In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams (All Things That Matter Press), Thomas Davis’s fourth published novel, won the 2019 Edna Ferber Fiction Award sponsored by the Wisconsin Council for Writers.  In addition to his four novels Davis has had two epic poems, The Weirding Storm, A Dragon Epic (Bennison Books) and An American Spirit, An American Epic (Four Windows Press), published along with one non-fiction book about the Menominee Tribe’s sustainable forestry, Sustaining the Forest, the People, and the Spirit (State University of New York Press).

Two new books are currently in the production process:  Meditations on the Ceremonies of Beginning, poetry written during the early years of the founding of two significant movements in education, the tribal college and universities movement in the United States and the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium, which will be published by Tribal College Press and Apples for the Wild Stallion, a young adult novel with an severely autistic hero who cannot talk, which All Things That Matter Press is bringing out.

During his distinguished career as an educator, Davis worked for six tribal colleges across the United States in leadership positions and was a leader in STEM education both in Wisconsin and nationally.   He has written grants for tribal colleges and Wisconsin tribes, served as He helped found College of the Menominee Nation in Keshena, Wisconsin and served as President or Chief Academic Officer of Lac Courtes Oreilles Ojibwa Community College in Hayward, Wisconsin, Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in Cloquet, Minnesota, and Little Priest Tribal College in Winnebago, Nebraska.  Before retirement, he served as Provost for Navajo Technical University, which has campuses in the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and Arizona.  At Bay Mills Community College in Northern, Michigan, he worked with Indian Head Start to develop one of the first degree-granting virtual colleges in the United States.  He has helped found a number of national and international projects and organizations that have affected the lives of American Indians and indigenous peoples from around the world. 

A 12 series podcast about his work with tribal colleges and universities is currently available at https://tribalcollegejournal.org/our-history-memories-of-the-tribal-college-movement-podcast-1/tom-davis-podcast.

Before the Civil War a community of black families settled at West Harbor on Washington Island.  One of the greatest mysteries in Door County revolves around where the black pioneers came from and what happened to them.  The community disappeared a long time ago.

Thomas Davis’s new historical novel, In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams, tells a fictional story about how the seven black families got to Washington Island via the Underground Railroad. 

Then it tells the story of how the largest black community outside of Milwaukee at the time created a fisherman community under the leadership of the charismatic black preacher Tom Bennett, a veteran of the War of 1812.

The hero of the story, Joshua Simpson, is a fourteen year old who has been severely whipped by the Overseer of the Bulrush Plantation in the boot heel of Missouri when the story starts.  His mother, Mary Simpson, insists that he go with her to a church meeting held beneath a giant cypress tree in the Mingo Swamp even though Joshua can barely move because of cuts and bruises on his back.

Joshua’s world is turned upside down when he follows his mother where his father, Jason Billings, whom he had never met and was not sure existed, appears out of the darkness.  Then he discovers that Preacher Bennett, a man with a Biblical prophet’s powerful presence, has gathered his swamp congregation together so that they can attempt to escape through the swamp to a place he describes as New Jerusalem.

The drama that follows is unrelenting as events, drawn partially from the literature on the Underground Railroad and slave narratives, complicate Joshua’s and the escaped slaves’ desperate attempts to reach Washington Island.

The novel’s narrative about the slaves’ effort to settle at West Harbor on the island presents a number of historical figures that settled Washington Island, including Jesse Miner, the son of Henry Miner who helped establish the island as a Township of Door County.  The younger Miner wrote a rough biography that provides most of the historical knowledge we have about West Harbor’s black settlement. 

Even the role of Green Bay’s Union Congregational Church and Wisconsin’s Stockbridge Native American Tribe in the Underground Railroad is explored as part of the larger story of racism in the United States.

In her review of the novel, the historical novelist Diane Denton wrote, “This important and moving story of a black fishing community of West Harbor, Washington Island, Wisconsin, insists that the savagery of slavery can be—must be—obstructed. Mr. Davis speaks to the need for all human beings to live freely, individually, uniquely while forming families, friendships, and community; to be at liberty to compete and cooperate, to feel love returned and even unrequited, to know how life is naturally given and taken, to enjoy the refuge of home, to have work and leisure and an education, to make plans and pursue hopes and dreams.”