James Mooney records Cherokee 'going-to-water' ritual chants and sacred formulas from Eastern Band elders, publishing them in 'Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees' (1891). These poems invoke animal spirits (redbird, otter), plants (ginseng, tobacco), and directional color symbolism, blending healing magic, hunting lore, and mythological history. Mooney's Sequoyan script transcriptions preserve pre-removal folklore.

Mooney's collections influenced Native American Renaissance poets (Marilou Awiakta, Rayna Green), who adapted Cherokee chant structures—anaphora, invocative catalogues, nature personification—into contemporary English poetry. The formulas' folk magic poetics, with their conditional syntax ('If I go to water...'), provided models for Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Joy Harjo's 'She Had Some Horses.' The documentation proves how colonial ethnography, despite its power imbalances, can preserve folk poetics for future literary reclamation.