{"product_id":"black-white-and-indian-race-and-the-unmaking-of-an-american-family-9780195313109","title":"Black  White  and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family","description":"\u003cp\u003eDeceit  compromise  and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian  African  and European descent living in the newly formed United States  the most personal and emotional choices--to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship--were often necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the countrys racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons. Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South  where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma  Katy Grayson and her brother William--both Creek Indians--had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their native land soon after the birth of the American republic  however  Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder  embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in Americas racial hierarchy. William  by contrast  refused to leave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them. Traveling separate paths  the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears  only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards  they refused to recognize each others existence. In 1907  when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens  Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white  others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W. Grayson  the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation  Claudio Saunt tells not only of Americas past  but of its present  shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics  the role of \"blood\" in the construction of identity. Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them  the Graysons denied their kin  enslaved their relatives  married their masters  and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its own right but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45648062709813,"sku":"ByrdShop_0195313100","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780195313109.jpg?v=1781708492","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/black-white-and-indian-race-and-the-unmaking-of-an-american-family-9780195313109","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}