The Thousands

Author ZZ Packer RI ’15 read an excerpt (video below) from her novel-in-progress titled The Thousands, which chronicles the lives of several families—Black, white, and Indian—shortly after the Civil War, through Reconstruction and the “Indian Campaigns” in the Southwest.

Among its themes, ZZ Packer’s novel reflects on the interactions between a Black cavalry regiment known as the Buffalo Soldiers and the Native Americans they alternately fought against and protected throughout the late 1800s West. These Black soldiers fled the terrors of Reconstruction by joining the US Army only to discover they’d been assigned to displace yet another oppressed and dispossessed people: the Apache tribes of the Southwest. The story of the Buffalo Soldiers and their Native American counterparts is a chapter of American history that is woefully neglected. She hopes this novel will serve as a meditation on the consequences of America’s policy of “Manifest Destiny” and the dangers of a nascent and burgeoning age of American imperialism.