Before the Ships: A Native American Epic

Before the ships appeared on the horizon, a world flourished. In the final years before European contact, a young Haudenosaunee man leaves his village with a pouch of seeds pressed against his heart and a dying grandmother's charge: Find what we are losing. Carry it forward. What follows is an odyssey across a continent that most of the world has forgotten ever existed. He climbs to mesa cities carved into cliffs where people have endured for a thousand years. He learns to read water in deserts where ancient canals turn scarcity into survival. He walks among the buffalo nations of the endless grass, witnesses the salmon runs that darken entire rivers, and stands atop the great mound at Cahokia—a city larger than London—watching torches burn like earthbound stars. At each place, he is given gifts: seeds and songs, languages of hands and languages of stars, ways of healing and ways of governing, knowledge that took millennia to accumulate. He carries these treasures home to his daughter, who is growing up without him, and to a world that does not know it stands at the edge of transformation. The reader knows what the characters cannot: that ships are coming. That everything they are building, everything they are teaching, everything they love will soon face a cataclysm that will reshape the continent forever. But Before the Ships is not a story of extinction. It is a celebration of what was—and what still remains. From the democratic councils of the Haudenosaunee to the navigational genius of Pacific voyagers, from the sustainable agriculture of the Three Sisters to the restorative justice of communities that refused to throw away their children, this novel illuminates the sophistication, beauty, and wisdom of Indigenous North America in the moments before contact. The seeds remain. The stories remain. The people remain.