Reframing the Settler: Reconstructing Black, Native, and White Histories in Indian Territory

Abstract

Indigenous nations and descendants of Black slaves are rarely thought of as “settlers” in United States history. The term more commonly evokes images of the Mayflower or the Euro-American “Boomers” and “Sooners” who expropriated Indigenous lands in the Land Runs of the late 1800s. In I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, historian Alaina E. Roberts boldly reframes traditional definitions of settler colonialism beyond the mere occupation of land through force by emphasizing a broader “transformation in thinking about and rhetorical justification of what itmeant to reside in a place formerly occupied by someone else” (2). Rather than confining settler colonial processes to dominant Euro-American groups, Roberts explores how subjugated people also “served the goals of spatial occupation and white supremacy,” or the “dual nature of settler colonialism,” by claiming land, rewriting history, and pursuing federal intervention to reinforce their land rights (2). Focusing on the post-Removal lands of the Five Tribes (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole Nations), Roberts forcefully asserts that the Native peoples coercively removed to Indian Territory, the formerly enslaved Black people forced across the Trail of Tears with them (whom Roberts terms “Indian freedpeople”), and Black American migrants to Indian Territory all practiced settler colonialism prior to Euro-American political dominance in the region. In a second central argument, Roberts expands the timeline of Reconstruction to 1907 (thirty years after the traditional end date of 1877), offering a critical historiographical intervention that marks the moment when Indian freedpeople received their Dawes land allotments and Oklahoma became a state. Roberts’s innovative study draws from her unique stakes and knowledge as a descendant of the Indigenous, Afro-Native, Black, and white Americans she investigates. Throughout the book, Roberts kneads in family histories of her ancestors and embraces her perspective as their descendant “to see how their freedoms and opportunities were begotten by impeding the freedoms and opportunities of others” (11).