The University of North Carolina Press

376 pp., 5.5 x 8.5, 6 illus., 8 maps, appends., notes, bibl., index

The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-3203-5

Published: July 2008

Paper

ISBN  978-0-8078-5883-7

Published: July 2008

African Cherokees in Indian Territory

From Chattel to Citizens

By Celia E. Naylor

---

Forcibly removed from their homes in the late 1830s, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians brought their African-descended slaves with them along the Trail of Tears and resettled in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. Celia E. Naylor vividly charts the experiences of enslaved and free African Cherokees from the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma's entry into the Union in 1907. Carefully extracting the voices of former slaves from interviews and mining a range of sources in Oklahoma, she creates an engaging narrative of the composite lives of African Cherokees. Naylor explores how slaves connected with Indian communities not only through Indian customs--language, clothing, and food--but also through bonds of kinship.

Examining this intricate and emotionally charged history, Naylor demonstrates that the "red over black" relationship was no more benign than "white over black." She presents new angles to traditional understandings of slave resistance and counters previous romanticized ideas of slavery in the Cherokee Nation. She also challenges contemporary racial and cultural conceptions of African-descended people in the United States. Naylor reveals how black Cherokee identities evolved reflecting complex notions about race, culture, "blood," kinship, and nationality. Indeed, Cherokee freedpeople's struggle for recognition and equal rights that began in the nineteenth century continues even today in Oklahoma.

About the Author

Celia E. Naylor is assistant professor of history at Dartmouth College.

Reviews

"Provocative and impressive . . . elucidate[s] a highly significant area of study within Indian slave-holding communities. . . . Highly recommend[ed]."
--Georgia Historical Quarterly

"A welcome contribution to one of the more important trends in the historiography of southeastern Indians: the recent expansion of scholarship on race, slavery, and the struggles of freedmen within the Five Tribes."
--American Historical Review

"Will take its rightful place as a significant contribution to the topic of nineteenth-century African-Indian relationships."
--H-Net Reviews

"A rich and textured glimpse of life, work, love and loss in Indian Territory."
--West Virginia History

In this bold and soulful book, Celia Naylor accomplishes something novel--a historical survey of slavery and emancipation in the Cherokee Nation from the perspective of enslaved blacks and freedpeople themselves. Her penetrating analysis of this unknown world of bondage reveals both the close cultural ties and harsh material realities that characterized the peculiar institution in Indian Territory.
--Tiya Miles, author of Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom

"Celia Naylor has produced a bold, well-written book on a highly provocative and critically important topic, the story of African American people who were enslaved not by Europeans but by Native Americans. The work is bold and original because it does not shy away from two central contradictions: that slaves and their descendants can partially identify with their former masters, and that people who have experienced racial prejudice themselves can adopt racial prejudice against others. Anyone interested in the comparative history of slavery, western history, identity politics, and the intersections of race, culture, and nationalism will count this work as essential reading."
--Circe Sturm, University of Oklahoma