About Me
Hi there! I’m Jim Barnes, a writer, Amerindian history buff and environmentalist. I live in France with my wife Anne, our two dogs and two cats. I was born in Tulsa and am a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
On November 24th the University of North Georgia Press will publish my new book – Cherokee History and the Spirit Family. It features my great-great grandmother Annie Spirit and her family who were on the Trail of Tears in the late 1830s. forced at gunpoint from their homeland in northern Georgia to Indian Territory 900 miles west. I tell the story of what they left behind and what happened in their new homeland, as their sovereignty ebbed, flowed and then ebbed again. In the 1890s the US government insisted on dissolving Indian governments, closing down their newspapers and schools. It is a bittersweet tale of resilience in the face of overwhelming power. I look forward to sharing my research with you on this blog.
Cherokee cousins helped me track down important family information, photos, paintings and artifacts such as Annie Spirit’s smoking pipe. My great-grandfather William Penn Mayes, who died in 1944, the year I was born, was Chief Interpreter for the Cherokee Senate in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Two of my great-great uncles, Joel Bryan Mayes and Samuel Houston Mayes, were elected Principal Chiefs of the Cherokee Nation in 1887 and 1896.
I’ve spent most of my life as an environmental lawyer trying to protect our oceans, lakes, rivers forests and mother nature’s creatures. In 1978 I founded the Antarctic & Southern Ocean Coalition – ASOC for short – bringing together environmental organizations around the world to protect 10% of the Earth. In 1982 I published Let’s Save Antarctica, to support a global campaign to protect Antarctica as a World Park. That book features Elliot Porter’s wonderful photos. My mentor Sir Peter Scott, son of Robert Falcon Scott who died in 1912 returning from the South Pole, wrote the Forward.
Today I serve ASOC (www.asoc.org) as Board Chair. In 1989, working closely with Jacques Cousteau, ASOC convinced France and Australia not to support a proposed Minerals Convention that would have opened the region to oil drilling and mining. That blocked the Minerals Convention. From 1989 to 1991 we led a successful campaign to negotiate the Environmental Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty, which includes an indefinite moratorium on any mineral activities and established a modern governance system for Antarctica. Since 2004 ASOC’s goal has been to establish a network of large Marine Protected Areas in the Southern Ocean. In 2016 the governments agreed to establish the world’s largest Marine Protected Area in the Ross Sea. Pending proposals to protect the Weddell Sea, East Antarctica and the Peninsula area remain on the table. The work goes on.