College


This project involves the use of Wili Woyi by Robert J. Conley. It was used in "Fantasy and Society," one of the curriculum options of Humanities 10A, which is part of the humanities core sequence of Saddleback College's Honors Program.

The Fantasy and Society curriculum covered origin stories, trickster tales, fairy tales, and science fiction. In the context of this class, the short story "Wili Woyi" allowed students to explore the trickster figure in Cherokee culture, and more importantly challenged them to decide what is fantasy, and what is just perspective.

Wili Woyi
An Exploration in "Fantasy" Literature


"Wili Woyi," by Robert J. Conley, was originally published in Geary Hobson's The Remembered Earth (Albuquerque: Red Earth Press, 1979). It was also featured in Conley's own The Witch of Goingsnake and Other Stories (Stillwater: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), and is included in Paula Gunn Allen's Song of the Turtle: American Indian Literature 1974-1994 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996).

The short story is a good length for a classroom "read-to." It is short enough to allow time for discussion afterward, and long enough to allow a definite mood to settle in on the class. A read-to allows a shared experience and a communal involvement in the text. Allow about 40 minutes for it; we suggest one reader in order to avoid breaking the mood. We did no introduction to the work other than to spend about 10 minutes in lecture to convey the following:

  • The story was written in 1979,
  • It is a story about the Cherokee, taking place on their land in Oklahoma from 1886 to 1891,
  • The Cherokee were forcibly moved to that land from their native area at a great cost of human life in the 50 to 60 years before the story takes place,
  • The story occurs at the time that the last of the plains Indians were defeated by the U.S. military and brought into the reservation system. This was when the size of American Indian population was at its smallest, suffering a reduction of (by a conservative estimate) 95% since European contact. This decline was caused primarily by military campaigns, genocidal actions, and the rapid and catastrophic spread of diseases from the Eastern Hemisphere.

After the reading, discussion can follow along several lines, depending upon what works students have previously been exposed to. Our students had read Ananse trickster tales from Africa, Br'er Rabbit tales, creation stories from various cultures, Grimm and Andersen fairy tales, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, The Hobbit, and Stranger in a Strange Land, in addition to several non-fiction readings pertaining to the cultures these stories came from. The only American Indian work they had been exposed to in class before this was the witches' conference story on pp. 130-137 of Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller. From the readings they were thus familiar with, for example, the idea of the trickster, and we left it to them to discover his presence in this story.

Possible discussion questions:

  • Is this a work of fantasy?
  • Is a work's status as "fantasy" determined by reference to the culture that produced it, the culture that reads it, or by some other criterion?
  • What did you hear in the dialog? What did you notice about the use of dialect, contractions in speech, profanity, and other aspects of dialog?
  • What is the author trying to convey by having whites and Cherokees speak in these ways?
  • How does the dialog in this story differ from the dialog between whites and Indians in other works you've read or films you've seen?
  • Is there a voice of authority in the story? If so, whose is it?
  • What fantasies do the whites in the story create to help them explain what happened?
  • How is humor used here?
  • What similarities are there to trickster tales we've read?
  • It could be argued that this story is more similar to the Br'er Rabbit trickster tales than to the Ananse ones. Why might this be so, given the societies that produced or provided the material for those stories?
  • What are we to make of the statement "Quatie . . . was a good Baptist, as was her husband, but saw no reason why the spirits should not attack Baptists as anyone else"? Does it come from a Cherokee reality, a Baptist reality, or . . . ?

We also suggest that other possible stories for exploring questions of fantasy vs. perspective are "Yellow Woman" and "Tony's Story" in Silko's Storyteller.

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