Black Slaves and Indian Owners: The Continuous Rediscovery of Indian Territory

Abstract

This essay provides an analysis of historiographical trends in the study of the Five Tribes (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Nations) and the Black women and men who were enslaved in, and part of, their nations in the Southeast and, after Indian Removal, in Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma). The author divides the scholarship she covers into two broad time periods: the 1930s to the 1970s and the 1980s to today. From work in the early 1900s that examined these Native people without real engagement with their practices of slaveholding to research today that uses the lenses of race, gender, and tribal sovereignty to excavate Black stories, the author pinpoints a key shift in the 1970s and 1980s resulting from the Black and Native activism of the day.