Nancy's War: The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice. A Little Cherokee Girl Comes of Age

Author Stan Rice has just published the first of three novels in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity.

The first novel, Nancy's War, is about the life and struggles of one of the most famous figures of Cherokee history: Nancy Ward. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. She is so famous that there is an association of her descendants. She lived at the same time as the “founding fathers” of the United States, and was just as important to the Cherokee Nation (which was not part of the United States) as the founding fathers were to the United States. She started off as a war hero, at exactly the same age as Joan of Arc (as explained in the next essay), then she became a lifelong zealous advocate for peace. All her life, the Cherokee tribe revered her, even when they began to disregard her opinions.

Before she was the great Nancy Ward, she was the little girl and then the young woman Nanyehi in her village of Chota. Chota was a large village, and the closest thing the Cherokee Nation had to a capital city. The leaders of the tribe—including her uncle Attakullakulla—lived there. Nanyehi’s name translates roughly wandering rose, which is what she was like, wandering everywhere and looking closely at everything, and turning up in surprising places, like a wild rose. The little animals, such as insects and birds, talked to her, but the big animals hid from her. Also, she was aware that there was something important, something about her, a secret that the grown-ups were not telling her.

Then, in the novel, Nanyehi took a trip with her uncle Attakullakulla to Charles Town, the biggest English city near her Cherokee village. She was twelve years old, just on the cusp of becoming a woman. Attakullakulla had been to London years before. Little Nanyehi had a lot of things to learn all at once on that trip. In this part of the novel, Rice confronts us with the numerous differences between Cherokee and white society, through the eyes of the little Nanyehi. It is typical, in white novels, to treat Natives and other people of color as primitive and inferior. But that is not how Nanyehi saw it. Rice introduces these things through her eyes, not his.

For one thing, Nanyehi could not understand why white people always did things the hard way. Instead of planting corn with a digging stick, they would hack all the vegetation away and plow the ground. Instead of having trails that curled among the trees, they cut the trees down and built straight roads. The white world was a world of straight lines, while the Cherokee world was curves. And instead of having a few people in small villages, where nature could process their wastes, the whites built big cities, and stored their wastes in porcelain chamber pots until they could dump them in the street. Nanyehi was astonished at how filthy the streets of Charles Town were, in contrast to Cherokee villages that were cleansed each year during the Green Corn Festival. Many other things Nanyehi saw that were, to her view, very humorous, such as wigs, which she thought were scalps. As Nanyehi saw it, the whites worked very hard to create a world inferior to the Cherokee world.

For another thing, Nanyehi could not understand slavery. Natives sometimes had slavery, but not as brutal and absolute as white ownership of black slaves. She was particularly puzzled at how whites calculated slavery based on blood quantum: a half-black, half-white person was a slave if the mother was black, and so on down the generations. A seven-eighths white person could be a slave in a matrilineal line. How could a white person have a slave as a half-sister? This made no sense to the Cherokees, in whose society a slave could either become free or whose enslaved status was not hereditary. This is a question Rice also addresses in his short novel Plantation Odyssey.

Most relevant to Nanyehi’s story, she could not understand why whites suppressed their women. In Cherokee society, women’s opinions were important and part of the process of government. Her uncle had been to England and was puzzled that Parliament had no women. Nanyehi was to be perhaps the most important woman leader of her tribe.

Just at the time Nanyehi was reaching puberty, she was also learning about the strange and dangerous white world just beyond her village. She learned just how dangerous it could be when a white man tried to kill her and her uncle.

It was at this time that the large animals started showing themselves to Nanyehi, including the white wolf. This was the secret that the adults only now told her: the white wolf of peace was her spirit animal. She was to spend her long life in search of peace for her people, and never quite finding it, as explained in another essay.

Rice does not say whether this trip really occurred; he used it as a device to present the ideas that Nanyehi had to process as she was growing up. Rice does not preach what he thinks is right about slavery and the role of women. He presents the ideas through the eyes of a confused little girl.

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part two.

This novel, which I introduced previously (cover), introduces some very serious issues, even though the author treats them with humor.

First, racism. Rea and her mother are full-blood Cherokee, while Earl is a white racist. (He obviously wasn’t when he first married the mother. Rice leaves this unexplained.) The way Rea describes it, white people see Native Americans as “dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the rez in flyover country.” Can’t get much worse than this, can it?

Yes, it can.

Not only is the racism contemporaneous but extends also into the past. Most white people (as Rea explains, echoing the words of Rice’s nonfiction book Forgotten Landscapes) see Natives as, at least in the past, savage hunter-gatherers. But many tribes, including Rea’s Cherokee tribe, fed large populations from big farms, and lived in big cities—some of them the biggest in the world a few centuries ago. Whites see themselves as not only being but having always been the forefront of civilization.

And there’s more. The adoption of Native children by white parents sounds like a good idea, only it resulted in the erosion of Native cultures, even when the white parents had the best of intentions. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act directly addressed this problem. You can read about it in at least two novels by Barbara Kingsolver.

The second issue is the oppression of women. Earl is not only violent toward Rea but also intends to rape her—and would have, were it not for the intervention of poison ivy. One of the reasons Rea loves Marten is, as she says, “You know how to grab a woman by the part of her body that matters most—her brain.” Rea becomes something of a heroine among women and among Cherokees, although she was just trying to live her life.

Yet Another Reason for Conservatives to Hate Global Warming Science

Most scientists, particularly those whose research has established the science of global warming, tend to be on the political left. They have been disproportionately targeted for the termination of federal government positions and funding, under the anti-global-warming leadership of Donald Trump. The outspoken advocacy of global warming science by former Vice President Al Gore particularly motivated conservatives to hate global warming science.

Well, I just ran across a new reason for conservatives to hate global warming science. The possibility of global warming was first discovered by a woman scientist.

And no ordinary woman scientist. She was a vocal advocate of women’s rights, and signed the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. She trespassed into the male territory of science and invention, and then she wanted to vote, too.

Eunice Newton Foote’s experimental demonstration of the possibility of global warming was very simple, and would today be considered simplistic, but it was valid. She took glass cylinders, used an air pump to remove the air, then put air into one cylinder, hydrogen gas into another, and carbon dioxide gas into a third. She had thermometers in the cylinders. (The actual experiment was a little more complicated.) When they had reached temperature equilibrium, she placed them in bright sunlight. The glass trapped the heat of the sun inside the cylinders—that is why it is called the greenhouse effect. The cylinder with carbon dioxide got much hotter than the others, reaching 125 degrees F. This cylinder also took longer than the others to cool off after being removed from the sun. She concluded not only that carbon dioxide held solar heat very well (actually, the infra-red radiation from objects that had warmed in the sun, and, further, that at times when the Earth’s atmosphere had more carbon dioxide—whether in the past or the future—the climate would have been or would be warmer. Years before John Tyndall, and a half century before Svante Arrhenius, who usually get the credit for the discovery of global warming, Eunice Newton Foote had it figured out. Her research, though it remained obscure, did get published. It was presented to the major American scientific society in 1856, though she avoided notoriety by having a man present it for her.

This graphic shows Foote, two of her glass jars, and the sun.

It was difficult, in the nineteenth century, for a woman to publish her own scientific findings, but some, including Eunice Newton Foote, managed to do so. It was legally impossible for a woman inventor to patent her own inventions, because she did not have the legal right to defend her patents from infringement in court. This is why Eunice Newton Foote, like other woman inventors, patented her inventions under her husband’s name. Fortunately Eunice had a supportive husband who was happy to promote her work.

Science, and the world, are better when women are given creative freedom. Most modern conservatives believe this, but they disapprove strongly of modern women who take Foote’s role in modern society.

How Conventional Religion Subordinates Women Even When It Doesn’t Mean To

I have written numerous entries about the bad things that religion can bring upon the human mind and the human experience. I have never done so, as some bloggers have done, in a spirit of contempt or ridicule. I have a background of religious fundamentalism, and when I write negative things about religion it is because I yearn for people who are still within the confines of doctrinal religion to be able to escape from it. For those of you, if any are reading this, who are still bound within the shackles of doctrinal religion (as opposed to spiritual sensibilities and feelings), I really care about you. I fear that you are missing out on anything good that religion might have to offer, as I did for so long.

One of the bad effects of doctrinal religion that I have noticed, especially here in rural Oklahoma, is that it plunges women into a position of inferiority. I’ll bet you’ve never heard that one before. Right. Whether it is overt, as in fundamentalist Christianity and Islam, or unspoken, as in conventional Christianity and Islam, women are encouraged to think of themselves as servants rather than leaders.

You knew that already, of course. I just want to tell you what I have directly observed. I have lost count of the number of brilliant and promising female students that I have had who end up dropping out of their professional or graduate programs and becoming more or less domestic servants. And religion plays a role in this, if only because religion pervades the culture from which these women briefly began to emerge. They are not forced to do so by their male partners; I have seen the husbands of these women interrupt their own careers to support their wives in medical school. But these women have grown up feeling more comfortable in the position of servant than in the position of leader. Adam was the leader, and Eve the “help-meet,” and nothing but trouble came from Eve thinking for herself. Religion, even if it does not prescribe a subordinate role for women, feathers the beds that make women feel comfortable at home rather than in the workplace.

The Natural Superiority of Women

I have never actually read the book by this title, edited by the famous twentieth-century sociologist Ashley Montagu, but I am going to attempt an evolutionary scientific defense of an idea that may not have even been widely circulating when Montagu published his volume. And that is: neoteny.

Neoteny, broadly defined, is the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. We have all noticed that juvenile animals differ from adult animals in consistent and very noticeable ways. Juvenile animals have big heads and big eyes and are generally smoother than adult animals. While it is difficult to define an exact list of neotenous characteristics, we all know them: the way puppies and kittens and children are different from dogs, cats, and adult humans.

These are precisely the ways in which humans differ from the other apes. Human and chimp babies look more alike than human and chimp adults. As humans grow, our heads (and brains) continue to grow for a much longer time than is the case in chimps. Baby chimps even have relatively flat faces, like humans, rather than the sloping faces of adult chimps. Baby chimps are pretty hairy, like adult chimps, but the relative hairlessness of humans (in which we have as many hairs as chimps, but many of them do not develop) can be considered not just a neotenous but a fetal characteristic that we maintain into adulthood. In addition to this, adult humans usually retain into adulthood the juvenile playfulness and creativity of children. We humans consider ourselves superior to chimps because of our neotenous characteristics.

And these are also some of the ways in which women differ from men. While it cannot easily be demonstrated that women have bigger brains (relative to body size) or are more creative than men, they have many juvenile characteristics such as relative hairlessness and smoothness. The smoothness comes from having more subcutaneous fat than men. Because women make a bigger physical investment into each child than do men, women think more about the future prosperity of their children than do men. Because of this, I believe, women are more likely to find peaceful and constructive solutions to problems than are men, whose first reaction is often violence. I think the world would be a more peaceful and a fairer place if it were run by women.

There are, of course, exceptions, and I am making only a generalization from my own biased point of view. My experiences have convinced me that, in general, women are superior to men. Matter of fact, I don’t see what women see in men. But I’m glad you like us men. To my male friends, I merely say that I’m not referring to you personally.

Yes, women are babes, and that’s why they are superior. Women are superior to men for some of the same reasons that humans are superior to chimps. I am defining superior, of course, from a human-centered viewpoint; all of you crawdads out there, and Klingons, forgive me, but the human viewpoint is the only one I can have.

Someone asked Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg how many women are enough in the Supreme Court. She said nine. She then explained that when the Court consisted of nine men, nobody thought it strange, but a nine-woman Supreme Court would raise at least a little bit of consternation. Nevertheless, I think that we need to have more input from women in governing our countries and our corporations (and our universities).

It can work. I am a member of the Cherokee tribe, and our traditional government (before about 1800) had women as well as men in leadership councils. Of course women made important decisions in times of peace, but there were a few women, such as my sixth great grandmother Nanyehi, who made important contributions in times of war also. When Attakullakulla, Nanyehi’s uncle, visited England in 1830, he met with the King and Parliament. One of his reactions was, where are the women? How can you ignore the input of half of the population? He might have been more pleased had he met Queen Elizabeth I, but the all-male Parliament would still not have met with his approval. I am squarely with Attakullakulla, and with Nanyehi, on this one. Of course, eventually the Cherokee tribe was vanquished. About 1829, just before being dispossessed from its homeland, the Cherokee tribe adopted a white style of government, modeled after the United States, including restriction of suffrage and offices to men. So the pre-1800 woman-intensive Cherokee system did not work? The only reason it did not work is that the white people—that is, white men—had more guns.

Back in the 1970s, a pollster asked schoolchildren who the worst man and worst woman in history had been. The most common responses were Adolf Hitler and Anita Bryant. You kidding me? In case you don’t remember Anita Bryant, she got to be famous for making anti-gay statements. I am not here to attack or defend Anita Bryant (she is certainly no Hitler); but if she is the worst woman the kids could think of in all of history, that tells you something about the differences between men and women. Islamist jihadists are mostly men, plus some women who have been practically brainwashed by men.

Another famous Cherokee, Will Rogers, said he never met a man he didn’t like. Well, I could introduce him to a few. And a few women, too. But I have truly liked and admired nearly all of the women I have ever met, and most, but not nearly as many, of the men.

Here’s to women! May it be a good year for you!