Side by side with the westward drift of white Americans in the 1830's was the forced migration of the Five Civilized Tribes from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Both groups were deployed against the tribes of the prairies, both breaking the soil of the undeveloped hinterland. Both were striving in the years before the Civil War to found schools, churches, and towns, as well as to preserve orderly development through government and laws. In this book Grant Foreman brings to light the singular effect the westward movement of Indians had in the cultivation and settlement of the Trans-Mississippi region. It shows the Indian genius at its best and conveys the importance of the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles to the nascent culture of the plains. Their achievements between 1830 and 1860 were of vast importance in the making of America.

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from. In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others. Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.

Note: Freedmen are Afro-Americans.

The forcible uprooting and expulsion of the 60,000 Indians comprising the Five Civilized Tribes, including the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole, unfolded a story that was unparalleled in the history of the United States. The tribes were relocated to Oklahoma and there were chroniclers to record the events and tragedy along the "Trail of Tears."

Given by Eugene Edge III.

Presents a collection of tales that focus on the the balance between the spirit world and the natural world.

“How can women wear diamonds when babies cry for bread?” Kate Barnard demanded in one of the incendiary stump speeches for which she was well known. In A Life on Fire, Connie Cronley tells the story of Catherine Ann “Kate” Barnard (1875–1930), a fiery political reformer and the first woman elected to state office in Oklahoma, as commissioner of charities and corrections in 1907—almost fifteen years before women won the right to vote in the United States. Born to hardscrabble settlers on the Nebraska prairie, Barnard committed her energy, courage, and charismatic oratory to the cause of Progressive reform and became a political powerhouse and national celebrity. As a champion of the poor, workers, children, the imprisoned, and the mentally ill, Barnard advocated for compulsory education, prison reform, improved mental health treatment, and laws against child labor. Before statehood, she stumped across the Twin Territories to unite farmers and miners into a powerful political alliance. She also helped write Oklahoma’s Progressive constitution, creating what some heralded as “a new kind of state.” But then she took on the so-called “Indian Question.” Defending Native orphans against a conspiracy of graft that reached from Oklahoma to Washington, D.C., she uncovered corrupt authorities and legal guardians stealing oil, gas, and timber rights from Native Americans’ federal allotments. In retaliation, legislators and grafters closed ranks and defunded her state office. Broken in health and heart, she left public office and died a recluse. She remains, however, a riveting figure in Oklahoma history, a fearless activist on behalf of the weak and helpless.

Records the history of the Choctaw Indians through their political, social, and economic customs.