"In this lyrical narrative about Shoeboots, Doll, and their descendants, Tiya Miles explores the constant push and tug between family connections and racial divides. Building on meticulous and inspired historical detective work, Miles shows what it might have felt like to be a slave and reassesses the convoluted ideas about race that slavery generated and left as a legacy."--Nancy Shoemaker, author of A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America

"Ties That Bind is a haunting and innovative book. Tiya Miles refuses to avoid or cover over the most painful aspects of the shared stories of Indians and African Americans. Instead, Miles passionately defends the need to explore history, even when the facts provided by history are not those that contemporary people want to hear."--Peggy Pascoe, author of Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939

"The book vividly conveys how precarious were the lives of Native and African people caught up in the whirlwind of slavery, colonialism, and discourses and practices of race."--David Chang, American Quarterly

Tiya Miles is Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story and The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts. Among other notable prizes and fellowships, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2011.