Nancy's War: The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice, part three. Peace or War: It Can Get Really Personal

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: Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. 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. All her life, the Cherokee tribe revered her, even when they began to disregard her opinions.

 

 

We hear about war and its casualties all the time in the news. As I write this, the United States is at “war” (undeclared, solely at the discretion of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth) with Iran, and supports Israel in its strikes against Lebanon. We hear and forget the numbers but it gets personal when I meet and talk with Iranians and Lebanese, some of whom live in France where I do. I hear about their family members who died in American and Israeli bomb strikes. I also remember, years ago, hearing the story of an Israeli air strike on a Palestinian home of a man who was not a terrorist. His daughter was excelling in school and wanted to be a doctor so she could help people. A minute later, her blood was dripping from the ceiling. It gets personal.

Seldom has war been a more personal issue than it was between Nanyehi (later Nancy Ward) and her cousin Tsiyu Gansini, also known as The Canoe. He was such a dedicated warrior that he wore war paint every day and was instantly ready to defend Cherokee interests against those of other tribes and of the whites. He believed the only way to withstand the whites was by war. To accomplish this, all the tribes that had long been at war had to unite together, something he worked hard to achieve. He was the enemy of the Muskogee tribe, until it was clear that their interests were better served by uniting with them against the whites. Rice clearly takes the side of Nancy Ward, but he puts words into The Canoe’s mouth that make his viewpoint seem irresistible. Rice gets inside of his mind. The Canoe’s slogan was, We are not yet conquered.

Nancy Ward, however, realized that the white path of peace and the red path of war were separate but often parallel, sometimes intersecting: sometimes war was necessary to obtain peace. But she compromised when she thought the Cherokee tribe would benefit, even if it meant becoming more and more culturally white herself. She married the white man Bryan Ward (see the next essay), and encouraged their daughter to marry a Virginia government official. Nancy Ward released a white prisoner who promptly ran to warn white outposts of The Canoe’s impending attacks. This caused her cousin’s war plans to fail ignominiously. He had reason to hate her. He considered her the prostitute of the white man—especially since the white prisoner she released may have been her lover. Her slogan was, Our cry is all for peace.

Peace or War? Rice clearly chooses peace, as did Nancy Ward, but sometimes the choice was not clear. Rice speaks through the voice of The Canoe with sympathy.

Rice weaves in some of the brutalities that white armies took against the Cherokees, such as pulling up all of their cornstalks to starve them out of their villages. This was one of the reasons that The Canoe fought until the bitter end, when his entire Chickamauga nation consisted of just a few villages in the mountains of Georgia.

Nancy's War: The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice. The Cherokee Joan of Arc

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, 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.

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.

Killing Time? The Evolution of Hobbies

As I have continued reading Lonnie Aarssen’s book, What We Are, I ran across another interesting idea. He claims, and is probably correct, that human evolutionary psychology has been strongly influenced by the awareness that we are going to die. Many aspects of our cultures result from our responses to the certainty of our deaths.

One category of response is to create something that outlives us. Most of the estimated 90 billion people who have ever lived have not left any trace, other than perhaps a name on a record somewhere, that they ever existed. It doesn’t take many generations for this to happen. My great-grandfather exists now, as far as I am aware, of two photos from about 1890, a grave, and some DNA in his descendants.

 

But people who have had more money and power than did my great grandfather can do a lot more to create an enduring legacy. Rockefeller and Carnegie had endowments that are still giving awards to people. Simon Bolívar has a country named after him. These legacies create the false impression, while we are alive, that we will not die, and after we die, that we are still alive. In the Becky Hobbs/Nick Sweet musical Nanyehi, devoted to our ancestor Nancy Ward, the great Cherokee leader, the Nancy Ward character says, when you see the white swan’s wing, know that I am still alive. Of course, she isn’t, and there is remarkably little of her personal effects that can still be found (she died about 1822). But Rockefeller, Carnegie, Bolívar, and Nanyehi are still having an impact on the world.

Sir Francis Bacon noted that childless men put more into their legacies (he was thinking of creativity and intellect) than do men with big families precisely because they have no physical posterity. Wikipedia lists no children for Bacon. I have one child and two grandchildren, but this is below the world average.

The main motivation I feel in creating a legacy of writing is that I do not feel that I should hoard for myself the insights I have encountered in life. I want to share them.

Another category of response is to lose ourselves in hobbies. This allows us to ignore the fact that we will die. My Dad, for example, recorded country music on hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes, and spent countless hours documenting and organizing them. They have almost all disintegrated. I have his tape of country songs sung by our next door neighbor’s brother, Truitt. Are these hobbies just a way of killing time?

That is clearly one purpose of a hobby. But some of us try to turn our hobbies into legacies. I have thousands of photographs. They would be depressing if they were just a pile of pictures. But since 2007 all are digital, and I scanned the others. I labeled each photo with a descriptive name, and the year, so that the next generation of my family will know what each one was. Just in case they ever look at them. Of course, my daughter and family are in my photos also. You can see about a thousand of these photos (mostly of natural areas, not of me and my family) at my newly refurbished author website.

One of the best ways to create a unique legacy is to write a book. Major commercial publishers have published six of my books; I plan one more; all about popular science and history. I have also written articles, which are on various databases. My website is me, in the future. The books that I know I cannot publish through increasingly unstable commercial publishers will be, or so I plan, on Amazon. My tech-savvy son-in-law can probably find a few minutes a year to maintain my digital presence long after my passing. The essays on this blog, starting about 2008, will be available perhaps as long as the internet exists.

And that is pretty much what I do these days. I have no hobbies that are just for killing time. Time is precious, and I want to use it—all of it—to make the world better. This includes activities that maintain health and vigor, since I do not want all of my work to collapse if I have a stroke or something. And to keep me happy, since I do my best work as a writer and a grandfather by being happy. I hope to put a reasonable finish to my work and then, one day, I just won’t wake up.

Of course, my main legacy (both biological and cultural, even spiritual) will be my family, which so far is resisting extinction, and consists entirely of good people. World, you will be glad we were here.

Nanyehi: The Continued Evolution

It has been two years since I first saw the musical Nanyehi, written by Becky Hobbs and Nick Sweet. The musical is based on the story of the last Cherokee ghigau, Nanyehi (also known as Nancy Ward). She lived from about 1738 to about 1822. I have a particular interest in this woman because she was my sixth great grandmother. Nanyehi was caught between the worlds of Europeans and Cherokees, and between peace and war. She was a war heroine who, all of her life, led the way to peace. Of course, for the Cherokees, neither the path of war nor of peace ultimately worked; both paths led to the United States conquering the Cherokee. We remain a conquered nation today.

The first set of performances was supported by the Eastern Band of the Cherokees in Hartwell, Georgia in 2012. The second set was sponsored by the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma in Tahlequah in 2013. This was where I first saw it. There were other performances in 2014: in Tulsa, Oklahoma (I saw this one), and Kingsport, Tennessee. The fifth set of performances has just ended in Tulsa, where I saw it last night.

In 2013, I wrote rapturously about this musical in my blogs. After seeing it three times my opinion remains unchanged. Each time it is performed (with Michelle Honaker as Nanyehi and Travis Fite as Tsiyu Gansini) it gets better and better in every way. Becky and Nick have added a couple of new musical pieces, which are among the best: “Love Doesn’t Come in Colors” and “War or Peace.” These pieces focus on some of the most important themes: the warrior Tsiyu Gansini is displeased with his peaceful cousin Nanyehi marrying a white man (Bryant Ward, my sixth great grandfather) or with her championing of the way of peace. You can find all information about this musical, including the stories and lyrics of all the pieces, at the website.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the evolution of this musical is that it has already become a classic.  There are already famous lines from it, such as when peace chief Attakullakulla says that “Cherokee women have always done and will always do whatever they want.” But most of all it has become a new tribal tradition. In its first performances, it needed support from the tribe; the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma paid for every Cherokee citizen who wanted to attend the 2013 Tahlequah performance. But last night the performance hall at the Cherokee Casino was totally filled. And what was the most common thing that I heard people talking about after the performance? The most common words were “Aren’t you glad you came?” and “Wasn’t that good?” and “See you again next year right here.”

The story of Nanyehi is only sparsely documented in books. Search for “Nancy Ward” on Amazon and you find only old books or children’s books or chapters within other books. I believe it is time that someone write a really good popular book about this astonishing woman who was important not only in Cherokee but in American history. Actually, I have a manuscript that I hope to market very soon. The words at the end of the theme song of the musical are “You will be heard!” but most people have never heard of Nancy Ward. I hope that my future writing, and the continued success of Becky and Nick’s musical, will fix this problem.

The issues faced by Nancy Ward and her warrior cousin are still with us today. Does war lead to peace, as Tsiyu Gansini said, or must we pursue peace as our primary goal, as Nanyehi said? This exact same story is going on in the Middle East today.

Another important aspect of the story of Nancy Ward is what some writers have called the sacred feminine. Civilization and organized religion have enforced male domination and crushed women into a subservient role. For example…well, look at all of recorded history. And look at the world today. But in many tribal societies, including the Cherokees, women often had important positions of leadership. As ghigau, Nanyehi could decide the fates of war captives. Primitive Christianity, when the church first started, was dismissed by outsiders as a religion for women and slaves. But eventually women lost their power: the church became entirely patriarchal, and in the early nineteenth century the Cherokee Nation reorganized itself to imitate American governance. Once the Cherokee Nation had a constitution, beginning in New Echota in 1827 (now in Georgia), only men could vote or hold office. The sacred feminine of nurture and peace was lost in the Cherokees just as in almost all other tribes, nations, and institutions. In a world that is still largely patriarchal, Nanyehi (Nancy Ward) remains a heroine worthy of our admiration. She was not perfect, but who was?

You don’t have to be Cherokee to be totally swept away by the story of Nancy Ward. If any of you ever get the chance to see the musical, don’t miss it! Hey you people in California, get on a plane and come back here next year to see it! Watch for information on the website. It just might restore a little faith that humanity has some goodness left in it.

This essay also appeared on my evolution blog.