Download or read book Wil Usdi written by Robert J. Conley and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-02-16 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adopted into the Cherokee tribe as a teenager, William Holland Thomas (1805–1893), known to the Cherokees as Wil Usdi (Little Will), went on to have a distinguished career as lawyer, politician, and soldier. He spent the last decades of his life in a mental hospital, where the pioneering ethnographer James Mooney interviewed him extensively about Cherokee lifeways. The true story of Wil Usdi’s life forms the basis for this historical novella, the final published work of fiction by the late award-winning Cherokee author Robert J. Conley. Conley tells Wil’s story through the recollection of the old man’s memories. Wil learns the Cherokee language while working at a trading post. The chief Yonaguska adopts the fatherless Wil, seeing to it that the boy dresses like a Cherokee and, for all practical purposes, becomes one. Later, representing the Eastern Band of the Cherokees in their negotiations with the federal government, Wil helps them remain in their ancestral lands in North Carolina when most other Cherokees are sent off on the Trail of Tears to the Indian Territory. Thus, Wil becomes popularly known as the white chief of the tribe. He continues making money as a merchant and in 1848 is elected to the North Carolina state senate, where he assists in the creation of a railroad system to serve the copper mines in neighboring Tennessee. During the Civil War, he leads a Cherokee battalion in the Confederate Army and tries to persuade his cousin Jefferson Davis to expand the battalion of fierce warriors into a regiment. His achievements make his admission into an insane asylum all the more tragic. The Wil Usdi of Conley’s story is in increasingly bad health, mistreated in a mental institution that to twenty-first-century readers is little more than a jail. He dreams of women and warfare and boyhood games of stickball. Yet even in his demented state, Wil is proud of his accomplishments and never loses his conviction that Indians are “more human than whites.” Weaving together the disconnected stories of Wil Usdi’s life, Conley’s blend of thorough research and imaginative prose gives readers a deep sense of post-removal Cherokee history.
Download or read book Mountain Windsong written by Robert J. Conley and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-12-11 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set against the tragic events of the Cherokees' removal from their traditional lands in North Carolina to Indian Territory between 1835-1838, Mountain Windsong is a love story that brings to life the suffering and endurance of the Cherokee people. It is the moving tale of Waguli (Whippoorwill") and Oconeechee, a young Cherokee man and woman separated by the Trail of Tears. Just as they are about to be married, Waguli is captured be federal soldiers and, along with thousands of other Cherokees, taken west, on foot and then by steamboat, to what is now eastern Oklahoma. Though many die along the way, Waguli survives, drowning his shame and sorrow in alcohol. Oconeechee, among the few Cherokees who remain behind, hidden in the mountains, embarks on a courageous search for Waguli. Robert J. Conley makes use of song, legend, and historical documents to weave the rich texture of the story, which is told through several, sometimes contradictory, voices. The traditional narrative of the Trail of Tears is told to a young contemporary Cherokee boy by his grandfather, presented in bits and pieces as they go about their everyday chores in rural North Carolina. The telling is neiter bitter nor hostile; it is sympathetic by unsentimental. An ironic third point of view, detached and often adversarial, is provided by the historical documents interspersed through the novel, from the text of the removal treaty to Ralph Waldo Emerson's letter to the president of the United States in protest of the removal. In this layering of contradictory elements, Conley implies questions about the relationships between history and legend, storytelling and myth-making. Inspired by the lyrics of Don Grooms's song "Whippoorwill," which open many chapters in the text, Conley has written a novel both meticulously accurate and deeply moving.
Download or read book Civil War Citizens written by Susannah J. Ural and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2010-11-22 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At its core, the Civil War was a conflict over the meaning of citizenship. Most famously, it became a struggle over whether or not to grant rights to a group that stood outside the pale of civil-society: African Americans. But other groups--namely Jews, Germans, the Irish, and Native Americans--also became part of this struggle to exercise rights stripped from them by legislation, court rulings, and the prejudices that defined the age. Grounded in extensive research by experts in their respective fields, Civil War Citizens is the first volume to collectively analyze the wartime experiences of those who lived outside the dominant white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant citizenry of nineteenth-century America. The essays examine the momentous decisions made by these communities in the face of war, their desire for full citizenship, the complex loyalties that shaped their actions, and the inspiring and heartbreaking results of their choices-- choices that still echo through the United States today. Contributors: Stephen D. Engle, William McKee Evans, David T. Gleeson, Andrea Mehrländer, Joseph P. Reidy, Robert N. Rosen, and Susannah J. Ural.
Download or read book The Witch of Goingsnake and Other Stories written by Robert J. Conley and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These stories, based on Cherokee history, folklore, and experience, reflect the depth of historical experience, as well as the range of contemporary life and values of this enduring Native American people
Download or read book Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution written by Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology written by and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution written by J. W. Powell and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book NINETEENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF TEH BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY written by J. W. POWELL and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution written by and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annual report of the Bureau of ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution
Download or read book Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution written by Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "List of publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology (comp. by Frederick Webb Hodge)":
Download or read book Annual Reports written by and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Shadow Warriors written by Cameron Judd and published by Fanfare. This book was released on 1997 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel of Unionist Resisistance in Tennessee and North Carolilna, September 1860-January 1863.
Download or read book Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution written by Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of Ethnology and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 718 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Whose Names Are Unknown written by Sanora Babb and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sanora Babb’s long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers’ plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author’s firsthand experience. This clear-eyed and unsentimental story centers on the fictional Dunne family as they struggle to survive and endure while never losing faith in themselves. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, Milt, Julia, their two little girls, and Milt’s father, Konkie, share a life of cramped circumstances in a one-room dugout with never enough to eat. Yet buried in the drudgery of their everyday life are aspirations, failed dreams, and fleeting moments of hope. The land is their dream. The Dunne family and the farmers around them fight desperately for the land they love, but the droughts of the thirties force them to abandon their fields. When they join the exodus to the irrigated valleys of California, they discover not the promised land, but an abusive labor system arrayed against destitute immigrants. The system labels all farmers like them as worthless “Okies” and earmarks them for beatings and worse when hardworking men and women, such as Milt and Julia, object to wages so low they can’t possibly feed their children. The informal communal relations these dryland farmers knew on the High Plains gradually coalesce into a shared determination to resist. Realizing that a unified community is their best hope for survival, the Dunnes join with their fellow workers and begin the struggle to improve migrant working conditions through democratic organization and collective protest. Babb wrote Whose Names are Unknown in the 1930s while working with refugee farmers in the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps of California. Originally from the Oklahoma Panhandle are herself, Babb, who had first come to Los Angeles in 1929 as a journalist, joined FSA camp administrator Tom Collins in 1938 to help the uprooted farmers. As Lawrence R. Rodgers notes in his foreword, Babb submitted the manuscript for this book to Random House for consideration in 1939. Editor Bennett Cerf planned to publish this “exceptionally fine” novel but when John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath swept the nation, Cerf explained that the market could not support two books on the subject. Babb has since shared her manuscript with interested scholars who have deemed it a classic in its own right. In an era when the country was deeply divided on social legislation issues and millions drifted unemployed and homeless, Babb recorded the stories of the people she greatly respected, those “whose names are unknown.” In doing so, she returned to them their identities and dignity, and put a human face on economic disaster and social distress.
Download or read book ASC Newsletter written by and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Western North Carolina written by John Preston Arthur and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cherokee Medicine Man written by Robert J. Conley and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A modern medicine man portrayed through the words of the people he has helped Robert J. Conley did not set out to chronicle the life of Cherokee medicine man John Little Bear. Instead, the medicine man came to him. Little Bear asked Conley to write down his story, to reveal to the world “what Indian medicine is really about.” For Little Bear, as for the Cherokee ancestors who brought their traditions over the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory, the medicine is about helping people. Visitors from neighboring states and Mexico come to him, each one seeking help for a different kind of problem. Each seeker’s story is presented here exactly as it was told to Conley. Little Bear has cured problems involving health, relationships, and money by uncovering the source of the problem rather than simply treating the symptoms. Whereas mainstream medicine and counseling have failed his patients, Little Bear’s healing practices have proven beneficial time and again.
