Tiya Miles Research Articles

Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles

Reviewed by: Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles Rebecca K. Shrum Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. By Tiya Miles. Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xx, 154. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2633-8.) It has been fifteen years since the publication of Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Small’s Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (Washington, D.C., 2002), which documented the absence and trivialization of African American lives and experiences at historic sites across the South. In the intervening years interpretative content about African Americans at southern sites has increased substantially through a relatively new type of tour: the ghost tour. In Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, Tiya Miles explores this phenomenon, focusing on the Sorrel-Weed house in Savannah, Georgia; the Madame Lalaurie house in New Orleans, Louisiana; and Myrtles plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana. Miles’s interest in this subject developed on a tour of the Sorrel-Weed house. There she heard a horrible yet beguiling story about a male enslaver and Molly, an enslaved woman, that ended with the suicide of the enslaver’s wife and Molly’s murder. The ghosts of these two women haunted the house, the guide claimed, and an evening tour told these ghost stories. As Miles recounts it, she “could not let the terrible story go,” and so she returned that night to hear the “supernatural story” (p. xvi). At each of these sites, visitors hear claims (often, Miles contends, unfounded) about enslaved African Americans whose ghosts haunt the premises. These stories, Miles argues, allow people to maintain a “safe distance” from history, which both gives listeners more room to imagine the horrors of slavery and enables them to avoid facing the consequences of such accounts by relegating the stories to the realm of “fancy” (p. 7). Although African Americans play significant roles in these tours, Miles concludes that “ghost tourism at historic sites of slavery appropriates African American history in a way that outweighs the value of inclusion” (p. 123). She observes, for example, a troubling pattern in the ghost tours’ reliance on African American religious expression—most often Voodoo but also the beliefs of Gullah and Geechee people—“to increase the level [End Page 240] of threat and titillation” (p. 119). These elements convey nothing about the complexity of the religious beliefs that have played a critical role in constructing black identity in America. Tales from the Haunted South is a page-turner, as Miles describes both the tours and her own apprehensive feelings as she ventured out to historic sites after dark to hear these scary stories. It is appropriate, then, that Miles considers why ghost stories are so beguiling. Her conclusion resonates far beyond sites associated with slavery, observing that “ghosts represent history in a way that feels like magic.... [T]he ghost story is an intensified version of the magic of historical interpretation writ large—the weaving of words, ideas, and events into a pseudo-spell that can spirit us back to days gone by” (p. 125). Finding ways to connect visitors with the past is a noble goal, but historic sites must be mindful of costs that can be associated with these methods. The tours that Miles experienced made clear the problems with how historic sites have incorporated African American history into ghost tourism. At the same time, African American experiences far too often continue to be excluded altogether from other kinds of tours offered at historic sites. In the tradition of Eichstedt and Small’s work, Tales from the Haunted South should serve as a call to historic sites to undertake the hard work of telling complex stories about the past that enable visitors to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of African American lives under slavery. I highly recommend the book to public historians, scholars of slavery and its current-day legacies, and anyone interested in the gothic...

Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery by Tiya Miles

Reviewed by: Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery by Tiya Miles Derek H. Alderman Tiya Miles. Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2015. 176 pp. $24.95. Over the past several years, cities and towns in the southeastern United States—and across the entire nation for that matter—have seen and contributed to the proliferation of ghost tourism. As a segment of an even larger dark tourism and dark heritage industry that indulges the public’s growing desire to hear of death, tragedy, and trauma, this “ghost fancy,” in the words of Miles, displays varying degrees of darkness, authenticity, and engagement with place and the supernatural. Ghost tourists can undertake these nighttime experiences by foot, van, or even hearse, and tours can occur at single homes, pubs, and cemeteries, or cover entire historic districts. Some members of the public take tours that equip them with ghost-detection technology and facilitate an actual hunt to prove the presence of spirits. Many other tourists simply accompany guides as they visit and narrate the alternative and sometimes unsettling social memories of locations and people long repressed or suppressed in traditional travel guides and published histories—all while entertaining and keeping tourists at a safe emotional distance. The rise of ghost tourism as a market niche within the heritage travel industry and as a sociocultural phenomenon has yet to be fully and adequately analyzed and critiqued. Tiya Miles’s Tales from the Haunted South takes us much closer to accomplishing this goal and does so from an African American studies perspective. I can envision her book being an important reference for not only tourism and race scholars, but also the increasing number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences interested in the politics of Southern public history and memory. It would be easy to dismiss ghost tourism as just another trite commercial tactic for drawing in travel revenue. For some unscrupulous entrepreneurs, this is certainly [End Page 87] the case. But such a perspective misses the larger social and political meanings and implications that run through ghost tourism as a method of “history-making.” Recognizing this fact, Miles offers one of the first critical examinations of ghost tourism in the context of the racialized history of the American South, providing a valuable glimpse into how the industry works, what it gets wrong, and to whom it primarily caters (namely white tourists). But more important, she provides a sobering commentary on the role of ghost tourism in appropriating, commodifying, and misrepresenting black heritage during the antebellum and Civil War eras. In exploring three of the South’s supposedly most haunted cities (Charleston, New Orleans, and Savannah), Miles concludes that Southern ghost tourism “reinforce[s] retrograde interpretations of power, race, gender, sexuality, and identity” and replays “antebellum plots that repopularize antiquated race and gender hierarchies” (124). These narrated hierarchies not only exploit black bodies and biographies and make them into spectacles but they also demonize foreigners and white women in positions of authority, “hence preserving the notions of southern paternalism and white patriarchal morality” (78). Important and troubling to Miles is the central place that the memory of slavery and slaves have in the Southern ghost-tour narratives she investigates using extensive primary and secondary sources. The historical inclusion of the enslaved would appear on the surface to be a victory for new social history and an opportunity to create public empathy for the historical contributions and struggles of African Americans—especially in places such as plantations, so widely known for being unwilling to even utter the word slavery to daytime visitors. However, Miles demonstrates quite convincingly that a dialectical tension between incorporation and marginalization shapes the content, tone, and affective power of ghost tours. According to her, ghost tours cloak and control black cultural history as much as they reveal and recover this history. Yes, ghost tours make the previously ignored lives of enslaved African Americans visible, but in the end their memory is exoticized, romanticized, and decontextualized. Within the Southern ghost tourism landscape, Miles exposes the real and imagined stories of slave ghosts and their masters...

Remembering and Forgetting: Slavery, Secession, and the Civil War

Remembering and Forgetting:Slavery, Secession, and the Civil War Anne Sarah Rubin (bio) Thomas J. Brown. Civil War Canon: Sites of Confederate Memory in South Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 362 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. M. Keith Harris. Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. xi + 220 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $42.50. Reiko Hillyer. Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. xi + 266 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. Tiya Miles. Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xvii + 154 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $24.95. Nowadays it’s not enough to study the Civil War years of 1861 to 1865 in a vacuum. Over the past twenty years, historians have become increasingly interested in the legacy of the war, often framed in the language of memory and commemoration. In many ways, the field was defined by David Blight’s masterly Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), which explored the first fifty years after the war. Blight argued that, as white Americans retreated from the promises of Reconstruction, they shaped a narrative of the Civil War that emphasized Union—and over time, reunification—at the expense of emancipation and racial equality. Blight reminded readers that the place of the Civil War in U.S. memory and culture was constructed and reconstructed: the work of veterans, white women, both Northern and Southern publishers and editors, and African Americans. Blight’s story was literary in nature and stressed broad, national trends. In contrast, Carol Reardon’s Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory (1997) took a familiar story (that of the third day at Gettysburg) and showed how that story was a distortion of what actually [End Page 73] happened.. Reardon’s emphasis on one incident and her close reading of the sources represent a parallel strand in Civil War memory studies. Books about Civil War memory fall into several categories. Some explore the shapers and transmitters, including Ladies Memorial Associations, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and various veterans’ organizations. Echoing Reardon, other authors have honed in on various battlefields and sites, including Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Shiloh, and Sherman’s March. The dead—or rather their resting places—have been closely read as sites of commemoration; African Americans, the Confederate flag, music, film, and literature have all been mined in the service of understanding memory. In general, the former Confederacy has been more fertile ground for these memory studies, but Northern veterans have not suffered from a lack of attention. Into this crowded, multifaceted field come four recent works. Read together, they provide a broad overview of the place of the Civil War and slavery in America. They engage with veterans’ lives and memories; tourism, both past and present; questions of commemoration; and memorialization. They ask readers to consider not just the creators and shapers of stories but also the consumers. M. Keith Harris’ Across the Bloody Chasm is the most traditional memory study of the four under review. He builds on the work of scholars such as Barbara Gannon and Caroline Janney, who have sought to challenge David Blight’s reunion narrative, emphasizing instead the degree to which Civil War veterans—both Union and Confederate—maintained anger and even resentment towards their erstwhile enemies.1 Harris draws a distinction between “reunion” and “reconciliation,” defining the former as “simply . . . the coming together of individual states,” while the latter was “an experiential action undertaken by the participants of that war” (p. 2). In essence, Harris seems to be saying that reunion was a political act, and a binary one at that, completed when Reconstruction ended. But reconciliation, in Harris’ formulation, was an emotional or sentimental decision made by each individual, separate from (although potentially influenced by) political reunion. Harris uses the lens of Civil War commemoration to explore veterans’ memories, and that proves to be both a strength and a weakness of his study. He casts...

Borderlands, Indigenous Homelands, and North American Settler Colonialism

Borderlands, Indigenous Homelands, and North American Settler Colonialism Elspeth Martini (bio) John P. Bowes. Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. xiv + 306 pp. Figures, maps, bibliography, notes, and index. $29.95. Michel Hogue. Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ix + 328 pp. Maps, illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. $32.95. Both of these books tell histories of peoples whose nineteenth-century homelands fell within the "northern borderlands" surrounding the U.S–Canadian border. And each, in different ways, evokes the struggles of indigenous peoples who attempted to retain their homelands, as settlers and government agents sought to dispossess and expel them. John Bowes' wonderful study of Northern Indian removal encompasses the borderlands of the Great Lakes, but it ultimately tells a (mostly) U.S.–focused history that challenges the customary narrative of Indian removal. Generally such narratives are dominated by the Indian Removal Act and the experiences of the Cherokees. Michel Hogue, in contrast, focuses more directly on the politics of the U.S.–Canadian border, masterfully recreating the world of the early nineteenth-century Northern Plains where the Plains Metis emerged and thrived, only to be excluded during the later nineteenth century by U.S. and Canadian settler regimes. As well as making substantive contributions to North American historiography, these works also contribute to the movement among North American scholars to incorporate theories of "settler colonialism." So while they tell the histories of different peoples, they both frame their narratives with an eye to the more widespread, longer-term dynamics through which North American indigenous homelands became the territories of the United States and Canada. Taking on the long-overdue task of exploring Northern Indian removal, Bowes' Land Too Good for Indians makes an extremely important contribution to American historiography. As in the better-known stories of their Southeastern contemporaries, Indian peoples north of the Ohio River also found themselves marked for "removal" west of the Mississippi. Yet, as Bowes [End Page 416] notes, it is the anti-removal struggles of the Southeastern peoples—and the Cherokees in particular—that feature in leading histories on removal, exemplified by the work of scholars such as Theda Perdue, Michael Green, and Tiya Miles.1 Whereas these narratives have made it into U.S. history textbooks, the experiences of peoples in the North generally receive only a brief cameo in the form of the 1832 Black Hawk War. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that Bowes' book is the first comprehensive removal-focused history of the Old Northwest since Grant Foreman's Last Trek of the Indians (1946). But Land Too Good for Indians does more than simply add a new regional geography to our current understandings of the removal era. Bowes argues that, in order to more fully understand the dynamics of Indian removal, we must go beyond portraying the Indian Removal Act "as a watershed historical event" (p. 7) and instead see it as just "one piece of a larger process" (p. 12). He attributes such conceptual insights to theories of settler colonialism that have become increasingly applied in the North American context by scholars such as Gary Anderson.2 Building on such work, Bowes frames the expropriation of Native homelands during the removal era as "a powerful illustration" (p. 12) of the much-longer history of dispossession that has structured relations between American Indians and the United States. Bowes employs these theoretical insights with a deft hand, exploring how colonialist power structures manifested in specific contexts. This attention to context is reflected in the book's structure. Instead of presenting an all-encompassing "single narrative arc" (p. 6), Bowes introduces the work as a series of case studies that "illustrate the specific facets of a diverse and complex history" (p. 17). In seven succinct and lucid chapters he manages to cover the interrelated histories of various Northern peoples, including groups of Miamis, Delawares (Lenapes), Wyandots, Senecas, Shawnees, Potawatomis, Ojibwes, and Odawas. The first chapter gives an excellent road map into the political culture of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Lakes region. Beginning with the years of the...

Review Essay: Where Is “Dark Public History”? A Scholarly Turn to the Dark Side, and What It Means for Public Historians

Book Review| August 01 2016 Review Essay: Where Is “Dark Public History”? A Scholarly Turn to the Dark Side, and What It Means for Public Historians Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture edited by Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. v + 308 pp.; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index; clothbound, $42.50.Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xi + 154 pp.; illustrations, notes, index; clothbound, $24.95; eBook, $13.99.Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places edited by Leanne White and Elspeth Frew. London: Routledge, 2013. ix + 296 pp.; figures, notes, bibliography, index; clothbound, $145.00; paperback, $52.00. Jessica Moody Jessica Moody Jessica Moody is a lecturer in modern history and heritage at the University of Portsmouth, UK. She has research interests in the memory of transatlantic slavery and the public representation of difficult histories. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2016) 38 (3): 109–114. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2016.38.3.109 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jessica Moody; Review Essay: Where Is “Dark Public History”? A Scholarly Turn to the Dark Side, and What It Means for Public Historians. The Public Historian 1 August 2016; 38 (3): 109–114. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2016.38.3.109 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Tiya Miles, Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom

Tiya Miles, Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom

Tales from the haunted South: dark tourism and memories of slavery from the Civil War era

In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of ghost frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. Dark tourism often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they continue to feed problematic Old South narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work, Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are still with us.

Review: The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts by Tiya Miles

Review: The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts by Tiya Miles

Tales From the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles

Reviewed by: Tales From the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles Leigh Fought TALES FROM THE HAUNTED SOUTH: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. By Tiya Miles. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2015. By its nature, dark tourism embraces the ugly parts of history and human relations shunned by tours that focus on elegant architecture and heroic city fathers. As such, haunted history tours have become one of the few venues through which public historians have engaged the history of slavery. In Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, the product of Pennsylvania State University’s Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era, Tiya Miles questions the use of such methods as didactic tools. With a good eye for poetic detail and a thoughtful, charming voice situated somewhere near Fox Mulder on the spectrum between believer and skeptic, Miles acts as her reader’s tour guide through her own inquiries and observations. She begins by sketching out an overview of the popularity of haunted history shows and tourism, and briefly takes her readers on forays into the business of ghost hunting, ghost stories, and of dark tourism as an industry and field of study. The bulk of her analysis focuses on the Sorrel-Weed House in Savannah, Madame LaLaurie’s house in New Orleans, and the Myrtles Plantation near St. Francisville, Louisiana. Naturally, all three insisted upon the title of most haunted in America and appear regularly on ghost-hunter television programs. Miles notes several troubling features of the stories told at these sites. First, each story absolves white, American, male slaveholders from blame for historical wrongdoings, casting the villains as outsiders or the victim as deserving of her fate. They also gloss over the exploitation of black women by describing serial rape as “an affair,” “concubinage,” “infidelity,” and an assortment of other euphemisms that fail to engage the limited choices and realities faced by enslaved women. In each, too, African American spiritual practices are represented differently than evangelical Christianity, Catholicism, or other serious, syncretic belief system holding great power for believers, but as mysterious drums, disturbing rituals, and gris-gris tchotckes. Furthermore, the black communities surrounding these sites do not control the story. As Miles observes of the storytellers and their audiences, these are largely stories told by white people for white people, allowing tourists to brush up against a disturbing past without becoming honestly disturbed. Then, of course, there is [End Page 170] the problem of evidence for the historical events behind these stories and the coincidence of the ghost stories appearing on record just as dark tourism became a market. Miles is less concerned with the lack of evidence behind the stories and more worried about the ways that the owners of these sites squander opportunities to use the “holistic experience” of visiting a house and the frisson of a ghost story to understand a life lived under slavery. Just as southern heritage tours do little to teach about the history of enslaved people, so do these ghost tours flatten their lives into a grand guignol. The possibility of seeing a ghost overshadows sympathy for the pain of a life and death so tragic that, according to lore, would cause a spirit to haunt a site. More upsetting, as Miles points out, the commercial success of tours that trade in stories about violence inflicted upon slaves parallels the business that traded in slaves. Still, she sees potential for these types of tours to engage not only the history but also questions about truth and fact. The engaging and subversive tour given by “Tommy,” the popular, openly gay, African American descendant of the Myrtles’ slaves, Miles believes, suggests that “tourists were apparently willing, even eager, to hear a spirited perspective from an unlikely source even though it challenged conventional expectations” (114). At 132 pages of text, Tales of the Haunted South is a short but deep and complicated volume, combining the history of slavery, the antebellum south, and tourism, as well as public history, folklore, sociology, and the dubious...

Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles

Reviewed by: Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles Wallace Hettle Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. Tiya Miles. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ISBN 9-781469-626338, 149 pp., paper, $24.95. The troubled history of the Civil War era has given rise to many books—perhaps too many—on the historical memory of the war and slavery. This one is different. This work was originally produced as a series of lectures for the Civil War Era Center at Penn State University. In it, Tiya Miles focuses on so-called ghost tours. Such excursions have long provided entertainment for a host of tourists traveling to the region. They wish to have an experience of the past that seems both frightening and familiar. In the course of her research, she traveled to plantations and cities, including Savannah, Charleston, and New Orleans, combining primary evidence such as guidebooks and secondary sources on slavery. The heart of the book is a first-person narrative based on traveling the South, which includes discussions with tour guides and tourists. Before reading this book, I thought of such tours, if I thought about them at all, as kitsch easily dismissed by professional historians. Miles takes these ghost stories, and the small industry around them, seriously, using an imaginative approach to an imaginary world constructed by tourism. It is hard to classify this book, except to say that it is not a standard historical monograph. While traveling to Savannah, Miles evokes the best-selling crime story Midnight in the Garden of Good in Evil, which sparked a tourism boom in coastal Georgia as visitors sought to experience the past by seeking out architectural splendor. While looking at that distinctive town, tourists encounter both literal and figurative ghosts of slavery. The author is clearly grounded in the secondary literature on slavery and the South, but she has produced a work based on oral history, some archival research, and travel. In some ways this book resembles creative nonfiction: it made me think of Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, the funniest and in some respects best work on Civil War memory. Miles also discusses Delphine LaLaurie, a Louisiana slave mistress famous for cruelty to her slaves. Her home is still standing and has become the basis for a season of the television program American Horror Story. This chapter includes a discussion of the dynamics of race and gender that shaped the problematic relationship between women and slavery. Louisiana, especially New Orleans, [End Page 450] which has a French Catholic heritage atypical of the South as a whole, remains a key tourist destination for contemporary Americans. These visitors come seeking authentic experiences of the slave South, and what they find is distinctive and horrifying. I have always thought of voodoo, a practice and cultural artifact that Miles examines in detail as a kind of “invented tradition” used by the travel industry to attract tourists, but Miles takes such cultural artifacts seriously to untangle the relationship between past and present. The book raises some questions. How did the Ku Klux Klan, with its members’ self-presentation as Ghosts of the Confederacy fit into this story? The Klan comes after the institution of slavery, which is central to the book. While that organization has faded since its massive resistance to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, it so evokes the subject matter of this book that it deserves an extended treatment. While the historian Gaines Foster explored the Klan and memory, his book on the subject is now a bit long in the tooth; perhaps this is a topic for another historian. I enjoyed reading this book, and it makes me want to revisit Savannah and New Orleans. I recommend it to historians and general readers alike. Wallace Hettle University of Northern Iowa Copyright © 2016 The Kent State University Press

Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles

Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles

The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis: A Troubling Case of Gender and Race in Creek Country

Tiya Miles NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 88 Notes from the Field TIYA MILES The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis A Troubling Case of Gender and Race in Creek Country IN THE LATE 1990s, I was casting about for a dissertation topic in the subject area of nineteenth-century African American and Native American women’s history when I noticed a pattern of black women’s assertive activities in Muskogee Creek communities of present-day Georgia, Alabama, and Oklahoma. A few of the women who caught my eye moved out of slavery by marrying into Creek families. A couple of the women became hoteliers in Indian Territory at a time when neither Native nor white women were doing the same. And one of these women of African descent, a young adolescent, was distinguished as an extraordinary pupil at the first mission school in the Creek nation. I considered writing a dissertation about the composite experience of these African American women in the context of Creek society. However, upon realizing that the source material was extremely sparse, I set aside this topic and instead located my work within Cherokee society, where I concentrated on the experiences of enslaved blacks and Afro-Cherokee tribal members. Nevertheless, there was one person I had uncovered among the population of black women living in Creek communities who never left my imagination. This was Mary Ann Battis, a teenaged girl of Creek, black, and white ancestry, whose residency at the Alabama-based Asbury Mission School in the 1820s became a point of controversy for Battis, her family members, Protestant missionaries, and a U.S. Indian Agent. According to the Methodist administrators and teachers at the school, Battis chose to remain in the Southeast with them while her own mother, uncle, and siblings emigrated west with other Creeks during the Indian removal period. It took the intervention of Thomas McKenney, head of Indian affairs in the War Department, to settle the conflict. When I first encountered this story as a graduate student, it struck me as unusual that an Indigenous young woman would refuse the requests of her mother and uncle (who in Creek matrilineal kinship terms would have been like a father) to relocate with them in favor of staying behind with white mis- NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis 89 sionaries. I pursued the matter and found that two historians had offered varying interpretations of Battis’s choice. Adele Logan Alexander, author of Ambiguous Lives, a lyrical history on free women of color in Georgia, had concluded that “Battis was raised a Christian and apparently felt a strong kinship with the settlers’ community because she remained at the Moravian [sic] mission near Milledgeville and chose not to go West when others in her tribe were forced out of Georgia.” In Alexander’s interpretation, Battis’s was an act of loyalty to “the missionaries who had raised her” and to “her own religious devotion.”1 Daniel F. Littlefield, a prolific chronicler of African American and Five Tribe Indian relations, argued in his book Africans and Creeks that Battis was a pawn in the political maneuverings between Indian Agent David Brearley, who was charged with overseeing Creek removal, and the missionary couple who had already lost students to this policy.2 While I admired the work of ­ Alexander and Littlefield, I was not fully satisfied with the explanations about Battis’s life that they had teased from the (admittedly) stingy historical record. Alexander had assumed an acculturative identity as the main push factor for Battis, while Littlefield had attributed the conflict to the white actors and allowed Battis’s own viewpoint to drop out of his analysis. I wondered at the time what might be uncovered about the intersectional dynamics of race, gender, and religion in Creek communities if Battis’s motivation were examined more closely. It would take more than a decade, though, for me to attempt such an examination. I have found through a renewal of my research on Mary Ann Battis that her story was even more unusual than I had perceived all those years ago—unusual enough for a key document in the case, Battis’s...

The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story by Tiya Miles (review)

The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story by Tiya Miles (review)

The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story by Tiya Miles (review)

Reviewed by: The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story by Tiya Miles Kimberly Welch The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story. By Tiya Miles. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. xi, 315.) Every year thousands of tourists travel to the mountains of North Georgia to visit the Chief Vann House and walk the expansive grounds of the Diamond Hill plantation. The grand homes of the pre-Civil War South have long held the collective American imagination captive and evoke a mythic southern past of garden parties, mint juleps, and an easy life of leisure. But, as Tiya Miles reminds us in The House on Diamond Hill, "these scenes of nostalgia" obscure more than they reveal (11). After touring the historic site and attending a 2002 dedication ceremony, Miles felt compelled to ask the question, "what does this house stand for?" (xv). Indeed, Cherokee women and African-descended slaves were conspicuously absent from the Chief Vann House narratives. In The House on Diamond Hill, Tiya Miles reconstructs the history of the plantation and the multiple worlds that intersected on its grounds—African, Cherokee, and European-American. She then places Diamond Hill into the broader context of American colonization of the Cherokee (and their resistance to it) and the growth of racial slavery. At the center of the book sits James Vann, a Euro-Cherokee and the first patriarch of Diamond Hill. While most accounts of Vann—past and present—describe him as a vicious, churlish, and impulsive drunk, Miles's treatment of him is much more nuanced. Vann was a man of contradictions—shrewd, violent, and self-interested, but also principled and a fierce defender of his fellow Cherokee. Vann's demons, Miles argues, are best understood in the "context of colonialism" (38). He amassed his wealth just as the Cherokee faced increased pressure to accommodate to American encroachments. While Vann rejected some American ways, he adopted others. His inability to navigate to his satisfaction both of the worlds he simultaneously traversed likely contributed to his turbulent character. [End Page 87] Moreover, his accumulation of a vast and private fortune "set him apart" from his fellow Cherokee (60). Indeed, Vann resembled many elite white men of the slaveholding South—men who built their fortunes on the backs of black slaves and by marrying for profit. In large part, James Vann's success "depended on the subjugation" of African slaves, whose labor he exploited and Cherokee women, whose "wealth he pilfered" (55). While the complicated figure of James Vann has most captivated the imaginations Diamond Hill's visitors, his story is but one fragment of the plantation's history. One of Miles's most important contributions is her careful reconstruction of the histories of the slaves of Diamond Hill. She details the world of over one hundred enslaved men and women belonging to the Vann family. In particular, she describes the lives of four enslaved women—Caty, Grace, Pleasant, and Patience—in order to remind us that "every slave on Diamond Hill possessed a name, a life, a story" (86). Their stories represent a vital, if forgotten, part of the Diamond Hill history. The men and women owned by the Vann family were a diverse group, including American-born English speakers, recently arrived Africans, and Afro-Cherokees. The slaves of Diamond Hill created a vibrant black community and a rich "cultural identity rooted in the memory of African values and practices" (97). The indigenous Cherokee context, Miles suggests, allowed for the retention and adaptation of "African ways of life" (103). Indeed, the parallels between Cherokee culture and African cultures—such as the belief in the supernatural and the acceptance of polygamy—provided a "supportive environment" for an African-influenced slave community (103). Miles also reconstructs the histories of the Cherokee women of Diamond Hill, most notably Peggy Scott Vann, James Vann's wife. Miles uses the life of Peggy Vann to trace the ways in which American conquest displaced Cherokee gender practices and subjugated Cherokee women to Cherokee men. In the wake of the Revolutionary War, the United States made attempts to "civilize" the Cherokee by encouraging them to adopt American gender ideals. While James...

The house on Diamond Hill: a Cherokee plantation story

At the turn of the nineteenth century, James Vann, a Cherokee chief and entrepreneur, established Diamond Hill in Georgia, the most famous plantation in the southeastern Cherokee Nation. In this first full-length study to reconstruct the history of the plantation, Tiya Miles tells the story of Diamond Hill's founding, its flourishing, its takeover by white land-lottery winners on the eve of the Cherokee Removal, its decay, and ultimately its renovation in the 1950s. This moving multiracial history sheds light on the various cultural communities that interacted within the plantation boundaries--from elite Cherokee slaveholders to Cherokee subsistence farmers, from black slaves of various ethnic backgrounds to free blacks from the North and South, from German-speaking Moravian missionaries to white southern skilled laborers. Moreover, the book includes rich portraits of the women of these various communities. Vividly written and extensively researched, this history illuminates gender, class, and cross-racial relationships on the southern frontier.

On the Politics of Indigeneity: North American and Pacific Histories

The field of comparative indigenous studies has grown tremendously in recent years. Tiya Miles, Paige Raibmon, and J. Kehaulani Kauanui offer some of the most thought-provoking reflections on the politics of indigeneity. Highlighting debates over indigenous identity in the United States and Canada during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, these authors uncover how Native peoples in modern industrial nation-states have reshaped their identities while resisting colonialism and maintaining degrees of their autonomy. Miles, Raibmon, and Kauanui provide glimpses into the dynamics of social change within indigenous communities. Miles explores how Cherokees incorporated slavery into their economic life, and how interrelationships between African Americans and Cherokees changed notions of race within the Cherokee Nation. Raibmon narrates three episodes of cultural encounter in which Indians on the Northwest Coast engaged in wage labor and the tourist economy, as well as grappled with non-Indian notions of authenticity and civilization. Kauanui's work assesses the enduring cultural and political divide that the blood quantum system created within the Native Hawaiian community. Taken together, these stories provide a sense of indigenous struggles to ensure the survival of their families and communities, and how Native peoples have made the best of unfavorable situations in rather unexpected ways.

Death and Dying in New Mexico (review)

?o6Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly for its southern and southeastern Indian neighbors. Toleration may have existed among the Creeks, but this was not the case elsewhere. During Reconstruction, for example, U.S. senators were repeatedly frustrated by the actions of Creek Indians and African Creeks when they tried to treat African Creeks as freed people . At about the same time, violent confrontations repeatedly took place between African Creeks and Cherokee Indians, neighbors who "during the postwar period did not exhibit the fluidity and flexibility found in die Creek county" (P- 124). Zellar's study focuses primarily on the political and the public, as it follows the history of race and citizenship through the maze of late-nineteenth- and early -twentieth-century Indian history. Only through federal interference through the Dawes Act and die allotment of lands did this era of tolerance end. At the turn of the twentieth century African Creeks had "full political, legal, and economic rights as citizens of the Creek Nation." Yet, within a decade, "the foundation of those rights—Creek citizenship and the right to hold and improve any part of the Creek domain—was kicked out from underneath them in the guise of reform and progress" (p. 257). Jim Crow would thereafter structure Creek society . African Creeks emphasizes the formalist interpretations ofsources and largely determines issues of identity through the legal issue of citizenship. Personal relationships and attitudes are largely overshadowed by political discussions, voting records, U.S. commission hearings, and public controversies. These discussions overwhelm the all-too-brief discussions of how African Creeks embraced or contributed elements of Creek culture or how they were actually integrated into the community. In this regard, Zellar's work differs from the studies by Claudio Saunt, Tiya Miles, Circe Sturm, and others who explore the intricacies of southeastern families with ethnohistorical evidence. Rather than attribute the CreekAfrican relationship to the widespread ethnic diversity within Creek society or to familial or clan ties, Zellar perhaps simplistically attributes it to Creek tolerance. Despite its shortcomings, African Creeks is a remarkably lucid, well-researched , and documented study that deserves the attention of southeastern Indian historians, as well as scholars of race, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Although it is certainly not the last word on the topic of Indians, race, and identity , it should help shape the future conversation. Florida Slate UniversityAndrew K. Frank Death and Dying in New Mexico. By Martina Will de Chaparro. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Pp. 286. Illustrations, figures, notes, bibliography , index. ISBN 9780826341631. $29.95, cloth.) Having suffered the untimely death of a loved one in early adulthood, Martina Will approaches her topic with a respectfulness that transcends this careful, lucidly presented academic study, the first to probe the subject in New Mexico. Her eye is on human beings as she relates telling anecdotes that put flesh (at 2??8Book Reviews107 least temporarily) on the numbers. Probing their emotions and practices surrounding deatfi, she illuminates people's lives, demonstrating time and again how in colonial New Mexico death possessed a meaning beyond the immediate loss it represented. On occasion, for example, dying New Mexicans reached out in their wills to free or bind the living, listing as property captive Indians (and their children) who had grown up serving their families, preferring because of antislavery legislation the more benign term criado (one who has been raised) to esclavo. At the heart of diis study are analyses based on the author's examination of 469 wills (overall, a very small percentage of Hispanic and Pueblo Indian New Mexicans made wills) and of thousands of burial entries in sacramental registers. These are informed by literature on death and dying from Spain, Mexico, and North America. Core chapters consider "The Good Death," "Releasing Worldly and Spiritual Concerns," "Rituals to Aid the Soul," "Treating the Physical Remains ," and "Exiling the Dead." Will writes with precision and wit as when referring to outsiders who imposed their alien funeral industry during the second half of the nineteenth century. Their names must have fallen clumsily off the tongues of Spanish speakers: Spiegelman, Deibyshire, Klattenhoff (p. 175). And, following David Weber, she provides in the notes Spanish transcriptions of every passage she has translated. Spanish...

<i>Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings Elizabeth Archuleta Angela L. Cotten and Christa Davis Acampora, eds. Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. 216 pp. Paper, $23.95. Although one does not usually find research on Phillis Wheatley and Paula Gunn Allen in the same book, the essays in Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings contribute to an emerging scholarship that is changing the ways in which we examine cross-cultural relationships between Native Americans and African Americans. Angela L. Cotten's and Christa Davis Acampora's edited collection adds to an already existing conversation by Daniel Littlefield, Tiya Miles, Claudio Saunt, James Brooks, Jonathan Brennan, and Matthew Restall, among others, on the historical and cultural exchanges between Native Americans and African Americans and works that signify on both traditions. Cotten and Acampora refer to a "crossblood literary aesthetics" that has grown out of these shared histories of and contact between African Americans and Native Americans, and they hope their collection encourages comparative approaches that examine overlapping traditions and cultures as well as aesthetic and philosophical innovations. Their collection challenges disciplinary boundaries that discourage comparative investigations of African American and Native American literatures. In addition to the editors' introduction, the volume includes three additional sections entitled "Transformative Aesthetics," "Critical Revisions," and "Re(in)fusing Feminism," suggesting methods for connecting the essays cross-culturally and comparatively. Part 2 uncovers the innovative structures created by Paula Gunn Allen, Phillis Wheatley, and Sherley Anne Williams to [End Page 161] express healing, celebration, and their unique visions and experiences. Part 3 explores how Linda Hogan and Alice Walker revise literary and critical traditions, inscribing themselves into and speaking back to psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist theories. Part 4 examines how the writing of Toni Morrison, Luci Tapahonso, and Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) questions feminism's narrow focus on gender and sexuality and how their early manifestations excluded race, colonialism, violence, and poverty. The editors note a dearth of scholarship on African American and Native American women's writing in the fields of aesthetics and philosophy, and their goal is to fill this gap by creating models for future comparative analyses. AnaLouise Keating takes a second look at Allen's Grandmothers of the Light, defining it as a different kind of self-help book. To distinguish it from other self-help books, Keating refers to Allen's book as a "womanist self-recovery" book that contains stories of empowerment rather than approaching it as an American Indian text. Elizabeth J. West uncovers in Wheatley's poetry examples of traditional African cosmologies combined with colonial American religious views, which would become the narrative core of contemporary African American women writers. Michael A. Anttonucci finds a blues aesthetic expressed in Williams's poetry, claiming that the blues had more of an aesthetic and cultural impact on American culture than is currently recognized. The essays in part 3 reveal how distinct literary works signify on other texts. Ellen L. Arnold brings Linda Hogan's Solar Storms and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing into dialogue, demonstrating their common goal of cultural recovery and healing gained through ecofeminist insights that claim an alliance between women and nature. In separate essays both Barbara S. Tracy and Angela L. Cotten discuss the ways in which Alice Walker's Meridian signifies on or engages in an African American call-and-response ritual with John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks. By claiming that Walker's novel is a revision of Black Elk Speaks, Tracy points to Meridian as a multivoiced text that refuses to silence the complexities inherent in multiraced identities. Cotten analyzes Meridian through the lens of Karl Marx's historical materialism in order to see how Walker shares some of Marx's perspectives for social change. In comparing their views on social struggle Cotten demonstrates the value of comparative analysis for enriching Marxian and black radical traditions. Part 4's essays focus on women-centered themes and insights in Morrison's Paradise, Tapahonso's "Leda...

Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. By Tiya Miles (Berkeley: University of California Press and The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875. By Gary Clayton Anderson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press

Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. By Tiya Miles (Berkeley: University of California Press and The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875. By Gary Clayton Anderson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press

TIYA MILES and SHARON P. HOLLAND, editors. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2006. Pp. xx, 364. Cloth $84.95, paper $23.95

Journal Article Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland, editors. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2006. Pp. xx, 364. Cloth $84.95, paper $23.95 Get access Tiya Miles and Tiya Miles, editors. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2006. Pp. xx, 364. Cloth $84.95, paper $23.95. The American Historical Review, Volume 112, Issue 1, February 2007, Page 320, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.112.1.320 Published: 01 February 2007