Woman of Many Names, with Debra Yates
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Thank you. Let's talk legacy.
Welcome to Let's Talk Legacy. I'm your host, Gary Michaels. And today we have a wonderful guest, Debra Yates. She's an official member of the Cherokee Nation, has written a book, Woman of Many Names, about an important woman in Native American history, Nancy Ward. So let's dig in here. And the story behind how this book came about is very interesting. You weren't really even intending to write a book at all. Can you tell us what you were doing before and how this whole thing came together?
Well, the stories I'd heard as a young child always infatuated me when I found out we were Native American. It was, you know, hidden from us for a really long time because of, you know, the prejudice that was around in the early 1900s and stuff. So When my grandfather left the reservation, the nation, and Everybody knew he was Native American and, you know, the prejudice continued and so on and so forth. And then in the 30s, I want to say it was like 39 or 40, they decided to move to Ohio. You know, it was a concerted effort at that point. It was decided that they were not going to tell anybody that they were American Indian because times were different. So, you know, I thought, you know, I'm getting old and... You know, my grandparents are dead. All his brothers and sisters were gone but one. And I thought, you know, I need to write these things down because, you know, the kids are so young and, you know, the grandkids didn't seem interested.
But I hope that maybe the great grandkids would be in the legacy and the blood that runs within them because everything had to happen just the way it did in order for there to be an us.
So tell us a little bit about Nancy Ward, when she lived, what the state of the Cherokee Nation was doing during that time and how she was seen amongst her contemporaries.
Well, when she was born, it was, you know, the 1740s. You know, every move you made, every breath you took, there was danger all around. And her birth had been foretold. There was a prophecy that there would be a girl child born to the wolf clan that would rise to lead her people to greatness. You know, they were kind of waiting on that prophecy to be fulfilled, I would say. And at a very young age, things started happening around Nanyahi that signaled that she might very well be that child. So as she was being brought up in the Cherokee culture, of course, you know, it's oral tradition. It's a lot of talk and it's a lot of telling the stories and between each other, not writing them down. When
you know, she became of age, you know, they knew that she was the fulfilling of that legend, that it was her. And so she was taught from a very young age, you know, things that maybe most girls wouldn't be in on being taught, you know, different languages. She had an aunt, her name was Lucy Ward, that was a lady-in-waiting to King George II's wife, who fell in love with Alcannistow when he went to visit England on a ship called the Fox with his brother at Akulagula. And she came home with him, became his wife. But she looked at Nancy kind of like she was her own, you know, prodigy to help, you know, teach things to. And, you know, the smarter that she was, the better the chance that, number one, that she would survive. And, you know, the country was being invaded from basically everywhere. The English, the Spanish, you know, everybody wanted a piece of America. They wanted the wood. They wanted the minerals. They wanted everything that they could glean from from these lands.
And they didn't care who they had to take it from in order to do such. She was just born at the right time and in the right place. And, you know, she knew, you know, the likes of Daniel Boone and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, you know, chased her around a desk or two and George Washington as well.
So she had ties with Daniel Boone? Oh, yes.
Nancy sold Kentucky to the Transylvania Company, who Daniel Boone was a representative for. They had, I think, a really good relationship, and they were able to hammer out the sale of literally the state. That was our hunting grounds. We kind of traversed up into Ohio, which means beautiful river and Kentucky. And we were from Tenassi, but Daniel Byrne, they gave him a choice.
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