Books by "John Milton Oskison"
5 books found
Wild Harvest, one the most important debuts of modern Native American writers, may rightfully be called the first Native American novel of the modern era. The author, John Milton Oskison, 1874-1947, was born near Tahlequah, Indian Territory to a part-Cherokee mother and a white father. He was a member of the first graduating class from Willie Halsell College in 1894, and later editor and editorial writer for the New York Evening Post and associate editor and finance editor for Collier's Weekly. He was a World War I veteran.
Unconquerable is John Milton Oskison's biography of John Ross, written in the 1930s but unpublished until now. John Ross was principal chief of the Cherokees from 1828 to his death in 1866. Through the story of John Ross, Oskison also tells the story of the Cherokee Nation through some of its most dramatic events in the nineteenth century: the nation's difficult struggle against Georgia, its forced removal on the Trail of Tears, its internal factionalism, the Civil War, and the reconstruction of the nation in Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. Ross remains one of the most celebrated Cherokee heroes: his story is an integral part not only of Cherokee history but also of the history of Indian Territory and of the United States. With a critical introduction by noted Oskison scholar Lionel Larré, Unconquerable sheds light on the critical work of an author who deserves more attention from both the public and scholars of Native American studies.
One hundred and forty years before Gerda Lerner established women’s history as a specialized field in 1972, a small group of women began to claim American Indian history as their own domain. A Field of Their Own examines nine key figures in American Indian scholarship to reveal how women came to be identified with Indian history and why they eventually claimed it as their own field. From Helen Hunt Jackson to Angie Debo, the magnitude of their research, the reach of their scholarship, the popularity of their publications, and their close identification with Indian scholarship makes their invisibility as pioneering founders of this specialized field all the more intriguing. Reclaiming this lost history, John M. Rhea looks at the cultural processes through which women were connected to Indian history and traces the genesis of their interest to the nineteenth-century push for women’s rights. In the early 1830s evangelical preachers and women’s rights proponents linked American Indians to white women’s religious and social interests. Later, pre-professional women ethnologists would claim Indians as a special political cause. Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1881 publication, A Century of Dishonor, and Alice Fletcher’s 1887 report, Indian Education and Civilization, foreshadowed the emerging history profession’s objective methodology and established a document-driven standard for later Indian histories. By the twentieth century, historians Emma Helen Blair, Louise Phelps Kellogg, and Annie Heloise Abel, in a bid to boost their professional status, established Indian history as a formal specialized field. However, enduring barriers continued to discourage American Indians from pursuing their own document-driven histories. Cultural and academic walls crumbled in 1919 when Cherokee scholar Rachel Caroline Eaton earned a Ph.D. in American history. Eaton and later Indigenous historians Anna L. Lewis and Muriel H. Wright would each play a crucial role in shaping Angie Debo’s 1940 indictment of European American settler colonialism, And Still the Waters Run. Rhea’s wide-ranging approach goes beyond existing compensatory histories to illuminate the national consequences of women’s century-long predominance over American Indian scholarship. In the process, his thoughtful study also chronicles Indigenous women’s long and ultimately successful struggle to transform the way that historians portray American Indian peoples and their pasts.