This is a letter I mailed to Tiya Miles, a Harvard professor, minority activist, and novelist, regarding her most recent novel, Cherokee Rose. I wrote on paper to her academic address, since she must be flooded with emails.
Dear Tiya Miles,
My name is Stan Rice. I am an emeritus professor of biology at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. I am the author of five popular science books about evolution, botany, and scientific thinking. I have also had a long scholarly interest in Cherokee history, due to my tribal membership, but I have no credentials in Cherokee or Native studies. I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed reading your novel, Cherokee Rose. I immediately recognized the James Vann character. It is a story that needed to be told.
The irresistible lure of family history, of mixed racial ancestry, has recently been an important part of my life as it was for one of your main characters, Jinx, and I assume for you also. Like Jinx, my interest in Native ancestry exploded long after the death of the last person who knew much about it, my mother. I remembered and wrote down everything my mother told me about our family’s past, but I did not seek further information from her. She was not interested in asking her Cherokee father about our family history either. She and all her siblings, long after the deaths of my Cherokee grandfather (the last one to speak Cherokee) and white grandmother, wished that they had asked them about everything they knew. I have reconstructed an historical framework and filled in the rest with imagination. As with you and Jinx, my ancestry is a major part of my identity today.
Human interest in ancestry is somewhat hard to explain from my scientific point of view. My evolution books deal with the evolution of altruism. My Ph.D. advisor was on the faculty of Harvard University, your institution. Among evolutionary biologists, altruism extends in primarily one direction, forward—an animal helping its offspring and indirect descendants—and is proportional to the degree of genetic relatedness. Parents care about offspring because they have a genetic relatedness of one-half, and their nieces and nephews because they have a genetic relatedness of one-fourth. Against this background, why should anyone care about ancestors? My Cherokee genes are 17/256, just a smidgin’ over one-sixteenth. Which is, biologically, nothing. My fascination with the story of Cherokee experiences, and the nearly universal interest in genealogies, are inexplicable from the biological viewpoint. This is one reason, of many, that I not only liked your novel but strongly identified with Jinx.
I spent my life ignoring the question of Cherokee freedmen. But I know firsthand about Cherokee hostility toward Blacks. Both sides of my family, especially the Cherokee side, was strongly racist toward Blacks. I was fortunate to have escaped this influence, as far as I am aware. I think this attitude is changing in the Cherokee tribe. I heard Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., whom you seem to have met, give a presentation at a little rural library in Oklahoma (before I moved to France). He had just discovered that one of his ancestors was a freedman. His message was that Cherokees need to face up to the fact that some of our ancestors were slave owners. (Mr. Hoskin is the kind of positive and empathetic leader our tribe has not had since Chief Wilma Mankiller.) My sixth great grandmother, Nancy Ward, one of the most famous Cherokees in history, was apparently the first Cherokee to own slaves. As I understand, she was a little unclear on the Southern concept of slavery; she did not abuse her slaves or treat them as chattel, but as employees who could not quit their jobs. Which does not alter the facts of the case. For me, the plot of your novel (about freedmen) is a personal one.
I have written, separately, to your assistant (as per your website request) to ask if you might be interested in writing a jacket endorsement of my upcoming book, Forgotten Landscapes, about the Native American transformation of the “wild” landscape of North America. I hope this request is forwarded to you. But even if you do not have time to look at my book, I wanted you to know that I, as an informed reader, appreciated your novel not just because of its superior fictional qualities but from a personal space in my heart.
