WHERE BIRDS LAND

In this stand-alone historical novel, intended as a companion to Little Bird (2021), Barnes tells the story of another generation of her family, based on actual accounts.

This novel tracks the life of the author’s great-grandmother, Ella Brown McSwain Adams, from her teenage years to when she’s a landowner with grandchildren, many years later. Ella, who is Chickasaw, struggles with the legal system over the years as she tries to claim land that’s rightfully hers through a U.S. government body called the Dawes Commission. Over the course of the story, Oklahoma becomes a state (in 1907), and Ella’s family faces many personal tragedies. The author tells the story of her great-grandmother and, by extension, her entire First American family, illustrating Ella’s grounded and nuanced thoughts in a clear, first-person voice as she reckons with her place in the expanding United States and the various messy relationships in a family that grapples with such issues as its matriarch marrying a local rancher. Barnes makes skillful use of a crow motif, which appears throughout the novel; Ella explains that the birds are “truth talkers” and “the spiritual heralds of every storm” to her family. Real-life quotes from various primary sources—such as the contemporary newspaper The Daily Ardmorette or a letter by President John Quincy Adams to the U.S. Supreme Court—appear at the beginning of each chapter to further anchor the narrative in lived experience. The novel, as often happens in real life, doesn’t have a climactic ending; instead, it observes Ella, simply enjoying a day in her life, as she witnesses a pair of eagles and declares, “It was a sign. A sign of renewed life and renewed spirit, in a land we could now call our own.”

A rich and intimate novel about one First American’s eventful life.