69 S. Alice Callahan (1868-1894)
Angela Weiler
Introduction
In the early 19th century, Native Americans began to author works in English. Although a number of Native men had works actually published (e.g., George Copway, Elias Boudinot), the works during that era authored by Native American women (e.g., Jane Johnston Schoolcraft) went unpublished. Often the genre of choice for Native authors was autobiography, in order to show the world what their lives had been like as they were forced to move back and forth between cultures.
While mentioning the injustices committed against tribal people, these early works usually promoted Christianity and assimilation as the route to survival for native people. Often Native American authors had been schooled in English and raised in white culture; they had survived at a time when many of their families and tribes had been killed or “removed” to distant lands. What they wrote reflected their opinions that the only way for their people to survive in an increasingly-white society was to adopt white culture and customs. However, their writings show that they did not abandon their culture; they assumed a dual identity in order to survive in both worlds.
As the 19th century moved forward, other Native American writers moved beyond autobiography and began to write about their culture and history, as well as producing works of fiction. Christianity and temperance were still strong themes in their work, as both had taken a heavy toll on the native people. Europeans had lived with alcohol and various diseases for thousands of years and built up tolerances and immunities against them. However, native tribes had no such physiological tolerances or immunities, and disease and addiction helped to decimate the tribes of the New World.
Wynema, A Child of the Forest by S. Alice Callahan is the first published American novel written by a Native American woman (1891). She wrote it when she was 23 years old, one year after hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children had been killed in the Wounded Knee massacre at the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Callahan was only twenty-six years old when she died, and in her short life, she was known as an exceptionally intelligent young women who was consumed by literature and writing.
Born in Texas, Callahan lived most of her life in Oklahoma. Her father, Samuel Callahan, was of Creek descent in addition to Scotch and Irish; her mother, Sarah Elizabeth Thornberg Callahan, was the daughter of a Methodist minister. Samuel had a large cattle ranch and was very active in Creek politics, serving at one point as the Creek delegate to Washington.
Due to the Indian Removal Act signed into law by President Andrew Jackson in 1930, Samuel’s parents, along with other members of the Creek, Cherokee, Seminole, and other tribes, were forced to relocate. They walked from their ancestral lands in Alabama to unsettled lands in Oklahoma, a distance of almost 1,000 miles, in an event now