For Tim Tingle, a children’s and middle-grade writer who focuses on characters sharing his own Choctaw heritage, the No. 1 reason to write is to show today’s young readers that Native peoples are still alive and that they are modern people. “When people mention the words ‘Indigenous Peoples,’ American Indian, or Native American,” Tingle says, “the visual images that pop up are the images from Hollywood: buffaloes, teepees, headdresses....I write to break those stereotypes.”

Tingle’s relationship to his heritage has evolved greatly over his lifetime. As a child in Texas, it was information kept strictly between family members, to the point that childhood friends were shocked to discover he had been inducted into his high school’s hall of fame as a “Choctaw author and storyteller.” As an adult, Tingle returned to school for a master’s degree focusing on Native studies and began to speak with Choctaws across the Southeastern United States. “My grandmother told me before she died that it was time we be proud of who we are,” Tingle says. “So I began to collect stories.”

Out of years of conversations with Choctaws across the U.S. came his 2006 picture book, Crossing Bok Chitto (illustrated by Jeanne Rorex Bridges), which explores Choctaws helping slaves escape to freedom during the Civil War via a hidden path of stones allowing them to cross a river. “I had been telling that story for 12 to 15 years before I wrote it,” Tingle says, “but I always felt there was more to it.” In his latest release, Stone River Crossing, Tingle has gone back to finish the tale. In this new novel, he not only depicts Choctaws helping slaves—in particular a young boy named Lil Mo—but also what happens when Lil Mo wakes up on the other side of the river and is thrust into Choctaw life.

Tingle is clear that Stone is not intended to be taken as historical fiction—the novel also delves into elements of magical realism—but Tingle’s ability to respectfully bring this cross-cultural perspective to life came out of the very real stories he collected across the Southeast.

While Tingle is quick to point out that he cannot speak for all of the many different Indigenous American cultures, he says that Choctaw traditions always called for African Americans to be readily accepted, a fact confirmed by the many interviewees Tingle found who had both African and Choctaw heritage. “Slaves were not seen as outside people,” Tingle explains. “If [the Choctaws] helped people escape, they could become part of the community with marriage and children….They were adopted into the tribe.”

Tingle continues to speak at schools and write new books to change the way that young readers think of contemporary Native Americans. This year’s later release of Doc and the Detective (Oct. 15) will feature a young, modern Choctaw teenager who solves a mystery with his elderly neighbor, adding age diversity to the list of issues Tingle wants to tackle. But if his main objective is challenging stereotypes, he hopes to do so by also sharing stories like Stone River Crossing:histories that will never find their way into a textbook. “If you dig into the Native past, you run into an amazing mountain of facts that are absolutely not taught,” he says. “I think all Native writers have that as a motivation: to tell truths that aren’t being told.”

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.