Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison

In 1755, when Mary Jemison was twelve years old, Shawnee warriors murdered her family and took her prisoner. This should be a story of rescue, of escape, of return to the white world that claimed her. Instead, it is something stranger and more luminous: a woman who stayed. Adopted into the tribe, married first to a Delaware warrior and then to a Seneca chief, Mary Jemison spent sixty years among the people who destroyed her childhood, and she found there a life that fit her. Recorded by James Seaver in 1824 from her own words, this is one of the most extraordinary captivity narratives in American literature: a white woman's account of Indigenous life written from the inside, before the homogenizing myths of frontier and civilization had calcified into legend. She witnessed the French and Revolutionary Wars from the Seneca side of the river. She watched her children grow into a world that was vanishing. And when the whites finally came to 'rescue' her, she refused to go.