WARRIOR WOMAN

Prequel to Sign-Talker (2000), introducing an 18th-century female Shawnee Indian chief whose pursuit of peace leads to endless conflict with lovers, friends, and foes.

We meet Nonhelema (“Not a Man”) in 1774, on the eve of a confrontation with British soldiers loosely allied to a division of colonial troops. Though nearly fifty, she has the lithe body of a woman half her age and fights alongside her fiercest male warriors. Her entourage includes an escaped African slave as well as a daughter from a previous liaison with a Caucasian. Nonhelema’s mother, now named Elizabeth, has converted to Christianity and lives full-time in a nearby Christian mission. The British are marching on Shawnee lands in what are now portions of western Pennsylvania and Ohio to claim, by force if necessary, the hunting grounds they say were sold to them by the Iroquois. The Shawnees say those grounds do not belong to anyone and cannot be sold. Nonhelem’s tribe wants war, and they fight so fiercely that the Colonial army asks for a parley. Things go from bad to worse as Nonhelema realizes that, despite the compassionate love of the Christian God whites claim to believe in, the intruders will eventually take everything the Shawnees hold dear. Never afraid to fight, she counsels peace because she has blood ties and religious loyalties on both sides. (Among the plot twists is her brief fling with a rough-and-ready frontiersman, Alexander McKee, which results in another offspring.) Conflicting relations with the British and the colonials during the Revolutionary War bring about the massacre of Nonhelema’s tribe, and she faces a future that, while uncertain, is no less noble. Collaborating for the first time on fiction with his Shawnee wife, Thom adds to his gallery of Native American heroes a woman whose character transcends her culture, but whose culture gives her incomparable skills, strengths, beauty and insights.

Stirring, often bitter, but ultimately uplifting.