这个故事来自北美的切罗基人。美国民族学家詹姆斯·穆尼（1861—1921）曾在北卡罗来纳州的切罗基人中间住了好几年，记录下126个故事，1900年发表在美国民族学局第十九次年度报告里，书名《切罗基神话》，这个故事在第269页。

This story comes from the Cherokee people of North America. The American ethnologist James Mooney (1861–1921) lived among the Cherokee in North Carolina for several years and recorded 126 of their stories. They were published in 1900 in the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology under the title Myths of the Cherokee, and this story appears on page 269.

切罗基人有自己的文字：1821年，切罗基人塞阔雅创造了一套音节文字，每个符号代表一个音节，很快许多切罗基人都学会了读写。英语里的负鼠一词 opossum，也来自北美原住民的语言。

The Cherokee have their own writing system. In 1821 a Cherokee man named Sequoyah created a syllabary in which each symbol stands for one syllable, and soon many Cherokee people learned to read and write. Even the English word opossum comes from a Native American language.

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