Bøker av Robert Downes

RAW DEAL explores the theft of Native lands by squatters, speculators, unfair treaties and blatant swindles, focusing on the Indians of the Midwest and the Great Lakes.Although Indian lands were paid for with hard cash and services provided by the U.S. government, it was always for pennies per acre, backed by the threat of removal at the point of bayonets, sabers and guns wielded by government troops and violent militias. Native peoples who bowed to government demands soon learned that federal treaties rarely lived up to their promises.Raw Deal traces the heroic efforts of the Indians to retain their homeland through centuries of warfare and exploitation. From the first people to inhabit the Upper Great Lakes 13,000 years ago, Raw Deal ranges across the centuries in the confrontation between Native peoples and the hard-luck immigrants of Europe, who came flooding across the ocean, eager to get their share in a dog-eat-dog world.

 "The Wolf and The Willow" is a multicultural story of first contact between indigenous peoples and European invaders, set in the bones of ancient America. Willow, a slave of Black and Arab descent is swept up in a doomed 1527 expedition to the New World, where she meets Wolf, a spy for the shamans of the Ojibwe nation. The book begins in Morocco, where Willow is abducted by pirates. Sold in a slave market in Sevilla, she joins the 1528 expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez to Florida. In the New World, she meets Wolf, a trader, neophyte shaman, and spy for the shamans of the Ojibwe people on a mission to find a mythical animal. Together, they outwit their captors on a mission through the heart of Indian civilization on the Mississippi, culminating at the ancient ruins of Cahokia, outside present-day St. Louis. Grounded in historical events and extensively researched, the novel brims with adventure, romance and the peaks and chasms of the human spirit.

 The great love of Blue Heron and Red Bear sustain an Ojibwe clan as it struggles to survive war, famine, and the coming of foreign explorers bearing deadly diseases. The blood feud between two rival warriors over the love of Ashagi, a strong-willed woman of great beauty and greater determination threads through this story of one Ojibwe clan on the cusp of great change. A young woman from a peaceful village, Ashagi (Blue Heron) is abducted in a raid conducted by the Sioux, the ancestral enemies of her clan, and made a concubine of a fat, slovenly chief who already has two wives. When she is rescued by Misko (Red Bear), an Ojibwe youth, the two fall in love and a lifelong bond is formed. But Nika, Misko's rival, demands that Misko surrender Ashagi to replace his brother who was killed during a raid involving the young warriors' two clans. As Nika's pride and obsession with Ashagi eats away at his sanity, greater danger for the whole Ojibwe way of life creeps ever closer.Warfare, vengeance, supernatural monsters, and strange spirits all claw at the edges of this love triangle, but the power of the clan and the love of family and tradition helps sustain a culture on the verge of harrowing times. Beginning in 1588 and spanning twenty-five years, WINDIGO MOON encompasses warring tribes of the Upper Great Lakes, the onset of the Little Ice Age of the 1600s, the diseases introduced by foreign explorers, and, always and forever, the great love of Blue Heron and Red Bear.Meticulously researched and beautifully written, WINDIGO MOON will appeal to fans of Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear, Jean Auel, Alexander Thom, Anna Lee Waldo, and other top authors of historical fiction.