A Newbery Honor book inspired by the true story of a girl captured by a Shawnee war party in Colonial America and traded to a Seneca tribe. When twelve-year-old Mary Jemison and her family are captured by Shawnee raiders, she’s sure they’ll all be killed. Instead, Mary is separated from her siblings and traded to two Seneca sisters, who adopt her and make her one of their own. Mary misses her home, but the tribe is kind to her. She learns to plant crops, make clay pots, and sew moccasins, just as the other members do. Slowly, Mary realizes that the Indians are not the monsters she believed them to be. When Mary is given the chance to return to her world, will she want to leave the tribe that has become her family? This Newbery Honor book is based on the true story of Mary Jemison, the pioneer known as the “White Woman of the Genesee.” This ebook features an illustrated biography of Lois Lenski including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

Even before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas, the practice of taking captives was widespread among Native Americans. Indians took captives for many reasons: to replace--by adoption--tribal members who had been lost in battle, to use as barter for needed material goods, to use as slaves, or to use for reproductive purposes. From the legendary story of John Smith's captivity in the Virginia Colony to the wildly successful narratives of New England colonists taken captive by local Indians, the genre of the captivity narrative is well known among historians and students of early American literature. Not so for Hispanic America. Fernando Opere redresses this oversight, offering the first comprehensive historical and literary account of Indian captivity in Spanish-controlled territory from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Originally published in Spanish in 2001 as Historias de la frontera: El cautiverio en la America hispanica, this newly translated work reveals key insights into Native American culture in the New World's most remote regions. From the "happy captivity" of the Spanish military captain Francisco Nunez de Pineda y Bascunan, who in 1628 spent six congenial months with the Araucanian Indians on the Chilean frontier, to the harrowing nineteenth-century adventures of foreigners taken captive in the Argentine Pampas and Patagonia; from the declaraciones of the many captives rescued in the Rio de la Plata region of Argentina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the riveting story of Helena Valero, who spent twenty-four years among the Yanomamo in Venezuela during the mid-twentieth century, Opere's vibrant history spans the entire gamut of Spain's far-flung frontiers. Eventually focusing on the role of captivity in Latin American literature, Opere convincingly shows how the captivity genre evolved over time, first to promote territorial expansion and deny intercultural connections during the colonial era, and later to romanticize the frontier in the service of nationalism after independence. This important book is thus multidisciplinary in its concept, providing ethnographic, historical, and literary insights into the lives and customs of Native Americans and their captives in the New World.

These eight reports by white settlers held captive by Indians gripped the imagination not only of early settlers but also of American writers through our history. Puritans among the Indians presents, in modern spelling, the best of the New England narratives. These both delineate the social and ideological struggle between the captors and the settlers, and constitute a dramatic rendition of the Puritans' spiritual struggle for redemption.

Slavery existed in North America long before the first Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619. For centuries, from the pre-Columbian era through the 1840s, Native Americans took prisoners of war and killed, adopted, or enslaved them. Christina Snyder's pathbreaking book takes a familiar setting for bondage, the American South, and places Native Americans at the center of her engrossing story. Indian warriors captured a wide range of enemies, including Africans, Europeans, and other Indians. Yet until the late eighteenth century, age and gender more than race affected the fate of captives. As economic and political crises mounted, however, Indians began to racialize slavery and target African Americans. Native people struggling to secure a separate space for themselves in America developed a shared language of race with white settlers. Although the Indians' captivity practices remained fluid long after their neighbors hardened racial lines, the Second Seminole War ultimately tore apart the inclusive communities that Native people had created through centuries of captivity. Snyder's rich and sweeping history of Indian slavery connects figures like Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe with little-known captives like Antonia Bonnelli, a white teenager from Spanish Florida, and David George, a black runaway from Virginia. Placing the experiences of these individuals within a complex system of captivity and Indians' relations with other peoples, Snyder demonstrates the profound role of Native American history in the American past.

Captivity narratives have been a standard genre of writings about Indians of the East for several centuries.a Until now, the West has been almost entirely neglected.a Now Gregory and Susan Michno have rectified that with this painstakenly researched collection of vivid and often brutal accounts of what happened to those men and women and children that were captured by marauding Indians during the settlement of the West."

On New Year's Day in 1870, ten-year-old Adolph Korn was kidnapped by an Apache raiding party. Traded to Comaches, he thrived in the rough, nomadic existence, quickly becoming one of the tribe's fiercest warriors. Forcibly returned to his parents after three years, Korn never adjusted to life in white society. He spent his last years in a cave, all but forgotten by his family. That is, until Scott Zesch stumbled over his own great-great-great uncle's grave. Determined to understand how such a "good boy" could have become Indianized so completely, Zesch travels across the west, digging through archives, speaking with Comanche elders, and tracking eight other child captives from the region with hauntingly similar experiences. With a historians rigor and a novelists eye, Zesch's The Captured paints a vivid portrait of life on the Texas frontier, offering a rare account of captivity. "A carefully written, well-researched contribution to Western history -- and to a promising new genre: the anthropology of the stolen." - Kirkus Reviews

This edition of A Thrilling Narrative of Indian Captivity rescues from obscurity a crucially important work about the bitterly contested U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. Written by Mary Butler Renville, an Anglo woman, with the assistance of her Dakota husband, John Baptiste Renville, A Thrilling Narrative was printed only once as a book in 1863 and has not been republished since. The work details the Renvilles’ experiences as “captives” among their Dakota kin in the Upper Camp and chronicles the story of the Dakota Peace Party. Their sympathetic portrayal of those who opposed the war in 1862 combats the stereotypical view that most Dakotas supported it and illumines the injustice of their exile from Dakota homelands. From the authors’ unique perspective as an interracial couple, they paint a complex picture of race, gender, and class relations on successive midwestern frontiers. As the state of Minnesota commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Dakota War, this narrative provides fresh insights into the most controversial event in the region’s history. This annotated edition includes groundbreaking historical and literary contexts for the text and a first-time collection of extant Dakota correspondence with authorities during the war.