ᏦᎢ ᏣᎳᎩ ᎡᏘ ᏂᏧᎵᏍᏔᏅᏍᏔᏅ ᏄᎵᏍᏔᏂᏙᎸᎢ
CHEROKEE TRILOGY
Three historical novels explore an extended, mixed-race family’s saga, led by a mystic teacher, that begins as exploitation overwhelms the Cherokee with disease, hatred, and bigotry.
Symbolized by the Waters sisters’ struggles for identity and survival, their once proud lineage questions its heritage. The Tsalagi battle each other, and the invaders, but forced relocation and Civil War injustice decimate their population.
The younger sister’s acceptance of her dual culture guides scarred survivors into a determined march forward as the sun rises in the twentieth century.
"Cherokee Rock," - “A studied look at the deadly challenges facing Indigenous people in 18th-century America.” –
Kirkus Reviews "Get It" rating
Exploitation sweeps westward over the Appalachians in 1779 and engulfs a boy who loses his mother to smallpox, allies with a mentor squirrel, trains as a shaman and blood-brothers with a freedman during decades of pestilence and war, only to lose his people’s trust to a malignant medicine man before these old enemies collide in an epic good-versus-bad wolf revelation.
A Georgia Freedman’s half Cherokee daughter battles pestilence, bigotry, alcoholism, starvation and a record cold 1838 winter during a forced removal led by white profiteers and her father’s murderer that earns her people’s respect and adoration as the Cherokee Rose, then she illegally jumps her land allotment and faces a white jury in a trial that sets national precedents for the rights of Native Americans.
Torn from her past on the Trail of Tears, a half-Cherokee woman loses her sister to a political assassin, marries a freedman, organizes a freedom trail and founds a women’s rights organization during the turmoil leading to the civil war only to lose her husband and community in political strife that forces self-evaluation and confrontation with her sister’s murderer, a Confederate icon, to determine her life and future.
ᏣᎳᎩ ᏅᏯ
ᏣᎳᎩ ᎫᏣᏲᏍᏗ
ᏣᎳᎩ ᎧᏃᎩᏍᏗ
ABOUT the author
James A. Humphrey is retired with his wife of fifty years in Grapevine, Texas. By birthright, he is a certified citizen of the Cherokee Nation and takes online language classes from their language department. The author is an oil painter.
"Like painting, writing needs a stimulus. My paternal grandmother, Ella Waters, a Dawes’ Roll registrant, inspires my stories and I use her dialogue, history, culture, and language with focus and respect."
This trilogy, “Cherokee Rock,” "Cherokee Rose," and Cherokee Reel" tells the poignant story of a Cherokee families' and culture's disintegration."
Through colonial expansion, a forced removal, and pre- and post-Civil War crisis, this saga entertains the reader through Cherokee history as an extended family faces a tumultuous future.
The three novels follow different family members, two sisters and their father. Each story explores much different characters and epochs. In common, they stimulate your perceptions of justice and a self-analysis of your modern soul.
