Mary Ruth Barnes is the author of the new novel Where Birds Land. She also has written the novel Little Bird. She is also an artist and an educator, and is a member of the Chickasaw Hall of Fame. She lives in Oklahoma.
Q: How much was Where Birds Land based on your family history?
A: The book was entirely based on over 70 pages of Dawes Commission interviews with [my great-grandmother] Ella McSwain Adams and the documented court proceedings of her battle against receiving unusable allotment land, including the US Supreme Court.
By creating a timeline and confirming all events through these documents and newspaper articles, I was able to follow her life events accurately.
Q: What did you see as the right balance between history and fiction as you wrote the book?
A: Ella McSwain Adams’s journey from widowhood to the unrelenting fight for her rightful ownership of usable land is accurate history. However, I wanted her story to read like fiction, involving the reader in every emotion she felt, including her relentless struggle for her own identity in the ever-changing landscape of Indian Territory to Oklahoma statehood.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: My great-grandmother’s Indian name was Osi, which is Eagle. Ella (Osi) was wanting to find her own homeland and not be removed again, like her ancestors. Where Birds Land was a significant title, because it was the full direction and purpose of her heartfelt struggles.
Q: What do you see as the relationship between this book and your novel Little Bird?
A: Little Bird is a revival of identity for my great-great-grandmother Esther McLish. Her struggles became her daughter Ella’s struggles in Where Birds Land, but each had different goals.
I wanted every page of both books to carry a testimony of injustice, a strength of motherhood, the heartache of widowhood, and a historical backdrop of an everchanging landscape from Indian Territory to statehood.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am working on a third novel, even going back further in time to the 1830s when my ancestors first arrived in uninhabited Indian Territory. It will be a story of the men and women who came with superstitions and fear to a place of the unknown, a land of rocks and many waters. It will be an historical adventure.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I hope my works will pull my readers into the cloudy shadows of time past and honor the men and women who endured it. It is not just my ancestors’ story, but it is many First Americans’ life history, as they suffered the same aches of injustice.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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