Race, Slavery, and a Cherokee Family
Tiya Miles. Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom
Book Reviewed by Joshua Piker
Department of History,
University of Oklahoma
(Permission was granted by H-Net to republish this book review in Voices of Indian Territory.)
Tiva Mites. Ties that Rind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom American Crossroads Series. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xix + 306 pp. Illustrations, maps. figures. notes, selected bibliography, index. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-520-24132-0;
$21.95 (paper), ISBN 0-520-25002-8.
Tiya Miles aims to tell “a Cherokee story, an African-American story, and an American story” (J). xvi), Each element is critical to her book’s success because. as she argues, “though much of nineteenth-century Cherokee history has been written as a story about Cherokees and whites, it was an invisible third element, the presence of black people, on which the story often
turned” (p. 24).
“Ties that Bind” focuses on the family created by Shoe Boots, a Cherokee, and Doll, his black slave. Their relationship, Miles believes, merits book-length treatment in part because it was the first Afro-Cherokee union to be regulated by the Cherokee national government; as such, it has become a common reference point for scholars. More important, however, is the fact that the lives of Shoe Boots, Doll, and their descendants, from the 1790s to the 1860s, “crystallize and illuminate” (p.3) a series of issues central to debates within American studies, American history, and ethnohistory. Among the topics brought to the fore by this family story are the diversity of experience among African Americans. the impact of colonialism on Native Americans, the cycles of enslavement and resistance that characterized American slavery, and the link between nationalism and racial formation...
You can read the entire review in the Winter edition of Voices of Indian Territory©