Christmas Fun | Chickasaw Book Project Research Materials
It’s like early Christmas at the Homahota Consulting offices! We got a big order in of research books for a new book project. As a part of my #GivingTuesday commitment, I ordered via Amazon Smile to benefit one of my chosen non-profits, the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums.
These books will be used as primary reading and preparation for a book I’m working on about Chickasaw allotment. The book will be a cultural biography that examines the loss of land and culture through the lens of a series of historic correspondence that took place between my great-grandmother and great-grandfather between 1907 and 1912 in Chickasaw Indian Territory.
I’ll be drawing both cultural artifacts and academic research and the book will be based on a legacy of written artifacts in the form of postcards, letters, and scrapbooks, paired with the academic history of the Indian Allotment era in Oklahoma, Indian Territory, with particular attention on the Chickasaw Nation. Essentially, the artifacts are the framework from which I’ll tell the story of allotment in Chickasaw.
Two stories emerge organically from the cultural material, one a love story between two people, the second a narrative of Chickasaw Indian Territory at the time of Allotment. As time passes, the correspondence not only shows the progression of a love story, but the progression of the loss of culture and land, with profound outcomes that would influence future generations, including the author’s own sense of cultural identity.
So below is a list of books I just added to my bibliography today! I can’t wait to get started reading them!
The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (Critical Issue)
Cover via Amazon
Tracing Ancestors Among the Five Civilized Tribes
White Enough to Be American?: Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation
History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century
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