I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land by Alaina E. Roberts (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land by Alaina E. Roberts Circe Sturm (bio) I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land by Alaina E. Roberts University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021 IN HER FIRST BOOK, I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, historian Alaina E. Roberts offers a powerful and sophisticated account of Indian Territory in the Reconstruction era. Letting the land guide her lines of inquiry, Roberts makes a number of provocative arguments that upend traditional accounts of Reconstruction. By focusing on land contests in Indian Territory, she showcases the intimate connections between Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty that were articulated and enacted during this period, especially as they were expressed in debates about tribal citizenship, community belonging, and territorial authority over land. In doing so, she extends the timeframe of Reconstruction another thirty years to include the allotment era at the turn of the century, when Indian freedpeople, meaning the former Black slaves of Chickasaws, Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles, were allotted tribal lands by the Dawes Commission. She argues that this often-overlooked time and place are in fact critical to historical accounts of Reconstruction because for a short time Indian Territory was one of the last places where Black people could escape Jim Crow, find land, and exercise political rights until Oklahoma Statehood in 1907. Roberts is careful not to romanticize the nature of this land holding or to ignore the contests over political authority that were taking place in the region. In fact, throughout the book she makes a strong case that all the various groups that arrived in Indian Territory, whether by force or choice, participated in settler colonialism and that they did so consciously and strategically to improve their own standing. According to Roberts, that strategic participation is as true for the Five Civilized Tribes that were removed from their homelands in the east and forced to settle on the traditional territories of other tribal communities, such as the Caddo, Kiowa, and Comanche, as it is for their former slaves who once walked the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory alongside them. What is so provocative about this argument is that Roberts convincingly challenges the standard racial narratives that are associated with settler-colonial theory, principally the idea that settlers are typically white. Instead, she carefully demonstrates how Blacks, Indian freedpeople, and Native Americans also participated in the project of settler [End Page 148] colonialism whenever they built communities on the homelands of other Indigenous people. The story of Indian Territory centers on the promise of freedom and autonomy that comes with land tenure, a longing that was shared by all the different migrants to the area; however, as Roberts so carefully points out, these dreams were largely realized through the expropriation of Indigenous land. She is unflinching in her critiques of the anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity that are at the heart of settler-colonial processes and are so evident in her historical account. Yet Roberts still manages to write with sympathy and compassion about all of the actors in her narrative. Her capacity to do so, I think, stems in part from her own positioning and how it informs her work. As a descendant of African Americans, Chickasaws, and whites who settled in Indian Territory, Roberts weaves her own family history into the narrative, bringing to light stories that might otherwise be left untold. In fact, of all the former slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes, Chickasaw freedpeople are the ones about which we know the least. Often, they have been marginalized in the historiography because they were the one group of emancipated slaves who were never granted tribal citizenship by their former owners. Though its subject matter ranges far beyond the case of the Chickasaws, Roberts's book does an excellent job of addressing these historical lacunae. This book establishes Roberts as a powerful new voice in the field of African American and Native American history. Rarely have I encountered a first book that is so meticulously researched, methodologically innovative, theoretically sophisticated and original, while also being entirely accessible to a general reader. Readers...