When a Ghost Talks, Listen ― A Choctaw Trail of Tears Story

As Book 2 in Tim Tingle's award-winning How I Became A Ghost Series begins, his family continues the long walk to Indian Territory, and ten-year-old Isaac, our narrator and now a ghost, meets the famed Choctaw Chief and U.S. Army General Pushmataha. There have been surprises aplenty on the Trail thus far, but this one tops them all or so he thinks, until Isaac and his three Choctaw comrades learn they can now also time travel. With Pushmataha as their guide, Isaac and friends head back in time to the Washington, D.C., of 1824 to bear witness for the Choctaw chief who has come to the nation’s capital at the invitation of his dear friend Andrew Jackson. You cannot blame the people before you for mistakes their ancestors made, Chief Pushmataha tells the little band, making a powerful and timeless lesson one made more so as the reader travels from graveyards to boarding schools, from 1824 to 2018, experiencing firsthand the joy of never leaving.

Tim Tingle is an Oklahoma Choctaw storyteller and an award-winning author of nineteen books. His great-great-grandfather, John Carnes, walked the Trail of Tears in 1835, and his grandmother attended rigorous Indian boarding schools in the early 1900s. In 1992, he retraced the Trail of Tears to Mississippi and began recording stories of tribal elders. His family experiences and these interviews with fellow Choctaws in Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma—more than two hundred hours and counting—are the basis of his most important writings.His first children’s book, Crossing Bok Chitto, was an Oklahoma Sequoyah Award Finalist and an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times Book Review. Tingle was a featured author and speaker at the 2014 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., based on the critical acclaim for How I Became a Ghost, which won the 2014 American Indian Library Association Youth Literature Award.Tingle received his master’s degree in English Literature at the University of Oklahoma in 2003, with a focus on American Indian studies. While teaching freshmen writing courses and completing his thesis, “Choctaw Oral Literature,” Tingle wrote his first book, Walking the Choctaw Road. It was selected by both Oklahoma and Alaska as their Book of the Year for the “One Book, One State” program. As a visiting author, Tingle reaches audiences numbering more than 200,000 annually, and in April of 2018 was awarded the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award by the Oklahoma Center for the Book, a state affiliate of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.