Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. The First Settlers of Indian Territory
Chapter 2. Emancipation and Intervention
Chapter 3. Whose Racial Paradise?
Chapter 4. The Last Wave
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
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, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction.
Alaina E. Roberts teaches history at the University of Pittsburgh.
"I’ve Been Here All the While masterfully untangles the many
complicated arrangements in the U.S. government’s settlement of
Indian Territory and its imposition of racial categories and
restrictions. . . . Roberts’s original book will cause historians
to reexamine generalities about Indigenous and Black people in
Oklahoma and their empowerment and identity; and to extend the
story of Reconstruction and its aftermath westward in time and
space."
*Library Journal*
"In a lovingly personal narrative, Roberts weaves her familial
history with Works Progress Administration slave narratives and
testimony from the Dawes Commission to reveal that both Natives and
Black people could be, at varying times, victims and perpetrators
of settler colonialism."
*Journal of Southern History*
"Roberts brings a unique sensibility to her tale. She positions
herself thoughtfully between subject and object, treating the
stories collected from kith and kin with a receptive yet critical
stance. These family histories are gracefully interwoven with
interpretation from documentary sources. . . . I’ve Been Here All
the While will endure and inspire."
*Journal of the Civil War Era*
"Exploring race and the making and remaking of Indian Territory and
later Oklahoma, [I've Been Here All the While] broadens and
complicates how we think about claims to land, community formation,
and race in the West, making it a well-timed and welcome read [that
is] hard to put down."
*The Journal of African American Studies*
"Roberts’s book is refreshing in both its complexity and
conciseness...While well-written and engaging, the most heroic feat
of the text is the author’s willingness to confront the realities
of Oklahoma territorial history and take a deep dive into the
nuances of settler colonialism, enslavement, dispossession, and
wealth that outline the experiences of generations of diverse
people...The book is a welcome addition to historical scholarship
on land
rights and political economy while also a weighty perspective on
the relationships and experiences of past and present. "
*The Chronicles of Oklahoma*
"[A] moving historical account of land, power, and settler
colonialism in Indian Territory...Roberts has added compelling
insights to this impressive and still-growing historiography."
*New Mexico Historical Review*
"In I've Been Here All the While, historian Alaina E. Roberts tells
a riveting story about Indian Territory in the Reconstruction era
that illuminates a broader national moment. A descendant of the
African Americans, Chickasaws, and white settlers about whom she
writes, Roberts speaks in a bold voice and advances a provocative
argument, urging readers to see how the various groups who migrated
to Indian Territory by choice or by force all consciously
participated in a process of settler colonialism and thus a
national narrative. Scholars of the U.S. West, African American
history and Native American history, and descendants of the many
populations Roberts carefully recovers and calls to account, will
want to contend with the complex portrayal she offers of family,
land, hope, and loss."
*Tiya Miles, author of The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery
and Freedom in the City of the Straits*
"A revealing and heartfelt book. Alaina E. Roberts' study,
clear-eyed and richly ironic, is of the tangled story of Blacks,
Indians, and whites during those years when the reconstructing
nation was sorting out who would be in and out of the American
family. Her focus is one of the most underappreciated theaters of
that story, Indian Territory. More broadly, Roberts has given us as
well something of a meditation on the universal human desire for
home and belonging."
*Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians,
Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado*
"In her elegant book, Alaina E. Roberts powerfully illuminates
themes of freedom, ownership, belonging, citizenship, opportunity,
land, and colonialism in the crucible of mid-nineteenth-century
Indian Territory."
*Kathleen DuVal, author of Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of
the American Revolution*
"Combining family history and rigorous research, this brilliant
text deepens our understanding of post-Civil War Reconstruction by
interrogating what happened in Indian Territory, revealing the
layered wreckage wrought on the Native nations and formerly
enslaved Africans, all entrapped in the pernicious logic of
settler-colonialism."
*Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of
the United States*
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