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Miles, Tiya

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

California (Berkeley)

2005



OUR SYNOPSIS: Tiya Miles shares the stories of a Cherokee man named Shoe Boots, an enslaved Black woman named Doll who he purchased in the late 1790s, and the five children they had together, all adopting the last name Shoeboots. This family illuminates complex intertwined Black and Cherokee histories of slavery, freedom, race, colonialism, gender, citizenship, and more. She establishes these themes in their historical context by organizing the book around “episodes in the Shoeboots’s lives that foreshadow, overlap, and result from major historical events.” (52) At the same time, she tracks the broader development of dual Cherokee and African American historical narratives from the late eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. Their intersections are insightful, for example with Doll’s status as both an enslaved Black person belonging to Shoe Boots and a non-member of a Cherokee clan shaping her position in Cherokee society.

BIG QUESTIONS:

  • How did Cherokee people adapt the institution of Black chattel slavery to their own culture?

  • What can we try to understand about Doll’s perspective despite the lack of direct historical evidence? What indirect evidence could be useful?

FEATURE QUOTES:

  • “Shoe Boots, Doll, their children, and their grandchildren lived through key historical moments: the U.S. colonization of the indigenous Southeast, the formation of the first Native American constitutional government, the systemization of slavery in America and the adoption of slaveholding among American Indians, the cementing of race as a social category and of blacks as a subjugated racial caste, the removal of southern Indians west of the Mississippi, and the American Civil War. The composite and intersecting stories of the Shoeboots family members’ lives thus crystallize and illuminate not only each of these historical moments but also crucial issues in the fields of American studies, American history, and ethnohistory.” (49-50)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:

  • N/A

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