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. 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, then she became a lifelong zealous advocate for peace.
Nanyehi, who only later became Nancy Ward, was an unusually brilliant child, and wandered a lot in the forest, hence her name Wanderer. When she was about seventeen (remember that number), she married a young warrior named Tsula (Kingfisher).
About that same year, 1755, the Cherokee tribe (in southern Kentucky and northern Georgia) went to war with the Muskogee tribe (in southern Georgia) in a dispute over hunting territory. Part of the white image of Natives is that the tribes were always at war. This was, however, no more true of the Cherokees and Muskogees of Nanyehi’s time than of the English and French of Joan of Arc’s time. And it was partially the fault of the European invaders. The tribes had reached an uneasy truce about which one had which territory for hunting and agriculture; but as the whites took over land, going westward from the Atlantic, they displaced eastern tribes into the territories claimed by other tribes. Among the warriors who had to fight was Tsula.
Nanyehi was not the kind of girl to stay home when her husband went to war. And she did not just tag along and fix lunch for him. At the Battle of Taliwa on the Etowah River, she was right up at the battle front with him. Cherokees and Muskogees both had guns, but they were not rifles. The guns had long barrels but no rifling. on the inside to give the bullets more deadly accuracy. When she saw Tsula shot, Nanyehi did not collapse into helpless emotion. She grabbed his gun and started running and shooting and yelling. Legend has it that some of the Cherokees had already turned back in defeat until they saw her and followed her example, giving the Cherokees the victory. She became a war hero, like other women before her, and perhaps the youngest Cherokee war woman. She was, in fact, the last war woman when she died in 1822.
Rice described the Battle of Taliwa, Tsula’s death, and Nanyehi’s transformation, in terms too dramatic and colorful to actually be true, but he was unabashedly trying to get into Nanyehi’s head by doing so.
The stories of Joan of Arc and Nanyehi are similar enough that one could imagine that the Nanyehi story was a recycled Joan of Arc tale. Both Joan and Nanyehi were seventeen when they became heroes, a lone girl leading an army of men to victory. But there are good reasons to believe that Nanyehi’s story was not just a retelling of Joan of Arc. The main reason is that the historicity of Nanyehi was widely-held in the Cherokee tribe long before there had been enough Christian instruction to make this possible (especially since most missionaries to the Cherokees were Protestant, not Catholic). There are many other differences. For example, Joan was a virgin while Nanyehi was a mother. Joan was burned at the stake, while Nanyehi remained a hero for the next seventy years.
The story of a lone girl leading armies of men is irresistible. An early example is the probably fictional Chinese story of Mulan. But like much fiction it may have a little bit of truth in it. There is no shortage of military heroes who were women disguised as men. But everybody knew Nanyehi and Joan of Arc were women.
Human history has mostly been the story of men abusively ruling over women. But sometimes women have fought back and commanded the admiration, and even the obedience, of men.
