Description: Offering insights gleaned from reconsidered and overlooked historical sources, this book enhances our understanding of the history and workings of social welfare policy and services, not only in the Cherokee Nation but also in the United States.
Brief description: Julie L. Reed (Cherokee Nation) is Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University.
Review Quotes: "In Serving the Nation, ethnohistorian Julie L. Reed carefully shapes a unique, multifaceted, and essential view of Cherokee life and politics through the lens of social welfare. This wide-ranging study of social service issues and institutions deftly describes traditional community values of kinship obligation and coordinated work and explains how diverse subsets of the Cherokee populace struggled to address human needs in the context of colonial imposition."--Tiya Miles, author of The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story