I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land

I’ve Been Here All the While

AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Series editors

Brian DeLay, Steven Hahn, Amy Dru Stanley

America in the Nineteenth Century proposes a rigorous rethinking of this most formative period in U.S. history. Books in the series will be wide-ranging and eclectic, with an interest in politics at all levels, culture and capitalism, race and slavery, law, gender and the environment, and regional and transnational history. The series aims to expand the scope of nineteenth-century historiography by bringing classic questions into dialogue with innovative perspectives, approaches, and methodologies.

I’ve Been Here All the While

BLACK FREEDOM ON NATIVE LAND

ALAINA E. ROBERTS

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-5303-0

For all the dearly departed members of the Roberts family, but especially for Travis Roberts. You were the family historian long before I was born, and this book would not be what it is without your remembrances. Thank you for safeguarding this knowledge for us all and for being so generous with your time. I wish you were here to see our family story finally told in print

I feel so fortunate to have been born into a story so rich I can barely believe it at times. I know that I was gently led to this scholarship by my ancestors, and I hope that I have done justice to their stories and to the stories of the millions of African, African American, and mixed-race people who shared similar experiences

Contents

Introduction

1  The First Settlers of Indian Territory

2  Emancipation and Intervention

3  Whose Racial Paradise?

4  The Last Wave

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

WHEN MY GREAT-GREAT-UNCLE Eli Roberts described his family’s arrival as enslaved people in Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) from the Mississippi Chickasaw homelands in the mid-1800s, he detailed a world distinct from that which they had left. The fertile, green grasses of Mississippi metamorphosed into red and brown clay, and the southern pathways that had become crowded with white settlers clamoring for land were suddenly wide-open spaces occupied predominantly by Indians and Black people. In his childhood western home, he recounted to an interviewer with the Works Progress Administration in 1937: It was wild tribes of all kinds, animals, hogs, cows—everything was wild. We wore shirts and they were woven. We made moccasins out of buck skin. There weren’t any bridges. There weren’t any typewriters. We had stage routes, trails, and no newspapers. The country was all open Indian lands. Just one store and post office, plenty game and fish, and no homesteaders. We had lots of horse racing, but no medicine, and no settlements.¹

Soon, however, this western space began to resemble the southern homelands that its Native settlers had been forced by the U.S. government to leave behind. The Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Nations (also known as the Five Tribes) had brought their slaves, their distaste for foreign American oversight, and their proven adaptability to Indian Territory. The wealthy citizens of these Indian nations rebuilt their plantations larger than before, increasing their cotton production, cultivated by an enslaved populace that grew to make up approximately 14 percent of Indian Territory’s total population by 1860.² It became evident that slavery was now both economically and socially important within the Five Tribes right as the United States saw the 1830s period of plantation expansion shift into the 1850s skirmishes that became known as Bloody Kansas.³ As white Americans argued over Black humanity and the spread of slavery, the Five Tribes were swept into analogous disputes that sparked discord and challenged their notions of race and kinship. In the war that followed, both white and Indigenous slaveholding societies fractured. After their ideological and martial involvement in the Civil War, Indian nations, too, experienced a Reconstruction period. Like their white southern counterparts, they resisted emancipating and enfranchising their former slaves until the United States’ intervention compelled them to do so. But for Indian nations, this federal intervention represented a combination of the American obsession with the spread of slavery in the West and a fixation on the seizure of western Indian land.

It is this connection between North American slavery, Black freedom, and settler colonialism that constitutes the nucleus of this book. What do I mean by settler colonialism? Scholars from a number of disciplines have traditionally defined settler colonialism as the exploitation of a region or country’s resources and labor, plus the forcible resettlement of Indigenous peoples and their replacement by settlers who then move onto their lands and rewrite history in an effort to erase the longevity of their presence, and often their very existence. Because throughout the Americas, Africa, Australia, and the Pacific Islands the settlers who have put these practices into motion have, for the most part, been white, settler colonialism also involves an element of racial ideology, specifically the idea that white dominion in political, social, and economic systems and control over land is natural and logical.⁴

In Indian Territory, I identify settler colonialism as a process that could be wielded by whoever sought to claim land; it involved not only a change in land occupation but also a transformation in thinking about and rhetorical justification of what it meant to reside in a place formerly occupied by someone else. This means that, in my definition, anyone could act as a settler, despite previous status as, say, a slave or a dispossessed Indian, as long as they used this process—composed of rhetoric, American governmental structures, and individual action—which may have aided in their efforts to acquire land or protection but which ultimately served the goals of spatial occupation and white supremacy: the dual nature of settler colonialism.⁵ Power did not emanate from only one person or governmental agency. Rather, these settlers appealed to tribal agents, the secretary of the interior, various governmental commissions, the president of the United States, and so on. Together, these sources of power made up the settler colonial state.

The settlers I follow are members of the Five Tribes (especially Chickasaws and Cherokees), Indian freedpeople (Black people once owned by members of the Five Tribes), and Black and white Americans. These overlapping waves of settlers employed particular iterations of settler colonialism to justify their claims to the land in Indian Territory, and hence to privileges of citizenship or communal belonging. The terms I use for people of African descent throughout this book are a mixture of historical creation and historians’ interventions. Freed African Americans were often referred to as freedmen in their own time (for instance, the governmental agency charged with helping them to acclimate to freedom was called the Freedmen’s Bureau). In the same historical moment, the U.S. government referred to Black people owned by Native Americans, and their descendants, as Chickasaw freedmen, Cherokee freedmen, and so on, to differentiate their histories of enslavement from those of Black people in the United States and to categorize them for the purpose of resource distribution. I use Indian freedpeople as a gender-neutral catchall to refer to formerly enslaved women and men from all of the Five Tribes.⁶ Though today the descendants of Indian freedpeople identify, for the most part, as African American, here I largely refer only to those people of African descent who lived in the United States as African American to call attention to their nationalities. Indian freedpeople were part of the Indian nations they were connected to, and, as such, I believe that calling them African American is anachronistic.

In many ways, Eli’s life experiences embody the complexities of my definition of settler colonialism and the key arguments of this book. Throughout the United States, enslaved people of African descent owned by whites were used to till and tame the land that was stolen from Native Americans, becoming coerced participants in the process of settler colonialism. Eli’s enslavement would eventually serve a similar purpose. He and thousands of other enslaved people of African descent who lived within the Five Tribes were the product of an eighteenth-century American goal to civilize Native peoples by encouraging them to take part in capitalistic endeavors, including chattel slavery.⁷ When the United States’ Indian policy changed in the early nineteenth century, the Five Tribes’ qualified adoption of civilization was not enough to stop them from being displaced by impatient white settlers, and they, along with the Black women and men enslaved in their nations, were coerced into moving westward. Though there were Indians such as the Comanches, Caddos, and Plains Apaches already living in Indian Territory, once the Five Tribes arrived, they, along with enslaved people like Eli, tended this land that had been forcibly taken from other Native tribes. In doing so, they formed a connection to their new homeland, and in order to protect their claim to it, they turned to the process of settler colonialism: the Five Tribes urged the American government to help them safeguard their property (settlements, cows and horses, enslaved people) from the raids of western Indians, and they rhetorically situated themselves as more civilized than the former occupants of their land. They would be only the first wave of settlers to construct such a dichotomy to justify their fitness to occupy the land.

As it did in the United States, the Civil War forced a reckoning with slaveholding in Indian Territory and provided American politicians an excuse to disavow their own treaties and once more demand land cessions from Native peoples, including the Five Tribes. Eli and other Indian freedpeople benefited from this project of dispossession, receiving forty-acre allotments of Indian land (the same forty acres that has long since echoed in African American culture) through the Dawes Severalty Act. In the process, Indian freedpeople became the only people of African descent in the world to receive what might be viewed as reparations for their enslavement on a large scale.⁸ To solidify their hold on their new assets, Indian freedpeople, and subsequent waves of Black and white Americans who arrived in the 1880s seeking new beginnings, utilized this same process of settler colonialism to claim land through the U.S. government and articulate a right to dispossess their spatial forebears.

Though these historical actors may not have truly believed that the American government should hold the power to police their land claims or that white people were the superior race, they engaged with the settler colonial process in an effort to realize their own visions of freedom. For the Five Tribes, this meant the freedom to rebuild after the trauma of Removal; for Indian freedpeople and African Americans from the United States, this meant the freedom of ownership after lives of enslavement; for white Americans, this meant the freedom from hierarchical communities that offered them no economic advancement. For all of these groups, Indian Territory became the ground upon which they sought belonging.

Belonging is a term that many scholars have used as a sort of all-encompassing way to reference community, kinship, social welfare, or citizenship, at times respectively or all at once. The term resists a firm interpretation, as it is tied to the emotional connections of people in the past. And yet a desire for belonging shaped historical events, and so I deem it necessary for examination. Though I use belonging throughout my narrative to refer to the community ties of all my historical actors, I most often use belonging throughout this book to signal that the Black and mixed-race characters in this story did not always seek citizenship, the legal conveyance of certain rights and privileges upon a person by a state. Rather, they often clung to kinship networks and natal communities in locations where citizenship was an impossibility in order to possess land.⁹ Chickasaw freedpeople, like members of my family, were offered no tribal membership by the Chickasaw Nation after emancipation. And here lies the importance of examining belonging in this period: even without the prospect of tribal citizenship, Chickasaw freedpeople stayed within the nation, demonstrating that, for them, kinship ties and generational connections to the space of Indian Territory were often more important than political rights, insofar as they allowed them to stake a claim to the land.¹⁰

This importance of land broadens the idea of Reconstruction that has been put forth in much historical scholarship: that Reconstruction revolved predominantly around the pursuit of political rights by people of African descent.¹¹ What if we looked at Indian Territory as a space where a different sort of Reconstruction project occurred, one that allowed for the successful pursuit of land, and it was this undertaking that influenced Black people’s decisions and experiences?¹² It is true that, constrained by institutional and individual racism as well as by the crushing poverty of newfound emancipation, Black settlers did not have access to the same economic and social resources that white settlers possessed. But Indian Territory was a space upon which people of African descent projected their hopes and dreams of successful land claims. In their letters to Indian and white officials in Indian Territory and the United States, as well as in their communications to the U.S. Congress, Indian freedpeople and African Americans from the United States expressed a sense of ownership of Indian land and a willingness to take whatever steps were necessary to gain and maintain access to it, a key part of their sense of belonging in their respective all-Black or mixed-race communities.

At the same time, formal citizenship was also important to this story of the West, as Reconstruction saw Black and Indian citizenship negotiated in dynamic relation to each other in both Indian Territory and the United States.¹³ Textbooks, films, and both academic and popular works of history that consider American Reconstruction have primarily defined the era in terms of the U.S. government’s efforts at reconciling the northern and southern regions of the country, torn asunder by the issue of slavery. This concern now ostensibly settled through emancipation, federal and state governments attempted to incorporate free African Americans into their polities to a degree through laws, fragile promises, and military support, while at the same time placating white people who had previously owned these same freedpeople. Whether characterized as a period in which African Americans and their supporters unfairly penalized the South or as a period in which Republicans truly tried to change the racist foundations of their government and society only to eventually capitulate to white southerners and Democrats, the standard narrative has focused on Black and white Republicans’ legislative and grassroots struggles for political power, and the principal protagonists of Reconstruction have thus largely remained only white or African American.¹⁴

Reconstruction, though, was not solely a project designed to force southern states to recognize the freedom and rights of African Americans. Republicans wielded their power in the West as well, and the inclusion of the Native peoples and people of African descent located in Indian Territory in our narrative of this period demonstrates that settler colonialism must be connected to our analysis of the period. This brings me to the second part of my argument. When Eli, his parents, and his siblings received their land allotments, the nineteenth century was nearly over, and what the average person thinks of as Reconstruction had long ago ended.¹⁵ Considering the allotment of Indian land to Indian freedpeople expands the timeline of Reconstruction from 1863–1877 to 1863–1907 and demonstrates that in Indian Territory, Native Americans’ national conversations about Black and Indian citizenship were directly connected to American conversations about Black and Indian citizenship.¹⁶

In the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, white politicians debated the dimensions of African American rights and citizenship.¹⁷ These conversations joined those they had about Native Americans: whites assumed they would soon conquer the West, forcing Native Americans to become American citizens. At the same time, within the Five Tribes, Indian leaders began to strategize about how to subvert forced absorption into the United States and also how they could preserve slavery and sovereignty.¹⁸ When the United States forced them to free their slaves, the Five Tribes then found ways to keep people of African descent from fully accessing tribal membership. The emancipation and enfranchisement of Indian freedpeople that culminated in their receipt of land was the result not of Indian nations’ decisions but of progressive Americans wrestling with the question of Black citizenship and fulfilling Black freedom and advancement within Indian nations in a way that they would not in their own country. This both violated Native nations’ sovereign right to define their own tribal membership and provided Indian freedpeople with rights they would not have obtained otherwise. At the same time that the United States was broadening its definitions of citizenship, the Five Tribes were narrowing theirs.¹⁹ In Indian Territory, previous inclusive definitions of tribal membership that revolved around ideas of adoption, shared history, and extended kinship became racialized and limited to a small number of citizens who would have access to tribal lands and monies.

Citizenship was by no means an established concept in the nineteenth century, and its boundaries remain contested to this very day. In the nineteenth century, states, the federal government, and Indian nations loosely defined it piecemeal, through property rights, wealth, ancestry, and access to voting. This excluded poor whites, recent immigrants, and most former slaves to varying degrees.²⁰ During Reconstruction, federal, state, and tribal citizenship became solid legalities only as a result of grassroots efforts, constitutional amendments, and legal suits brought by people of African descent, Native nations, Chinese and white immigrants, and Indian freedpeople.²¹ With Reconstruction in Indian Territory, tribal citizenship became essential to determining who had access to what resources.²² Putting the debates about Black and Native citizenship in Indian Territory and the United States into conversation with one another reveals how these dialogues both fed off disagreements over increasing migration and settlement in the West and the manner and degree of federal intervention in local definitions of societal membership.

As Indian land was allotted by the U.S. government to make room for white settlers, Creek, Cherokee, Seminole, and Choctaw freedpeople received their land, along with the ability to vote, hold office, and serve on juries, decades after Jim Crow laws had stymied much of the progress of their southern counterparts.²³ American agents took pains to ensure that all Indian freedpeople were able to access their land, with varying success, up to 1907—a use of federal force in the West to ensure Black progress long after the military had pulled out of the South.²⁴

After Indigenous land holdings were divided and distributed through the Dawes Act, after surplus lands in Indian Territory were opened to American settlement and became Oklahoma Territory, and after the Five Tribes unsuccessfully launched protracted negotiations with the United States, the lands that made up Indian Territory became part of the state of Oklahoma in 1907. At this point, Black progress no longer seemed to concern the federal government. Oklahoma statehood brought discriminatory legislation and white political power that disintegrated tribal governments and the Indigenous kinship practices that allowed for an acceptance of Black inclusion. This change did not occur overnight. It settled in slowly, first with land theft and lynchings in the quiet, rural spaces of Eli Roberts’s Oklahoma, then with concerted racial violence in urban centers signaling its destructive arrival.

In 1921, the Tulsa Race Massacre was just such an event: an effort by white Oklahomans to destroy the economic success that people of African descent, many of whom were Indian freedpeople, had found through the oil and mineral resources on their land allotments. The division and allotment of Indian land made Indian Territory into a space where Indian freedpeople, whites, and African Americans could imagine, respectively, a homeland, a fresh start, and a racial paradise. African Americans and Indian freedpeople created all-Black towns and neighborhoods, such as Black Wall Street, the Greenwood district of Tulsa, whose names still conjure images of nineteenth-century Black self-determination and coalition. After statehood, efforts by white Americans to forcibly take the economic and social control that landownership had brought people of African descent culminated in two days of mass murder and terror, the extent of which is still being discovered.²⁵ Not until perhaps the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s would we again see American governmental intervention on behalf of people of African descent. Although 1907 marked the end of U.S. intervention in Indian Territory on behalf of Indian freedpeople, and thus the end of this expanded Reconstruction, my story ends in 1921, with the cruel reverberations of this removal of support for Black property ownership. Settler colonialism and Reconstruction shared the same end: white Americans and their rights and goals were now the U.S. government’s only concern. This is why the interconnected series of migration, displacement, and seizure that begin in the 1830s with the Five Tribes’ large-scale removal to Indian Territory are necessary to help us understand the trajectory of this western space and the importance of the multilayered claims made on land in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The aggregation of Reconstruction and settler colonialism allowed for all of these possibilities but for only one ultimate ending.

The titular utterance, I’ve been here all the while, represents