Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891) is a novel by Muscogee American writer Sophia Alice Callahan. Published when the author was only 23 years old, Wynema: A Child of the Forest is the first novel written by an American Indian woman. Although it gained little, if any, attention upon publication, the novel was rediscovered and reprinted in 1997. Wynema: A Child of the Forest is an essential record of the Massacre at Wounded Knee and the subsequent Lakota Ghost Dance movement, a work of fiction which looks at the suffering of American Indians through the eyes of an assimilated Muscogee woman, a character not unlike Callahan herself.
Wynema is a young Muscogee girl. Raised in Indian Territory, she is educated in English and becomes a teacher at a local mission school. There, she befriends a white coworker, whose brother she eventually marries. In time, the couple gives birth to a child and begins to raise their family. However, following the Massacre at Wounded Knee, and horrified by stories of orphaned Lakota children left to fend for themselves, Wynema and her husband decide to expand their family by adopting a young Lakota girl. Through this family narrative, Callahan examines the assimilation of American Indians into Western culture while providing a critical comparison of Christianity and the Ghost Dance religion. In its description of the events at Wounded Knee, the novel portrays heroic Lakota women risking their lives to save children from the onslaught of American soldiers, a circumstance unreported in the press’s presentation of the Massacre. Wynema: A Child of the Forest is an important and vastly unknown novel from the first woman novelist of American Indian heritage.
This edition of Sophia Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest is a classic of American Indian literature reimagined for modern readers.
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Sophia Alice Callahan (1868-1894) was an American novelist of Muscogee descent. Born in Sulphur Springs, Texas, Callahan was raised by a mixed-race father and a white mother. Samuel Benton Callahan, her father, was a member of the Muscogee-Creek tribe who served in the Confederate States Army as an officer after fleeing from Indian Territory during the outbreak of the American Civil War. When the war ended, the family returned home to Okmulgee, where Callahan’s father established a farm and cattle ranch. Raised in Indian Territory, Callahan moved east to study at the Wesleyan Female Institute in Virginia before returning to teach at several schools in the Creek Nation. Over the next few years, she worked as a teacher, wrote articles in the school journal of the Harrell International Institute, and joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Muskogee. In 1891, Callahan published Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891), a novel that fictionalized the recent Massacre at Wounded Knee and the Lakota Ghost Dance movement. At the age of 26, Callahan succumbed to a bout of pleurisy, cutting short the promising life of the first American Indian woman to write a novel.
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