2
" Apart from Cherokee freedpeople, Cherokee citizens also spoke out against the present of African Americans from the United States. In 1894, the editor of the Cherokee Advocate incited his fellow tribesmen to resist both Black and white migration, telling them to ‘Be men, and fight off the barnacles that now infest our country in the shape of non-citizens, free Arkansas ni—ers, and traitors.’
Anti-Black sentiment like this encouraged Native peoples to ignore Indian freedpeople’s shared histories with their nations and to inaccurately associate them with Black interlopers from the United States. Indian freedpeople fought this attitude by attempting to differentiate themselves. When Mary Grayson was interviewed in 1937 as part of the Works Progress Administration Slave Narrative project, she illustrated this dichotomy, saying ‘I am what we colored people call a ‘native.’ That means I didn’t come into the Indian country from somewhere in the Old South, after the War, like so many Negroes did, but I was born here in the Old Creek Nation and my master was a Creek Indian. Mary felt that her experiences of enslavement were better than those of Black Americans, arguing that ‘I have had people who were slaves of white folks tell me that they had to work awfully hard and their masters were cruel to them, but all the Negroes I knew who belonged to Creeks always had plenty of clothes and lots to eat and we all lived in good log cabins we built.’ Mary clearly demarcated her history and circumstances from those of African Americans from the United States. Mary’s assertion of her identity as a ‘native’ rather than a newcomer (like other Blacks in the West) is reflective of a key component of the settler colonial process—strategic differentiation. "
― Alaina E. Roberts , I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land
4
" 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. Moreover, they followed their physical appropriation of Plains Indians’ land with an erasure of their predecessor’s history. 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. 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.
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. 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…. "
― Alaina E. Roberts , I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land
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" The Five Tribes not only physically displaced other Indian nations in Indian Territory; they erased the history of southern Plains people and drafted a new history of Indian Territory. For example, in 1955, the Chickasaws built their council house, a sixteen-by-twenty-five-foot log house. Here, the Chickasaws rewrote their constitution and took their first actions as a sovereign legislature, under the first Chickasaw governor, Cyrus Harris. Although the log house was quickly replaced (within the next year or so) by a brick iteration, the log house serves a particular purpose in the pantheon of Chickasaw public history. In 1911, the Wapanucka Press, an Oklahoma-based newspaper, interviewed someone (presumably a representative of the Chickasaw Nation) about the story of the log house’s origins. The paper reported, ‘Slaves of the Chickasaws toiled in the dense oak forests cutting down the finest trees and hewing them into shape…Thick undergrowth was cleared from a knoll…paths were cut from bottom meadows.’ Rough-hewn and surrounded by overgrown foliage, the log house is meant to evoke the idea that the Chickasaws encountered a ‘wilderness’ in early Indian Territory. The reader is meant to believe that, as civilizers, the Chickasaws shaped this wilderness into the modern space that it became. This idea of ‘civilization’ is based on Euro-American colonizer’ ideas of advanced societies. The Cherokee Nation alleges on its website that ‘upon earliest contact with European explorers in the 1500s, Cherokee Nation was identified as one of the most advanced among Native American tribes.’ Although the Cherokees were asserting their longevity as a people and their pride in their culture, here they use a European measurement of their merit.
In the nineteenth century, the Five Tribes succeeded at crafting a perception of difference. The western Indians certainly saw them as settlers. The special agent to the Comanches reported that they were angry that tribes such as the Creeks and Choctaws ‘have extended their occupation and improvements to the country heretofore used by themselves as a hunting ground,’ expressing that they saw the Five tribes as unlawful settlers, just like whites, and themselves as the dispossessed indigenous peoples of the region. "
― Alaina E. Roberts , I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land
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" The labor of enslaved women and men was crucial to the Five Tribes’ economic and social success in Indian Territory... Preserved through family lines and nourished by increasing dividends, Black chattel slavery had bene an element of life in the Five Tribes for decades by the time of the Civil War.” Pg 23
“The Five Tribes, to varying degrees, adapted the institution of slavery to suit their own needs beginning in the late 1700s and intensifying in the early 1800s. Along with the institution of slavery the Five Tribes also adopted other parts of American ‘civilization,’ such as Euro-American clothing, agriculture, political language, religion….while retaining aspects of their own culture. As in the United States, the majority of people in the Five Tribes did not own slaves. Yet, Indian elites created an economy and culture that highly valued and regulated slavery and the rights of slave owners…In 1860, about thirty years after their removal to Indian Territory from their respective homes in the Southeast, Cherokee Nation members owned 2,511 slaves (15 percent of their total population), Choctaw members owned 2,349 slaves (14 percent of their total population, and Creek members owned 975 slaves, which amounted to 18 percent of their total population, a proportion equivalent to that of white slave owners in Tennessee, a former neighbor of the Chickasaw Nation. Slave labor allowed wealthy Indians to rebuild the infrastructure of their lives even bigger and better than before. John Ross, a Cherokee chief, lived in a log cabin directly after Removal. After a few years, he replaced this dwelling with a yellow mansion, complete with a columned porch. "
― Alaina E. Roberts , I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land
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" Through their use of the settler colonial process and the use of enslaved labor to build social, economic, and political capital, the Five Tribes have become so synonymous with Oklahoma that, nearly 190 years after they arrived in the region, most Americans think they are indigenous to the state. This is, of course, not the case…In attempting to use the American government as a mediator in their issues with the western tribes, the Five Tribes were not unique; since European contact Native people had used alliances with various colonial powers to wage wars against enemies or to gain protection from them. What was different in this context was the language used by the Five Tribes, which portrayed these other nations as uncivilized by Euro-American measurements that had essentially become their own—or which they, at least, were willing to use for rhetorical effect. This was an essential part of their colonial process…
The Five Tribes’ rise and fall as settlers accepted by the American government in Indian Territory was strongly connected to their use of enslaved labor to ‘tame’ the land. Their adoption of the institution of slavery allowed them to cast themselves as civilizers like whites, who had encouraged their acceptance of this institution. "
― Alaina E. Roberts , I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land
