"A collection of twenty-six essays about politics and Cherokee culture and history by Cherokee novelist and professor, Robert J. Conley."--

"Adopted into the Cherokee tribe as a teenager, William Holland Thomas (1805-93), known to the Cherokees as Wil Usdi (Little Will), went on to have a distinguished career as lawyer, politician, and soldier. He spent the last decades of his life in a mental hospital, where the pioneering ethnographer James Mooney interviewed him extensively about Cherokee lifeways. The true story of Wil Usdi's life forms the basis for this historical novella, the final...