About the Book
The Selected Works of Ora Eddleman Reed collects the writings of Ora Eddleman Reed with an introduction that contextualizes her as an author, a publishing pioneer, a New Woman, and a person with a complicated lineage. “Little Writer” Ora V. Eddleman (pseudonym Mignon Schreiber) was only eighteen when she published her first work in the Indian Territory newspaper Twin Territories, which she edited for much of its brief run. This publication promoted the literary works of Muskogee Creek poet Chinnubbie Harjo (Alexander Posey), Cherokee historian Joshua Ross, and Muskogee Creek chief Pleasant Porter. In the advice column “What the Curious Want to Know,” Eddleman Reed answered readers from around the country who had ignorant impressions of Indian Territory (and whose questions, notably, she did not include). Such columns were accompanied by pieces that amount to some of the earliest Native historiography by an American woman claiming Indigenous heritage. Twin Territories was directed at both Natives and non-Natives and had a national readership. The heterogeneous form of the newspaper gave room for healthy internal debate on controversial ideas like Indigenous sovereignty and assimilation, affirming Native Americans as a significant, diverse collective.
In this first book of Eddleman Reed’s work, Cari M. Carpenter and Karen L. Kilcup revive the writings of an important author, publisher, and activist for Cherokee rights.
Author Bio
Ora Eddleman Reed (1880–1968) was a prolific author, publishing pioneer, and a New Woman. Cari M. Carpenter is a professor of English at West Virginia University. She is the coeditor of The Newspaper Warrior: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Campaign for American Indian Rights, 1864–1891 (Nebraska, 2015). Karen L. Kilcup is the Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor of English, Environmental and Sustainability Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the editor of Native American Women’s Writing: An Anthology, c. 1800–1924.
Praise
“The Selected Works of Ora Eddleman Reed is a contribution to the field of Native American studies and a work of literary recovery, since the work of Ora Eddleman Reed was dispersed in several archives across the United States, impossible to access but by a few pugnacious scholars such as the editors of this volume.”—Lionel Larré, editor of John M. Oskison’s Unconquerable: The Story of John Ross, Chief of the Cherokees, 1828–1866
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface and Editorial Principles: The Ethics of Recovery
Acknowledgments
Introduction: What the Curious Want to Know about Ora Eddleman Reed
Activist Writing and Journalism
Short Fiction
Poetry
Drama
Children’s Literature and Novel
Afterword: Ora Eddleman Reed, Allotment Genealogies, and Cherokee Literary Transnationalism, by Kirby Brown
Appendix 1. Contemporary Reviews and Commentaries
Appendix 2. Conversation on Ora Eddleman Reed, by Betty Groth and Karen Kilcup
Appendix 3. Ora Eddleman Reed Timeline
Notes
Bibliography of Eddleman Reed Works
Bibliography of Works Consulted
Index
