Osceola – The Story of an American Indian by Robert Proctor Johnson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The tragedy of this book, which, I guess, is geared toward older children, is that there is not one note that this is a book of fiction. Or is there mention that the author is writing from Osceola’s perspective. A reader not knowing this, or much else, will believe that “the evil white man” did all wrong and Osceola was an angel. I’d go so far to write this is a book of fantasy.

Johnson’s attempt here is to do, what i call, the Gore Vidal-ization of the story of Osceola. He works up the sketchy story of Osceola and builds to filling in blanks between known events during the life of Osceola. Trouble is he works off of a few errors he’s written and then compounds the errors. Errors include: Communication in English between Seminoles and Americans, Osceola as chief, assumptions not documented involving Micanopy, blacks were also slaves for the Seminoles, etc. I have to wonder just how much research was done to write this book and not to present a political viewpoint.

A huge problem I have is the perspective of the book and the author not pointing out his intent. This was written in the early ’70s when emotion ran high of a view that American indians faced nothing but abuse. Seems Johnson took that emotion to write this book. That would be fine, but some context should be presented. Especially, in that this is presented as a book for younger and less educated people.

The writing is fine involving dialogue, misplaced as it might be. Otherwise Johnson seems to struggle with the narrative involving the stroytelling, maybe due to his sketchy knowledge of the history.

Bottom line: i strongly don’t recommend this book. 2 out of ten points.

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