Littlefield's account of the freed blacks' social and economic life is a valuable discussion. Students of the West and race relations will welcome this book.

In the early 1800s, the U.S. government attempted to rid the Southeast of Indians in order to make way for trading networks, American immigration, optimal land use, economic development opportunities, and, ultimately, territorial expansion westward to the Pacific. The difficult removal of the Chickasaw Nation to Indian Territory—later to become part of the state of !--?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /--Oklahoma— was exacerbated by the U.S. government’s unenlightened decision to place the Chickasaws on lands it had previously provided solely for the Choctaw Nation. !--?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /-- This volume deals with the challenges the Chickasaw people had from attacking Texans and Plains Indians, the tribe’s ex-slaves, the influence on the tribe of intermarried white men, and the presence of illegal aliens (U.S. citizens) in their territory. By focusing on the tribal and U.S. government policy conflicts, as well as longstanding attempts of the Chickasaw people to remain culturally unique, St. Jean reveals the successes and failures of the Chickasaw in attaining and maintaining sovereignty as a separate and distinct Chickasaw Nation.

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes' removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes formulated racial and gender ideologies that justified this practice and marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended. Through the end of the nineteenth century, ongoing conflicts among Choctaw, Chickasaw, and U.S. lawmakers left untold numbers of former slaves and their descendants in the two Indian nations without citizenship in either the Indian nations or the United States. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved. Krauthamer's examination of slavery and emancipation highlights the ways Indian women's gender roles changed with the arrival of slavery and changed again after emancipation and reveals complex dynamics of race that shaped the lives of black people and Indians both before and after removal.

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.

Forcibly removed from their homes in the late 1830s, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians brought their African-descended slaves with them along the Trail of Tears and resettled in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. Celia E. Naylor vividly charts the experiences of enslaved and free African Cherokees from the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma's entry into the Union in 1907. Carefully extracting the voices of former slaves from interviews and mining a range of sources in Oklahoma, she creates an engaging narrative of the composite lives of African Cherokees. Naylor explores how slaves connected with Indian communities not only through Indian customs--language, clothing, and food--but also through bonds of kinship. Examining this intricate and emotionally charged history, Naylor demonstrates that the "red over black" relationship was no more benign than "white over black." She presents new angles to traditional understandings of slave resistance and counters previous romanticized ideas of slavery in the Cherokee Nation. She also challenges contemporary racial and cultural conceptions of African-descended people in the United States. Naylor reveals how black Cherokee identities evolved reflecting complex notions about race, culture, "blood," kinship, and nationality. Indeed, Cherokee freedpeople's struggle for recognition and equal rights that began in the nineteenth century continues even today in Oklahoma.

Note: Freedmen are Afro-Americans.

Popularly known as “Black Seminoles,” descendants of the Seminole freedmen of Indian Territory are a unique American cultural group. Now Kevin Mulroy examines the long history of these people to show that this label denies them their rightful distinctiveness. To correct misconceptions of the historical relationship between Africans and Seminole Indians, he traces the emergence of Seminole-black identity and community from their eighteenth-century Florida origins to the present day. Arguing that the Seminole freedmen are neither Seminoles, Africans, nor “black Indians,” Mulroy proposes that they are maroon descendants who inhabit their own racial and cultural category, which he calls “Seminole maroon.” Mulroy plumbs the historical record to show clearly that, although allied with the Seminoles, these maroons formed independent and autonomous communities that dealt with European American society differently than either Indians or African Americans did. Mulroy describes the freedmen’s experiences as runaways from southern plantations, slaves of American Indians, participants in the Seminole Wars, and emigrants to the West. He then recounts their history during the Civil War, Reconstruction, enrollment and allotment under the Dawes Act, and early Oklahoma statehood. He also considers freedmen relations with Seminoles in Oklahoma during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although freedmen and Seminoles enjoy a partially shared past, this book shows that the freedmen’s history and culture are unique and entirely their own.

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.

The true story of mob vengeance on two innocent Native American teenagers in Oklahoma

Choctaw are the largest tribe belonging to the branch of the Muskogean family that includes the Chickasaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole. According to oral history, the tribe originated from Nanih Waya, a sacred hill near present-day Noxapater, Mississippi. Nanih Waya means "productive or fruitful hill, or mountain." During one of their migrations, they carried a tree that would lean, and every day the people would travel in the direction the tree was leaning. They traveled east and south for sometime until the tree quit leaning, and the people stopped to make their home at this location, in present-day Mississippi. The people have made difficult transitions throughout their history. In 1830, the Choctaw who were removed by the United States from their southeastern U.S. homeland to Indian Territory became known as the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.