Books by James W. Parins

Takes a fascinating look at how literacy served to unite Cherokees during a critical moment in their national history, and advances our understanding of how literacy has functioned as a tool of sovereignty among Native peoples, both historically and today.

John Rollin Ridge was a controversial, celebrated, and self-cast exile. He was born to a prominent Cherokee Indian family in 1827. This biography places Ridge in the circle of his family and recreates the circumstances surrounding the assassination of his father and his grandfather and uncle by rival Cherokees, led by John Ross.

Born into the influential Ridge-Boudinot-Watie family, Elias Cornelius Boudinot was raised in the East after the assassination of his father, who helped found the first newspaper published by an Indian nation. This is a biography of Boudinot, a half-Cherokee, half-white man who lived on the cultural border of the two societies.