Captives and Kin in the Ohio Country

"Captives and Kin in the Ohio Country" is a follow-up to the author’s previous historical work, "The White Indians," released in 2016. “The White Indians” brought to light the previously untold story of hundreds of White colonial settlers who were taken captive by the Native-American tribes during forty years of unrelenting warfare during the mid to late 1700’s in the Ohio River Valley and beyond, as Native peoples fought to preserve their land from invasion. “Captives and Kin in the Ohio Country” picks up the story of the captives once they were brought back to the Native villages deep in the Ohio Country. It explores what happened to captives psychologically from the Native side of the story. Where “The White Indians” dealt with the when, where, and why captives were taken alive rather than killed during wilderness warfare, “Captives and Kin” delves into the many shades of assimilation into Native culture and the changing identity of captives who developed kinship relationships with Native people during their lifetime. There exists no documentation in colonial American archives that tells the story of what happened to people taken captive by Natives and why they never came back. Consequently, “Captives and Kin in the Ohio Country” draws on extensive interviews with Native historians today who shed light on the phenomenon of captive assimilation drawn from authentic tribal oral history. Collectively, this history of what happened to captives has been told in a story form to give it both heart and faces. The voices are fictional; the narrative is true to life and tightly woven to the historical record. Alan Fitzpatrick