By AJ Eversole

Today we’re welcoming author Anne Broyles (Cherokee) to Cynsations to discuss her new young adult novel, Words Spoken True (Scholastic, Nov. 3, 2026). From the publishers’ website:

Award-winning author Anne Broyles weaves the lyrical story of fourteen-year-old Jane Bushyhead and her family’s forced removal, upon threat of death, from their home in the ancestral Cherokee Nation. Based on a true story, this evocative, compelling account of the pain and hardships endured, as well as the love and courage summoned by the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears, is equal measures heartbreaking and hopeful.

Jane Bushyhead dreams of one day becoming a teacher. But everything changes when she and her family are forced from their ancestral Cherokee homeland by US soldiers at gunpoint. After months of imprisonment and uncertainty, Jane and her people are then ordered to march eight hundred miles to “Indian Territory” (modern-day Oklahoma) during one of the worst winters of the 19th century.

It’s a grueling journey–many of the Cherokee people are barefoot and unprepared for the freezing weather–and all go hungry as supplies dwindle and sickness abounds. Yet, Jane finds romance with a young man who has been adopted by the Cherokees and comfort within the loving embrace of her family.

As the dangerous journey unfolds, and Jane finds purpose in teaching and recording the stories of her people, she will be forced to bear witness as they perish from starvation, disease, and deadly hazards of the Trail. Soon, Jane will have to face an impossible choice between love and her own family.

Award-winning author and enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, Anne Broyles brings the Trail of Tears to desperate, vivid life in this beautiful story about courage, community, memory, and love.

Jane Bushyhead shares a name with Jesse Bushyhead, the real minister who led one of the historical Trail of Tears detachments. How closely is Jane’s story tied to the documented Bushyhead detachment, and where did you take deliberate liberties?

Jane was the eldest daughter of Rev. Jesse Bushyhead, the first Cherokee Baptist minister and a tribal leader who often went to Washington to advocate for Cherokee Nation. There is a lot of information about Jesse—his work on behalf of the tribe in the 1830s, his ministry before and after the Trail, his life after the forced removal to present-day Oklahoma. Because he led a detachment of almost 1,000 people, I was able to track Jesse’s geographical and chronological Trail of Tears journey, which is well documented. I discovered many details of compelling events I would never have thought to make up.

Jesse Bushyhead was a much-admired tribal leader. He was also a slaveholder, something that even in that era was somewhat controversial. The Baptist Mission Board challenged Jesse and other church leaders to let them go, but nevertheless, several enslaved people were forced to walk the Trail with the Bushyheads, and even at the time of Jesse’s death six years after he arrived in Indian Territory, those enslaved persons had not been freed.

Which brings me to Jane. All that is documented of her are birth and death dates, the fact that she married and had a child, and the genealogy of her son and subsequent generations. Plus the wonderful letter she wrote to a white friend in March of 1838 that inspired my book. I use that letter in Words Spoken True, and it is in the back matter in her own handwriting.

Jane was only thirteen when she wrote the letter, but she obviously had a good grasp on the political realities for Cherokee Nation. She used phrases like,

“If we Cherokees are to be driven by the cruel hand of oppression to seek a home in the west….” and “It is thus our rights are invaded.”

I imagined the inner life of a young person in 1838. Given how Jane expressed herself in that one letter what might her dreams have been? I chose to give Jane the gift of storytelling and the dream of becoming a teacher. While imprisoned before the Trail, she creates a way to tell tribal stories and teach younger children tribal history.

I also had Jane meet Muskrat, a fiery white boy who had been adopted by Cherokees and chose to go west with his adopted family. Because he sees that the Bushyheads enslave people, Muskrat challenges Jane:

“If Negroes weren’t owned by Cherokees, they wouldn’t be prisoners here. If they were free, they wouldn’t have to walk to the Indian Territory. Dilsey is punished twice, first to be a slave, then to be an Indian landowner’s slave.”

Jane admires her father but tries to engage him in conversation about slavery. As with many teens, then or now, Jane vacillates between admiration for her father and frustration that he doesn’t listen to her ideas.

Jane died at the age of 20, but the rest of her siblings led long and fruitful lives in which they made great contributions to Cherokee Nation. Her brother Dennis Wolf Bushyhead even served as Principal Chief from 1879 to 1887. Given all that her siblings contributed, I felt sure that Jane as the oldest child would have also been a thoughtful, intelligent compassionate person.

I wrote Words Spoken True as historical fiction, sticking to the researched facts as much as possible but filtering everything through Jane’s perspective. The back matter includes complete details of what was true and what I imagined with source notes substantiating everything. The Cherokee Trail of Tears is the backdrop for a mostly imagined journey of a real-life girl who survived the forced walk from Tennessee to present-day Oklahoma.

You’ve written about the Trail of Tears before, in Priscilla and the Hollyhocks, but from the perspective of a girl enslaved by a Cherokee family. What made you want to return to this history now from inside a Cherokee family’s own experience?

I began research on Words Spoken True over 35 years ago. I worked on the manuscript off and on, at times discouraged by editors who said things like, “Nobody wants to read about Indians.”

In my early research, I found the story of Priscilla and the hollyhocks but thought it should be written by someone related to the story. No one else did tell Priscilla’s story. One morning fifteen years after I first read about Priscilla, I woke up with her words in my head and decided to write down what she dictated, which became the picture book, Priscilla and the Hollyhocks.

I had always wanted to tell the Trail of Tears story from the Cherokee experience. Even in writing the picture book, I tried to explain the Cherokees who enslaved people in a way that didn’t demonize our tribe but also told the truth.

In Words Spoken True, I found a different way to confront the fact that some Cherokees were slaveowners. I thought contemporary readers deserved to know that reality but would relate to how Jane might have come to believe slavery was wrong. We’ll never know whether Jane had feelings about slavery one way or the other, but as her life was turned upside down by unjust oppression, it felt right for her to consider her own family’s participation in oppressing others.

As an enrolled Cherokee Nation citizen writing this, how did your own family or tribal history shape which details made it onto the page versus what you found in the archival record?

Unfortunately, I don’t know my family’s exact history with the Trail of Tears. My great-great-grandmother was born in 1838, the year of our Trail of Tears and died in Oklahoma. Her address on her application to register herself and her seven children on the Dawes Roll states they were living in “Chelsea, Indian Territory.”

My grandfather died when I was two and all others of his or earlier generations died before I was old enough to know the right questions to ask to get a firm hold on family history. So I had to rely on tribal archives, records and books and articles published about the Trail of Tears for details of what that journey might have been like for Jane Bushyhead.

The book is aimed at a YA readership and doesn’t look away from starvation, disease, and death on the Trail. How did you think about pacing that reality against the joyful and family scenes so the book didn’t become unbearable, or conversely, too soft?

Many of the situations in which Jane finds herself in the book were dictated by chronology and geography: the day of her family’s arrest, their departure date to begin walking west, when they were served food by church folks in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, the month their detachment spent stuck on the shores of the Mississippi River. I also had a list of events that most people on the Trail encountered and spread those out across the book.

Jane’s relationship with her siblings sometimes provided humor, and her developing relationship with Muskrat Adair added lightness for much of the book. There was never a conscious “It’s time for something less painful,” just a pacing that came naturally as I told the story. Hopefully, I found a balance between the joy Jane found with her family and Muskrat and the realities of absolutely unbearable sorrow.

What sources anchored your research, and how did you go about finding them?

When I began my research around 1990, I visited our national archives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma; and a wonderful librarian piled books and articles on a table for me to sort through. This was before cell phones, and since there wasn’t a photocopier, I typed out entire articles on my laptop to print out at home. Most of these resources are now online, so I was able to double-check all my original notes for accuracy.

In 1990, I also wrote a letter to our tribal newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix, asking for family stories or any information about other people’s family’s Trail of Tears stories and received many handwritten letters from Elders who had heard of their ancestors’ experiences. I traveled to important Trail of Tears sites in seven states and did research at several universities. I read dozens of books on our Trail, consulted with numerous historians, and consulted with several Cherokee readers who are knowledgeable in this era. I have three 3-inch binders filled with details on the Trail and several shelves of books on the subject.

The title Words Spoken True foregrounds testimony and truth telling. What does that phrase mean to you in the context of a forced removal story that’s still contested when taught in American classrooms?

As a documentarian and historian, I find it hard to understand anyone who contests history that is well documented in primary and secondary sources. Genocide against Native peoples is fact. The resiliency of Native peoples over the centuries and the vibrant cultures that still exist in Native communities is also fact.

Jane Bushyhead sees herself as the keeper of her people’s stories and wonders, “When someone dies do they disappear? Will they be forgotten? Who tells their stories?” Even though the 16,000 Cherokees who were forced out of their homelands were too focused on survival to keep journals as I have Jane do, there were many other witnesses to what happened.

Elected officials, journalists, non-Cherokee Christian ministers who accompanied the detachments on the Trail and Cherokee survivors who later told their stories offer substantial proof that the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the relocations many other tribes experienced are proven reality.

You’ve written picture books and now this YA novel, tell me about your approach to each one and what different skillsets you brought to each.

It’s interesting that reviews of both my picture books and this novel have been called “lyrical writing” but they needed such different skills. Picture books require the fewest possible words and are paired with illustrations that bring stories alive. So in Priscilla and the Hollyhocks, I could say a lot with “When I was young and still wore slavery’s yoke I was saved by hollyhocks and a stranger’s kindness” and know that illustrator Anna Alter’s painting would beautifully convey this.

A novel gives room to go deeper into character and plot. I was happy to be able to not only have Jane tell her story but also, to include a poem she wrote at the beginning of each chapter to summarize her emotions. All my books, whatever the length, are heavily researched. I enjoy both the precision of language needed in picture books and the ability to expand in novels.

What are you hoping Native teens take away from the story?

I hope contemporary Native youth will learn not only how hard the journey was for the Cherokees in 1838 (and for basically every other tribe at some point in American history) but also will take pride in the resiliency of their people despite injustice, oppression and attempted genocide.

I hope they will agree with the Publishers Weekly starred review that said the book is “a triple threat: an illuminating historical telling, a vulnerable portrait of adolescence, and a harrowing call to action against the country’s inhumane treatment of Indigenous people.”

What’s next?

“And now for something completely different,” I am co-authoring a humorous middle grade series.

Cynsational Notes

Anne Broyles is the award-winning author of children’s picture books, I’m Gonna Paint: Ralph Fasanella, Artist of the People, Priscilla and the Hollyhocks, Arturo and the Bienvenido Feast, Arturo and the Navidad Birds and Shy Mama’s Halloween.

Anne’s recent book, Eating to Save the Planet: How Veganism Helps Fight Climate Change is a middle grade nonfiction book in the “Books for a Better Earth” series. In November, Scholastic will publish Words Spoken True, a young adult historical novel based on a Cherokee girl’s real-life experience on the Trail of Tears in 1838.

Anne is available for school visits, writing workshops, author residencies and speaking engagements. She supports equity and inclusion in the world of books and beyond. She will not participate in any event that excludes or discriminates against people who are marginalized or underrepresented on the page or off.

A.J. Eversole is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and a writer of adult and children’s literature. Her work appears in Legendary Frybread Drive-In (Heartdrum/HarperCollins), a Michael L. Printz Award–winning anthology, Beyond the Glittering World, and Never Whistle at Night Part II (Vintage, 2026). She also reports on Native voices in literature for Cynsations. Find her online @ajeversole.