I've Been Here All the While

Black Freedom on Native Land

Alaina E. Roberts

• Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780812297980
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

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.

CHAPTER 1

The First Settlers of Indian Territory

ELI ROBERTS REMEMBERED how the human landscape of Indian Territory had changed over his time spent in the West in the 1800s. “Walker Martin was the only white man in the settlement. He lived near where Caddo Creek empties into the Washita River. He moved here from Atoka, where he had operated a large grape press…. Uncle Charlie Henderson was the next settler in this country. He established a store on the Washita at the location which was later known as Dresden. Before Henderson’s store was established, the negro settlers carried their grain to [Chickasaw] Governor Harris’s mill at Mill Creek [at the southern point of the Chickasaw Nation].”¹ Eli’s narrative illustrates, among other things, a progression of settlement in Indian Territory: The Five Tribes came along with their Black slaves, and for years only they populated the region, along with a number of other Indian tribes, until they were followed by white and Black settlers from the United States, whose intermittent encampments gradually became towns and businesses.

Accepted wisdom about westward migration might have us believe that centuries-old Indigenous inhabitance of western lands gave way to a steady stream of white settlers who changed the racial landscape of North America in one fell swoop. In reality, the various movements and removals of Indigenous peoples from the Southeast due to white invasion meant that the first western settlers were often Native Americans who migrated to spaces other than their homelands, where they encountered other tribes—longtime enemies, other displaced peoples, and groups who had long called this land home. Native peoples adjusted their oral histories and survivance strategies to incorporate their new surroundings as they had done for millennia, crafting stories that told of successful migrations and learning about the food and herbs of their new homes.

As they were forced westward, the Five Tribes’ experience in Indian Territory was different from the other Indigenous migrations occurring around them. The Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Nations sought to use the settler colonial process to cast themselves as civilizers of their new home: they used the labor system that Euro-Americans insisted represented sophistication—chattel slavery—to build homes, commercial enterprises, and wealth, and they portrayed themselves as settlers in need of protection from the federal government against the depredations of western Indians, which, the Five tribes claimed, hindered their own civilizing progress.² Moreover, they followed their physical appropriation of Plains Indians’ land with an erasure of their predecessors’ history.³ They perpetuated the idea that they had found an undeveloped “wilderness” when they arrived in Indian Territory and that they had proceeded to tame it. They claimed that they had built institutions and culture in a space where previously neither existed.⁴ The Five Tribes’ involvement in the settler colonial process was self-serving: they had already been forced to move once by white Americans, and appealing to their values could only help them—at least at first. Involvement in the system of Black enslavement was a key component of displaying adherence to Americans’ ideas of social, political, and economic advancement—indeed, owning enslaved people was the primary path to wealth in the nineteenth century. The laws policing Black people’s behavior that appeared in all of the tribes’ legislative codes showed that they were willing to make this system a part of their societies. But with the end of the Civil War, the political party in power—the Republicans—changed the rules: slavery was no longer deemed civilized and must be eliminated by force. For the Five Tribes, the rise and fall of their involvement in the settler colonial process is inextricably connected to the enslavement of people of African descent: it helped to prove their supposed civilization and it helped them construct their new home, but it would eventually be the downfall of their Indian Territory land claims. Recognizing the Five Tribes’ coerced migration to Indian Territory as the first wave among many allows us to see how settler colonialism shaped the culture of Indian Territory even before settlers from the United States arrived.⁵

Though the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” has come to symbolize Indian Removal, the Five Tribes were just a handful of dozens of Indigenous tribes who had been forced to move from their eastern homelands due to white displacement. This displacement did not begin or end in the 1830s. Since the 1700s, Indian nations such as the Wyandot, Kickapoo, and Shawnee began migrating to other regions to escape white settlement and the violence and resource scarcity that often followed.⁶ Though brought on by conditions outside of their control, these migrations were “voluntary” in that they were most often an attempt to flee other Native groups moving into their territory as a result of white invasion or to preempt white coercion, rather than a response to direct Euro-American political or legal pressure to give up their homelands.

The majority of nineteenth-century Native migrations, though, were a result of direct white coercion. White settlers moving in from Georgia, Alabama, and other states began illegally occupying the Five Tribes’ land on the eastern side of the Mississippi River and requesting state and federal support to do so. Despite a Supreme Court ruling, Worcester v. Georgia, which upheld the Cherokee Nation’s right to their lands (and therefore other Indian nations’ same right), the support of the states for white settlers’ occupancy of tribal lands led President Andrew Jackson to rebuke the court’s decision. Through the Indian Removal Act, which pushed for removal treaties with Indian nations and for forcible evacuation by the U.S. military if necessary, Jackson insisted on the resettlement of the Cherokees, as well as the Choctaws, Creeks, Seminoles, Poncas, and Chickasaws, among others.⁷

Removal was devastating emotionally and physically for the Five Tribes, but it was not an immediate change in their lives; rather, tribal members moved gradually, with complete migration occurring over a period of nearly a decade. Native peoples were compelled to leave their homes, their buried loves ones, and many of their belongings.⁸ Even before the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, trauma brought on by the expectation of removal permeated the lives of Native peoples. Cherokee woman Cornelia Chandler remembered that as her people were rounded up to begin their move, “the people were hunted like cattle. [Federal soldiers] went through their homes, ripping open the feather beds, destroying the [beehives], and making the country as desolate as possible. Many tried to hide from them.”⁹ Sarah Harlin was a young girl when her people, the Choctaws, were forced to leave their homes in Alabama. She came to Indian Territory by steamboat and then by wagon with a twelve-person party. Along the way, a baby in their group died, and its mother was overcome with grief. Sickness threatened to derail their journey, their meat spoiled, and three of their horses died.¹⁰ If this was the journey of a family who, according to Harlin, “was thought in those days as well fixed, having a good wagon, fat horses, plenty of provisions and covering,” then what heartache and misadventure must those poorer than Harlin have faced? The destitute would likely have had little food of their own and would have been forced to subsist solely on the rations meted out by soldiers to them “as if they were cattle.”¹¹ The poor, the sick, and even the expectant mothers, if they stumbled or slowed down on their journey, “were shoved on, kicked and commanded to proceed on.”¹²

The majority of women and men in the Five Tribes faced only one extreme removal, from the Southeast to Indian Territory.¹³ But other Native peoples, such as the Lenape, faced multiple land dispossessions and migrations. The Lenape, also known as the Delaware, are originally from the East Coast and had been forced west into Ohio and western Pennsylvania in the 1750s by British colonists. In the 1830s, the Lenapes’ Trail of Tears had taken them to Kansas, but in the 1860s, as Americans moved further West, the Lenape once again migrated. This time, they signed a treaty agreeing to settle among the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory.¹⁴ These layered migrations, removals, and dispossessions impacted Native American nations in a number of ways. Native peoples have long established their connection to the lands they occupied through their origin and morality stories and through medicinal, food, and spiritual traditions that utilize plants and animals indigenous to the area.¹⁵ The Five Tribes’ connection to the land in their pre-Removal homes had been further bolstered by the fact that, as farmers, they lived on the produce and resources the land provided for themselves and their livestock. Thus, Removal meant that the Five Tribes were not only physically uprooted but also spiritually uprooted. They had to find ways to relate to and claim their new homeland as their own in order to reestablish their nations economically, socially, politically, and spiritually—in other words, to find a new sense of belonging. The settler colonial process they chose to use to accomplish this was the same process that had forced them to leave their original homes—only this time, the Five Tribes were the settlers.

When the Five Tribes arrived in Indian Territory, there were a number of other Native peoples already living there. Some, like the Plains Apaches, Comanches, Wichitas, Yuchis, and Kiowas had long used Indian Territory as an occasional residence and hunting ground. Others, like the Quapaws and Osages, had moved from their homelands and farms to Indian Territory as a result of dwindling resources, pressure from settlers in surrounding regions, such as Texas, and forced treaties.¹⁶ They saw the Five Tribes as intruders, and this shaped their reactions to them: members of these western nations often raided and killed members of the Five Tribes. These Indians’ use of horses brought by Spanish explorers provided them with a great advantage over other tribes, and they saw that they could easily use their speed and agility to raid and war on agricultural peoples.¹⁷

Neither white Americans nor the Five Tribes considered most of the western tribes to be civilized. Americans believed early on that “emigrant Indians” such as the Five Tribes would need to be protected from the “erratic tribes to the west and north of them.”¹⁸ In describing the Five Tribes’ exodus to the West, John C. Calhoun, then secretary of war, wrote in 1825 to President John Quincy Adams that, in removing tribes such as the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw, the U.S. government should “protect the interests” of both themselves and the Indian tribes. He emphasized that moving West would bring these “more or less civilized” Indian nations into contact with Indian tribes “of discordant character.”¹⁹ The western tribes’ lack of American-style government and refusal to engage in capitalism and permanent property ownership rendered them uncivilized in the eyes of white Americans, whereas the Five Tribes’ receptiveness to these practices made them allies—at least relative to other western Indians and when they weren’t competing for land with white Americans.²⁰ As for the Five Tribes, even before their official move, they were wary of these Native peoples they found so different from themselves.²¹ In 1824, a Cherokee delegation rejected removal on the basis that it would force them to “wage war with the uncultivated Indians” west of the Mississippi.²² As a young man, Peter Pitchlynn, a future chief of the Choctaw Nation, visited Indian Territory in 1828 on a scouting mission. Looking to identify lands acceptable to serve as his tribe’s new home, Pitchlynn encountered some of the Native peoples who would eventually become his neighbors. Of meeting these Plains Indians, he wrote in his journal, “You never saw such a people in your life. Their manners and action are wild in the extreme. They are in a perfect state of nature and would be a curiosity to any civilized man.”²³ Clearly, neither the Cherokee delegation nor Pitchlynn identified with the Native peoples already living in Indian Territory and, in comparison to themselves, they found them to be uncivilized.²⁴

These leaders’ views are important because they shaped the policies of their nations and show that they were well aware of the language and characteristics the American state used to denote civilization. However, Pitchlynn and a number of Cherokee leaders are not necessarily representative of the average member of the Five Tribes. As well-educated men from wealthy, well-connected families, their worldviews had been heavily shaped by the civilizationist policies preached at the schools they attended and by the white people they befriended. Records for common Native peoples are few and far between. Yet it was these ordinary tribespeople who felt the wrath of the western tribes the most. Unlike the wealthier Indians in their tribes who had a significant amount of property, when these ordinary people’s livestock were taken or killed, they went hungry; when their lone slave was kidnapped, they lost their only source of capital. From the arrival of the Five Tribes in Indian Territory through the Civil War, Indian agents regularly reported receiving letters from tribal members complaining about the theft of goods by “wild Indians” and appealing to them for stability.²⁵ I will note that not every tribal member had negative experiences with western tribes. Edward Nail recalled that after his grandfather came from Mississippi to Indian Territory in 1835, he lived in the western part of the Choctaws’ territory. He did not fence the ranch where his “fat” cattle roamed. Yet, according to Nail, the Comanches who “camped near his house, were peaceful.”²⁶

But many members of the Five Tribes had various reasons to harbor ill will toward western Indians: they may have suffered from raids or vandalism, or they may have truly felt they were morally and intellectually superior to them.²⁷ It is possible that tribal leaders were thinking, in part, of the effects raids had on their members when they spoke of western Indians. But the Five Tribes went beyond mere ethnocentrism or retribution when they involved themselves in the settler colonial process, using the language and methods that their ally, the United States, had created to dehumanize western Indians, in order to call for an American military presence in the region to erase southern Plains history and land claims.

After moving to the region and immediately...