'You have to marry outside your clan,' she said. 'That's law. All the people we knew were Bird Clan. All the others were gone.'

When Gloria's great-grandmother, Green Leaf, left her home in the Hiwassee Valley of Tennessee, it was with a man on a stolen horse. She was one of the fugitive bands of Cherokee who'd resisted capture long ago.

Decades later, her family takes Great Mam on a road trip home. But the place that holds the scattered bones of her ancestors is no longer the land she remembers.