From the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Maud's Line, an epic novel that follows a web of complex family alliances and culture clashes in the Cherokee Nation during the aftermath of the Civil War, and the unforgettable woman at its center.

It is June first and twelve-year-old Mary does not really understand what is happening: she does not understand the hatred and greed of the white men who are forcing her Cherokee family out of their home in New Echota, Georgia, capital of the Cherokee Nation, and trying to steal what few things they are allowed to take with them, she does not understand why a soldier killed her grandfather--and she certainly does not understand how she, her sister, and her mother, are going to survive the 1000 mile trip to the lands west of the Mississippi.

A selection of stories that introduce the reader to the Cherokee Little People (Yuñwi Tsunsdiʼ) and how they affect the lives of the Cherokee people.

A sixth-generation North Carolinian, highly-acclaimed author John Ehle grew up on former Cherokee hunting grounds. His experience as an accomplished novelist, combined with his extensive, meticulous research, culminates in this moving tragedy rich with historical detail. The Cherokee are a proud, ancient civilization. For hundreds of years they believed themselves to be the "Principle People" residing at the center of the earth. But by the 18th century, some of their leaders believed it was necessary to adapt to European ways in order to survive. Those chiefs sealed the fate of their tribes in 1875 when they signed a treaty relinquishing their land east of the Mississippi in return for promises of wealth and better land. The U.S. government used the treaty to justify the eviction of the Cherokee nation in an exodus that the Cherokee will forever remember as the “trail where they cried.” The heroism and nobility of the Cherokee shine through this intricate story of American politics, ambition, and greed. B & W photographs

Once the most powerful indigenous nation in the southeastern United States, the Cherokees survive and thrive as a people nearly two centuries after the Trail of Tears and a hundred years after the allotment of Indian Territory. In Our Fire Survives the Storm, Daniel Heath Justice traces the expression of Cherokee identity in that nation’s literary tradition. Through cycles of war and peace, resistance and assimilation, trauma and regeneration, Cherokees have long debated what it means to be Cherokee through protest writings, memoirs, fiction, and retellings of traditional stories. Justice employs the Chickamauga consciousness of resistance and Beloved Path of engagement—theoretical approaches that have emerged out of Cherokee social history—to interpret diverse texts composed in English, a language embraced by many as a tool of both access and defiance. Justice’s analysis ultimately locates the Cherokees as a people of many perspectives, many bloods, mingled into a collective sense of nationhood. Just as the oral traditions of the Cherokee people reflect the living realities and concerns of those who share them, Justice concludes, so too is their literary tradition a textual testament to Cherokee endurance and vitality. Daniel Heath Justice is assistant professor of aboriginal literatures at the University of Toronto.

Three women uncover the secrets of a Georgia plantation that embodies the intertwined histories of Indigenous and enslaved Black communities—the fascinating debut novel, inspired by a true story, of the National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of All That She Carried, now featuring a new introduction and discussion guide. “The Cherokee Rose is a mic drop—an instant classic. An invitation to listen to the urgent, sweet choruses of past and present.”—Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST Conducting research for her weekly history column, Jinx, a free-spirited Muscogee (Creek) historian, travels to Hold House, a Georgia plantation originally owned by Cherokee chief James Hold, to uncover the mystery of what happened to a tribal member who stayed behind after Indian removal, when Native Americans were forcibly displaced from their ancestral homelands in the nineteenth century. At Hold House, she meets Ruth, a magazine writer visiting on assignment, and Cheyenne, a Southern Black debutante seeking to purchase the estate. Hovering above them all is the spirit of Mary Ann Battis, the young Indigenous woman who remained in Georgia more than a century earlier. When they discover a diary left on the property that reveals even more about the house’s dark history, the three women’s connections to the place grow deeper. Over a long holiday weekend, Cheyenne is forced to reconsider the property’s rightful ownership, Jinx reexamines assumptions about her tribe’s racial history, and Ruth confronts her own family’s past traumas before surprising herself by falling into a new romance. Imbued with a nuanced understanding of history, The Cherokee Rose brings the past to life as Jinx, Ruth, and Cheyenne unravel mysteries with powerful consequences for them all.

The years between Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and the 1971 reemergence of the Cherokee Nation are often seen as an intellectual, political, and literary “dark age” in Cherokee history. In Stoking the Fire, Kirby Brown brings to light a rich array of writing that counters this view. A critical reading of the work of several twentieth-century Cherokee writers, this book reveals the complicated ways their writings reimagined, enacted, and bore witness to Cherokee nationhood in the absence of a functioning Cherokee state. Historian Rachel Caroline Eaton (1869–1938), novelist John Milton Oskison (1874–1947), educator Ruth Muskrat Bronson (1897–1982), and playwright Rollie Lynn Riggs (1899–1954) are among the writers Brown considers within the Cherokee national and transnational contexts that informed their lives and work. Facing the devastating effects on Cherokee communities of allotment and assimilation policies that ultimately dissolved the Cherokee government, these writers turned to tribal histories and biographies, novels and plays, and editorials and public addresses as alternative sites for resistance, critique, and the ongoing cultivation of Cherokee nationhood. Stoking the Fire shows how these writers—through fiction, drama, historiography, or Cherokee diplomacy—inscribed a Cherokee national presence in the twentieth century within popular and academic discourses that have often understood the “Indian nation” as a contradiction in terms. Avoiding the pitfalls of both assimilationist resignation and accommodationist ambivalence, Stoking the Fire recovers this period as a rich archive of Cherokee national memory. More broadly, the book expands how we think today about Indigenous nationhood and identity, our relationships with writers and texts from previous eras, and the paradigms that shape the fields of American Indian and Indigenous studies.