Roberts, Alaina E.

OUR SYNOPSIS: Alaina E. Roberts shares her own family histories as a jumping off point for understanding historical interrelationships between Native Americans and African Americans in Indian Territory. By focusing on freedom, land, and belonging, she shows how people understood their own complex life experiences in the long Reconstruction era from 1863 to 1907. Federal policy combined “the American obsession with the spread of slavery in the West and a fixation on the seizure of western Indian land.” (1) She studies “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.” (2) Specifically, she highlights when “enslaved people of African descent owned by whites were used to till and tame the land that was stolen from Native Americans” and foregrounds when “Indian freedpeople benefited from this process of dispossession.” Therefore, she argues: “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.” (3-4) This does not detract from the intergenerational trauma of Native American forced migration. Rather, it shows how displaced people leveraged the opportunities available to them in the United States. Members of Five Tribes nations defined themselves as different from and exploited the labor of the people already living on the lands that they newly occupied. Emancipation was an exercise of federal power that took away some of these labor exploitation opportunities, turning them into settler empowerment of “people of African descent formerly enslaved by the Five Tribes.” (42) This sometimes involved renouncing their own tribal land claims and identities for individual ownership rights, then building new communities.