United Native Nations

In 1863, the Battle of Honey Springs ended the last war to keep slavery alive on the continent. The Native nations and their allies won. The United Native Nations became the most powerful union in the world. Every schoolchild learns that the field was clean by morning.It was not.It is 2026 in the Oklahoma Cultural Corridor, and the Union is preparing to celebrate its founding victory. At a blues festival in Rentiesville, a few miles from the old battlefield, a white factory worker named Daniel Rusk is dead after a safety sensor his crew reported for twelve days finally fails. His cousin Caleb wants answers. Caleb’s teenage sister Elsie has a phone full of footage that no one in power wants seen. Governor Redbird is about to introduce the Cultural Security Act, a law that promises protection and delivers surveillance, travel restrictions and suspicion inherited by blood.At the center of it all stands Kai Freeman-Watie, heir to one of the oldest fortunes in the Union and the chief executive of the company that owns the plant where Daniel died. Kai has built her life on the family story: Isaiah Freeman and Tahu Watie, the Black soldier and the Native commander who fought side by side at Honey Springs. Then an archivist named Nina Baptiste finds evidence of a testimony written on the night of the battle and buried beneath a burned oak. It describes what happened to the prisoners after the victory, and it names the people who gave the orders.As the testimony surfaces, the museum that guards the official story is attacked, the evidence goes on the run across back roads and border checkpoints, and Caleb is detained without ordinary booking. A preacher who refuses to stay quiet, a blues legend and his wife who have spent decades holding their community together, a husband with secrets of his own and a mother who has kept a box hidden in her closet for twenty-two years are all pulled toward a continental tribunal in the Capital of Nations. There, a nation will have to decide whether its founding truth can survive being told in full.The Weight of Survival is a sweeping alternate-history political thriller about sovereignty, memory, race, labor and family. It asks what a people owes the truth when the truth implicates the ones they love, and what happens when survival becomes an excuse for power.The first novel of the United Native Nations Universe. Begin with the free digital graphic novel United Native Nations: Origins, The Honey Springs Testimony.It reveals the hidden testimony and the tribunal but keeps the Adelaide twist and the ending back. The question in the second-to-last paragraph echoes the afterword of Origins.