What Led this Historian to Write a Novel About Indians and Slavery?

Tiya Miles is the Mary Henrietta Graham Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, where she teaches in the departments of American Culture, Afroamerican & African Studies, and History. She is the author of "Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom" (University of California Press, 2005, 2015), "The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story" (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), "Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era" (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), and "The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts" (John F. Blair Publisher, 2015). She is grateful to Martha Jones, Greg Dowd, David Agruss, and Susan Kollin, whose comments on The Cherokee Rose inspired this piece.


“Historians do not love their documents.” These words spoken by an esteemed historian hit me like a blow as I sat beside him at a posh, downtown restaurant. I was a graduate student on the first campus interview of my career, vying for a tenure-track position in a History department at a Big Ten university. The senior historian, a faculty member in the department assessing me, was leveling a criticism in response to the job talk I had delivered earlier that day. I’m sure that I stuttered a weak reply, feeling like an imposter who, after seven years of graduate school, had finally been found out. I worried for weeks after the visit, replaying the scene of that apparently fateful job talk in my head.

The centerpiece of my talk had been an analysis of a primary source uncovered during my dissertation research on slavery in the Cherokee Nation. The source was a petition dictated by a man named Shoe Boots, a famous Cherokee warrior who appealed to the Cherokee National Council in 1824 to secure the freedom of his two daughters and son. His children were categorized as slaves because they were the offspring of Shoe Boots and Doll, an African American woman whom he owned as property.

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