Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom

Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom

University of California Press
February 2005
329 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520241329
Paperback ISBN: 9780520250024

Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies
University of Michigan

  • Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize, American Studies Association
  • Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, Organization of American Historians

This 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.

Table of Contents

  • List of Illustrations
  • Shoeboots Family Tree
  • Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • PART ONE. BONE OF MY BONE: SLAVERY, RACE, AND NATION—EAST
    • 1. Captivity
    • 2. Slavery
    • 3. Motherhood
    • 4. Property
    • 5. Christianity
    • 6. Nationhood
    • 7. Gold Rush
  • PART TWO. OF BLOOD AND BONE: FREEDOM, KINSHIP, AND CITIZENSHIP—WEST
    • 8. Removal
    • 9. Capture
    • 10. Freedom
  • Epilogue: Citizenship
  • Coda: The Shoeboots Family Today
  • Appendix 1. Research Methods and Challenges
  • Appendix 2. Definition and Use of Terms
  • Appendix 3. Cherokee Names and Mistaken Identities
  • Notes
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Index
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