Kikthawenund: The Real Chief Behind the Jamie Poole Diaries

Jamie Poole standing outside Anderson, Indiana, named for her mother's ancestor.

For readers who've wondered how much of it is true. When you write a series with time travel, shapeshifters, a sword that bends the hours, and a twenty-year-old “High Priestess” holding the line against the unmaking of the world—The Multiverse, you know—you expect people to assume you invented all of it. Clearly, some I did. But not the bones. Here is the thing I most want you to know: Jamie Poole is invented. Kikthawenund was not. (The same is true on other figures that come and go, but Kikthawenund holds a special place. He's kin.)

Kikthawenund is first mentioned in the second book in the series: Resurrection of the Druidess, where Jamie explains to Eliyana how a city was named after her mother’s family. Anderson, Indiana, just south of where Jamie grew up.

A real man, a real name, a real city

Kikthawenund was born around 1740–1750 and died in 1831. He was a leader of the Unalachtigo Lenape — the people history would come to call the Delaware. His Lenape name is usually translated as creaking boughs. He also carried an English name, given through his Swedish-trader father, John Anderson: William Anderson. His mother was a daughter of the great Delaware chief Netawatwees, and he became head of the Turkey Clan of his people. You can stand where he stood. The city of Anderson, Indiana is named after him — it grew up on the very site of his village, once known as Andersontown. He built a log house there, on land that is now ordinary streets and squares. The name on the city limits sign is his. He lived through one of the hardest chapters in American history. Under the 1818 Treaty of St. Mary's, the Lenape were forced to give up their lands in Indiana. In 1821 he led roughly 1,350 of his people west — first to the Current River country of Missouri, then onward to Kansas, where he died in 1831 and was buried near present-day Bonner Springs. His daughter Mekinges married the fur trader William Conner, whose trading post still echoes through Indiana history.None of that is fiction. Every name in this post is one you can look up.

Where the story enters in

In the Jamie Poole Diaries, Jamie's mother is Julia Anderson-Poole. That hyphenated Anderson is not an accident. It's the chief's name, tied into the story on purpose — because my connection to this history isn't only something I researched in a library. It runs through my own family.I come from a line of people I think of as memory keepers. A real ancestral thread connects my family to this Lenape history — a connection I spent a long-time tracing through cemetery records, census pages, and old death notices, not one I dreamed up at a writing desk. In the novels, I let that thread run more directly, and far more magically, than it does in life. That's the part that's fiction. The ground it stands on is not. So, when Julia carries the Anderson name into the story, she's carrying a real one.

Why it matters that it's real

For generations, families with Native ancestry were told — by the world around them, and sometimes by their own fear — to hide it, to deny it, to let it quietly disappear. A great many did. Names were changed. Stories went unspoken. Whole lines of memory were allowed to fade because remembering was dangerous or shameful or simply too hard.Writing this heritage back into a story is one small way of refusing to let it vanish. The fantasy is mine. The chief, the people, the treaties, the long walk west, and the city that still bears his name belong to history — and to the descendants who never stopped remembering.I built a fantasy on solid ground. I wanted you to know the ground was there.

In future books yet to be published, Kikthwenund will step into the pages and have direct conversation with Jamie about the Multiverse. Are you ready to see that?

Look it up yourself

I'd rather you didn't take my word for it. A few starting points:

- Chief William Anderson / Kikthawenund — his life, his name, and his role in the Delaware Nation's removal west- Anderson, Indiana — the city's official history pages, which open with its Native American beginnings

- The Delaware Tribe of Indians — the Lenape people today, who keep this history alive

The truth is stranger, and sadder, and more beautiful than anything I could have made up. That's usually the case.— Ellen E. Sutherland