S. Alice Callahan

S. Alice Callahan (born January 1, 1868, Sulphur Springs, Texas, U.S.—died January 7, 1894, Muskogee, Oklahoma) was a teacher and author of Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891), the first novel written by a Native woman in the United States.

Callahan’s paternal grandfather died during the forced removal of Indigenous people during the 1830s known as the Trail of Tears. Her father, who was three at the time of his father’s death, was one-eighth Muskogee Creek and was enrolled as a member of the Creek Nation. After their removal, the family settled in Texas. Callahan’s father was educated and edited a newspaper in Sulphur Springs before establishing a large farm and cattle ranch in Okmulgee, then in Indian Territory (later Oklahoma). Because he was wealthy and had a foot in both Euro-American and Native worlds, he was a significant figure in his community, serving as a representative of the Creek and Seminole Nations to the Confederate Congress during the American Civil War. He also held many other prominent positions within the Creek Nation. Callahan’s mother was a Methodist minister’s daughter, who brought her up (along with seven other children) as Protestants. Little is known of Callahan’s life before she was sent to the Wesleyan Female Institute in Staunton, Virginia, where she earned certification as a teacher.

As a young adult, Callahan wrote a novel, Wynema: A Child of the Forest—about a young Creek girl who becomes a teacher and sets up a school in her village—that was published in 1891, when the author was 23 years old. It was a “reform novel” intended for a white audience, illustrating the wrongs that had been done to Native peoples. Wynema also included arguments for woman suffrage, and it recorded elements of Creek culture, including the characteristic blue dumplings (made with blue cornmeal) and the Busk, or Green Corn, festival, an annual first-fruits and new-fire rite.

Callahan taught at Wealaka Mission boarding school in 1892–93 and at Harrell International Institute, a secondary school, in Muskogee later in 1893. Although she returned to Staunton to obtain a college degree so that she could open her own school, she was called back to Muskogee because several teachers at Harrell Institute had become ill. She herself contracted pleurisy soon after returning to Harrell and died two weeks later.