The House of Opessa

The House of Opessa: A Shawnee Family’s Story of Survival and Betrayal
by Frances Tasker

This book is the true, untold story of a family who carried the Shawnee fire across centuries of betrayal, exile, and survival.

It begins in the late seventeenth century, when Sewatha Straight Tail, daughter of Chief Opessa of the Turtle Clan, bound her life to Martin Chartier, a French exile and fur trader. From their union sprang two children — Mary and Peter — whose lives would embody the two halves of survival: endurance and defiance.

Mary’s hearth, built with her German husband John Deibert in Lancaster County, became a fragile bridge between two worlds — until it was shattered in 1763, when white settlers, inflamed with rage and hatred, descended on her home and brutally murdered her and nearly all of her children. Their act remains one of the most savage examples of frontier violence in American history.

Peter, restless and unyielding, rose as chief of the Pekowi Shawnee. He denounced the poison of rum, defied Pennsylvania’s governors, and allied with the French when betrayal by the English grew too great. To colonists, he was an outlaw; to his people, he was a protector. His fire lit the path that would later blaze in his cousin Tecumseh, the “Shooting Star” whose dream of a united Native confederacy nearly changed the course of America itself.

From the Ohio Valley to Pennsylvania, from Starved Rock to the Trail of Tears, from whispered stories in exile lodges to recognition denied until the year 2000, this is a saga of survival. It is not only a history of a nation scattered and broken into Absentee, Eastern, and Loyal Shawnee, but also the intimate story of a family — their marriages, their children, their griefs, their resilience.

In these pages, history is not a list of treaties or wars. It is the sound of cedar smoke prayers, the echo of drums over rivers, the silence after slaughter. It is the fire carried in clay pots across migrations, across generations.

And it is the fire that still burns.