TRAITOR

Absorbing life, set in the early republic, of a white man who sided with Native Americans—and lost.

In the early 19th century, a white boy was taken captive by Kickapoo Indians and traded among several local tribes until being adopted by an Osage family. Rather than turn against them, John Dunn Hunter became a strong advocate of Indigenous rights, writing books and articles, visiting Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, traveling to Britain and gaining the support of social reformers William Godwin and Robert Owen. He was nearly unique, historian Doolen writes, in being widely heralded rather than being met with “suspicion, fear, and loathing,” as white people who lived among Native Americans usually were. Yet his influence was limited: The uprooting of the Southeastern tribes was just one episode of the injustices done in his lifetime. It was among one of them, the Cherokees, that Hunter met with disaster; having moved southward from the Indian Territory into Texas, they sent Hunter to Mexico to appeal for a land grant, which never materialized, even though “the new republic of Mexico, badly needing loyalists on the frontier to deter the expansionist ambitions of their ­sister republic to the north, had made land available for settlement.” Hunter and a faction of Cherokees made common cause with white Americans who had also settled in Texas to rebel against Mexican rule, which led to betrayal and death. The author describes Hunter’s eventful life in a swiftly moving narrative that has modern implications. As he writes, those Native Americans were not extirpated, against the odds, and their descendants have been effective in legal challenges to redress wrongs done to them. Likening Hunter to the abolitionist John Brown, even though “Hunter could not easily be cast as part of Amer­i­ca’s redemption story,” Doolen foresees the possibility of the Cherokees’ being awarded financial reparations for the loss of their Texas holdings.

A skillfully spun tale of a man forgotten by history, whose story deserves to be known.