Tiya Miles - MacArthur Foundation

Tiya Miles - MacArthur Foundation: "Tiya Miles is a public historian who explores the complex interrelationships between African and Cherokee people living and working in colonial America. Her studies tease evidence from census records, legal petitions, missionary reports, newsprint, and oral histories and span territories east and west in the South, before and after the Trail of Tears (1838-1839) and up to the Civil War. In her first book, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (2005), Miles details the life of Cherokee farmer and celebrated warrior Shoe Boots, his marriage to and later abandonment by a white Southern girl he once held captive, and his subsequent union with their black servant, Doll."