Chronicled through the diverse voices of the Cherokee, white soldiers, evangelists, leaders, and others, a lyrical historical novel captures the devastating uprooting of the Cherokee from their lands in 1838 and their forced march westward. A first novel. 15,000 first printing.

Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears

Literature & Fiction

Glancy, Diane

United States

Harcourt

In 1838, 13,000 Cherokee were forced from their land to walk 900 miles along the "Trail of Tears" to present-day Oklahoma. This "illuminating and challenging chronicle of loss, despair, and regeneration" ("Washington Post Book World") brings this ordeal to life via the haunting voices of a young Cherokee woman, her husband, and a host of others--Cherokee and white, soldier and missionary, parent and child, the living and the dead Author appearances.

Pushing The Bear (Harvest American Writing)

Harper Paperbacks

It is February 1839, and the survivors of the Cherokee Trail of Tears have just arrived in Fort Gibson, Indian Territory. A quarter of the removed Indian population have died along the way, victims of cold, disease, and despair. Now the Cherokee people confront an unknown future. How will they build anew from nothing? How will they plow fields of unbroken sod, full of rocks too heavy to lift? Can they put aside the pain and anger of Removal and find peace?"Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears" tells the story of the Cherokees' resettlement in the hard years following Removal, a story never before explored in fiction. In this sequel to her popular 1996 novel "Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears," author Diane Glancy continues the tale of Cherokee brothers O-ga-na-ya and Knobowtee and their families, as well the Reverend Jesse Bushyhead, a Cherokee Christian minister. The book follows their travails in Indian Territory as they attempt to build cabins, raise crops, and adjust to new realities.The novel begins with a nation defeated--displaced, starving, broken, still walking that hated Trail in their dreams. Debate rages between followers of the old ways and converts to Christianity, and conflict between those who opposed and those who authorized resettlement eventually erupts into violence. In the aftermath of confusion, despair, and turmoil, a new nation emerges.

Pushing The Bear

Genre Fiction

Harper

Like poets of legend, Diane Glancy has spent much of her life on the road. For years she supported her family by driving throughout Oklahoma and Arkansas teaching poetry in the schools. Claiming Breath is an account of one of those years, what Glancy calls “a winter count of sorts, a calendar, a diary of personal matters . . . and a final acceptance of the broken past. . . . It’s a year that covers more than a year.”

Claiming Breath (North American Indian Prose Award)

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

University Of Nebraska Press

The Cold-and-Hunger Dance is an imaginative and honest account of Diane Glancy's journeys to and from the margins of memory, everyday life, and different cultural worlds that combine her Cherokee heritage and her Christian faith. Along the way, familiar images and concepts are juxtaposed to create a literary terrain that is both engaging and unsettling: the Bible and Black Elk Speaks converse; Glancy's dispute with a local bakery is played out as if on a world stage of warring nations; eggs and cultural identity implicate each other; and lost Native languages speak powerfully through their silences to modern Native writers. The creative twists and darting metaphoric excursions engendered by this journey provide an intimate glimpse into the process and problematics of language for modern Native authors.

The Cold-And-Hunger Dance

Arts & Literature

In this innovative novel, a librarian of Cherokee ancestry rekindles and reinvents her Native identity by discovering the rhythm and spark of traditionally told stories in the most unusual places in the modern world. Ada Ronner, a librarian at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, hears books speak and senses their restless flow as they circulate. The same relentless energy and liberation of the story is also felt by Ada as she roller-skates at the Dust Bowl, a local skating rink, floating far ahead of her husband, Ether, a physics professor. 
Hearing "the old Cherokee voices" when she skates and works in the Manuscript and Rare Book room in the library, Ada grows increasingly aware of the continuing power of Cherokee tradition today. Coming from a culture based in oral tradition, Ada discovers the potentially liberating role of the written word, and she finds her own empowerment as its promulgator and reinventor in the twenty-first century.
Designs of the Night Sky moves between the turbulent history of a tribe and the experiences of the survivors of that history still caught in turmoil. Rolling from past to present and present to past, Diane Glancy's story provokes and illumines while it invites us to reconsider the form and effect of Native American stories in today's world.

Designs of the Night Sky (Native Storiers: A Series of American Narratives)

The dream of a broken field is to bear crops. The dream of a broken history is to create meaning, to find among the fragments a way to tell the story of a life. It is this dream that Diane Glancy pursues here, through essays on writing, faith, family, teaching, and retirement. Blending a poet’s vision and a storyteller’s voice, the result is at once a virtuoso work of creative nonfiction and an exploration of that genre’s outer limits by one of the foremost voices in Native American literature today. Uneasily and yet firmly balanced between European and Native cultures—English and German on her mother’s side, Cherokee on her father’s—Glancy continues to search for a language that articulates the Native experience with both the fullness of tradition and the lapses inherent in a broken heritage. Accordingly, The Dream of a Broken Field offers a narrative that pauses and circles, connects and changes direction and travels great distances with grace only to stop sharply for a startling insight. Writing of weekend trips and long journeys, of natural landscapes and burial mounds, of Native American cosmology and a Christian upbringing, of Native American boarding schools and indigenous writers in American universities, Glancy captures the opposing demands of a hurried life and the timeless reflections of a history forever unfolding.

The Dream of a Broken Field

Memoirs

In this innovative novel, a librarian of Cherokee ancestry rekindles and reinvents her Native identity by discovering the rhythm and spark of traditionally told stories in the most unusual places in the modern world. Ada Ronner, a librarian at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, hears books speak and senses their restless flow as they circulate. The same relentless energy and liberation of the story is also felt by Ada as she roller-skates at the Dust Bowl, a local skating rink, floating far ahead of her husband, Ether, a physics professor. Hearing "the old Cherokee voices" when she skates and works in the Manuscript and Rare Book room in the library, Ada grows increasingly aware of the continuing power of Cherokee tradition today. Coming from a culture based in oral tradition, Ada discovers the potentially liberating role of the written word, and she finds her own empowerment as its promulgator and reinventor in the twenty-first century.Designs of the Night Sky moves between the turbulent history of a tribe and the experiences of the survivors of that history still caught in turmoil. Rolling from past to present and present to past, Diane Glancy's story provokes and illumines while it invites us to reconsider the form and effect of Native American stories in today's world.

Contemporary

Bison Books

At the end of the Southern Plains Indian wars in 1875, the War Department shipped seventy-two Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo prisoners from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. These most resistant Native people, referred to as “trouble causers,” arrived to curious, boisterous crowds eager to see the Indian warriors they knew only from imagination. Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education is an evocative work of creative nonfiction, weaving together history, oral traditions, and personal experience to tell the story of these Indian prisoners. 
Resurrecting the voices and experiences of the prisoners who underwent a painful regimen of assimilation, Diane Glancy’s work is part history, part documentation of personal accounts, and a search for imaginative openings into the lives of the prisoners who left few of their own records other than carvings in their cellblocks and the famous ledger books. They learned English, mathematics, geography, civics, and penmanship with the knowledge that acquiring the same education as those in the U.S. government would be their best tool for petitioning for freedom. Glancy reveals stories of survival and an intimate understanding of the Fort Marion prisoners’ predicament.

Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education

Community & Culture

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Glancy, Diane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Glancy, Diane

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Glancy, Diane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears

Pushing The Bear (Harvest American Writing)

Pushing The Bear

Claiming Breath (North American Indian Prose Award)

The Cold-And-Hunger Dance

Designs of the Night Sky (Native Storiers: A Series of American Narratives)

The Dream of a Broken Field

Designs of the Night Sky (Native Storiers: A Series of American Narratives)

Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education

Claiming Breath (North American Indian Prose Award)