The Education of Little Tree

An eight year old boy who lost his parents during the Great Depression is sent to his grandparents in the mountains of Tennessee. They give him the name Little Tree. He learns to live on the mountain, to read the forest, and how his grandfather makes a living running whiskey. Then the state arrives and wants to place the boy in a boarding school opened for Native children. Richard Friedenberg directed the film from a book published in 1977 under the name Forrest Carter and sold as a true story. The book's actual author was Asa Earl Carter, a Ku Klux Klan member who wrote George Wallace's 1963 segregation speech; the account is fiction and the Cherokee words in it were invented. Made six years after that came out, the film tells the book's story but not the matter behind it. James Cromwell plays the grandfather and Graham Greene plays Willow John.