Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and FreedomThis beautifully written book tells the haunting saga of a quintessentially American family. It is the story of Shoe Boots, a famed Cherokee warrior and successful farmer, and Doll, an African slave he acquired in the late 1790s. Over the next thirty years, Shoe Boots and Doll lived together as master and slave and also as lifelong partners who, with their children and grandchildren, experienced key events in American history—including slavery, the Creek War, the founding of the Cherokee Nation and subsequent removal of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War. This is the gripping story of their lives, in slavery and in freedom. Meticulously crafted from historical and literary sources, Ties That Bind vividly portrays the members of the Shoeboots family. Doll emerges as an especially poignant character, whose life is mostly known through the records of things done to her—her purchase, her marriage, the loss of her children—but also through her moving petition to the federal government for the pension owed to her as Shoe Boots's widow. A sensitive rendition of the hard realities of black slavery within Native American nations, the book provides the fullest picture we have of the myriad complexities, ironies, and tensions among African Americans, Native Americans, and whites in the first half of the nineteenth century. |
Contents
Location of the Cherokees relative to other major southern tribes | 1 |
Captivity | 13 |
Slavery | 25 |
Motherhood | 44 |
Property | 64 |
Slave house near Talala Indian Territory 1900 | 84 |
A Cherokee family in front of a cabin 1890 | 84 |
Formal portrait of a Cherokee family Indian Territory | 84 |
Christianity | 85 |
Nationhood | 100 |
Gold Rush | 129 |
Removal | 149 |
Capture | 162 |
Citizenship 191 Coda The Shoeboots Family Today | 204 |
definition and use of terms | 214 |
273 | |
Cherokee Treaty Party Member and Confederate General Stand Watie | 84 |
Murrell House Cherokee Nation Indian Territory 13 Tahlequah Cherokee capital 1902 | 84 |
Other editions - View all
Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom Tiya Miles Limited preview - 2005 |
Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom Tiya Miles Limited preview - 2005 |
Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom Tiya Miles Limited preview - 2005 |
Common terms and phrases
African American Afro-Cherokee Amer Application of William Archives and Records black slaves Boots and Doll Butrick Chero Cherokee citizenship Cherokee country Cherokee government Cherokee Mission Cherokee Nation Cherokee Phoenix Cherokee society Cherokee territory Cherokee women Cherokees and blacks child Chulio Citizenship Application Civil clan Clarinda Council Creek cultural Dawes Dawes Rolls diŠerent Doll’s enslaved father former slaves free blacks Georgia girls Hightower historian ican Indian AŠairs Indian Removal Indian Territory John Howard Payne John Ridge kinship land lived Major Ridge masters McLoughlin missionaries Morgan’s Station mother narrative National Archives Native Negro O‹ce o‹cials oŠered oŠspring Payne Papers political race racial relationship roll sexual Shoe Boots Shoe Boots’s Shoeboots family slave women slaveholding slavery Stand Watie story Tennessee Theda Perdue Thompson tion town Trail of Tears Treaty tribal tribes University of Oklahoma University Press Vann Watie wife William Shoeboots WoŠord woman