In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 Tribal History When I think of my mother’s hands, brown and square, fingers slightly bent from years of work, I consider all the other hands of Concow folk, bound, prepared for the lynching at the crooked oak along the mountain road near the town of Cherokee. It stood not far from the meadows where our ancestral people made their home. This was in the time when white men scoured those hills, breaking them down into rubble in their crazy search for gold. The treaty with the Concow would not be ratified by Congress, for Indians were in the way of “progress,” and though a promise had been made to provide corn starch and other commodities to every man who made his X on that scrap of parchment, the only X the white men made was to cross the hands of Indians behind their backs before swinging them out over the lava walls of the canyon. ...

Share