Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and FreedomThis beautifully written book, now in its second edition, tells the haunting saga of a quintessentially American family. In the late 1790s, Shoe Boots, a famed Cherokee warrior and successful farmer, acquired an African slave named Doll. 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. Updated with a new preface and an appendix of key primary sources, this remains an essential book for students of Native American history, African American history, and the history of race and ethnicity in the United States. |
Contents
Location of the Cherokees relative to other major southern tribes | 1 |
Captivity | 13 |
Slave house near Talala Indian Territory 1900 | P-6 |
Christianity | 85 |
FIGURES | 124 |
Locations of the Five Tribes before and after removal | 146 |
Citizenship | 191 |
The Shoeboots Family Today | 204 |
Account of Nancys capture Testimony of Two Cherokee Chiefs | 226 |
Tuscarora Shoe Bootss deed of gift for personal property April | 234 |
Articles 1 through 3 of the Cherokee Nation Constitution 1827 | 240 |
Cherokee County plat and land grant issued to Stephen | 248 |
Article in the Cherokee Advocate of October 7 1847 on | 257 |
Warrant for the land that Doll received on account of Shoe | 263 |
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY | 335 |
DEFINITION AND USE OF TERMS | 214 |
Other editions - View all
Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom Tiya Miles Limited preview - 2015 |
Common terms and phrases
African American Afro-Cherokee Amer Application of William Archives and Records ARTICLE black slaves black women Boots and Doll's Boots’s Butrick Chero Cherokee citizenship Cherokee country Cherokee government Cherokee laws Cherokee Nation Cherokee Phoenix Cherokee society Cherokee territory Cherokee women Cherokees and blacks chief child Christian Citizenship Application Civil claim clan Clarinda Court Creek cultural Dawes Rolls descendants district Doll Elizabeth emancipation enslaved father former slaves free blacks Georgia girl Hightower historian ican Indian Territory John Howard Payne John Ridge kinship land lived Major Ridge masters McLoughlin missionaries mixed-race mother narrative National Archives National Council Negro Payne Papers person petition Polly race racial relationship River roll sexual Shoe Boots Shoe Boots's Shoeboots family slaveholding slavery South Stand Watie story Tennessee Theda Perdue Thompson tion town Trail of Tears treaty tribal tribe United University of Oklahoma Vann warriors Watie wife William Shoeboots woman