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Plainsword This book—Trail Sisters—is a history of relationships, complex interactions that resulted from twin nineteenth-century mass movements of Americans to what is today Oklahoma. These were the unstoppable Euro-American settlements from the South Atlantic Coast westward and the ethnic cleansing of Native peoples from their homelands, a coerced westward movement now known as Removal . Also caught up in these brutal dislocations were black slaves and free African Americans. Admirably, it is the resultant multidimensional permutations of female relationships upon which Linda Williams Reese has chosen to focus. The Indigenous women of this history include both those already residing within Oklahoma and those who were forced into mass migrations by newly formed southern states and the U.S. government. The resistant refugees came from all parts of the American South. Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, Seminoles, and Choctaws—known today as the Five Tribes—were relegated to the eastern end of Oklahoma in a violent process that exacted countless lives en route. As the survivors struggled to attach themselves to new lands among existing Indigenous peoples, the Five Tribes witnessed the pouring in of Indian peoples from northern regions of the United States and from Texas and the Southwest. With the agricultural potential of the Plains still untapped by Euro-American powerbrokers , the federal government saw the Oklahoma Territory as a repository for the Indigenous from wherever white people wanted them uprooted. That ethnic cleansing had powerful appeal. Plainsword •xii• Some in the Five Tribes embraced black slavery and brought slaves with them. Free blacks found escape or sometimes legal means of migrating to Oklahoma. The Civil War brought disruption and death to the Territory’s Indigenous nations, yet also the onset of freedom for all African Americans dwelling there. The post-Civil War era would see even further division of Oklahoma lands as new Euro-American settlers competed for homesteads, often on lands already occupied. This book could not have been written without the groundbreaking work of previous historians drawn to the struggles of this nervous and claimed North American hinterland. Numerous historians of the Five Tribes and other Indian nations have helped illuminate the way. Early on, Grant Foreman, Angie Debo, Vine Deloria, Jr., and Annie Abel, among others, made seminal inroads. More modern treatments have shifted the emphasis to social history and delineated the agency of all participants. For this we are grateful to Gary Anderson, Willard Rollings, Susan Miller, Blue Clark, Daniel Littlefield, Jr., and again so many others. Of particular significance is the Southeastern Indian series edited by Theda Perdue and Michael Green and published by the University of Nebraska Press. Note also the important books on Creeks by Green and Cherokees by Perdue. With Trail Sisters, Linda Williams Reese adds to the corpus a most significant contribution. Her work is particularly informed by the invaluable oral histories collected in Oklahoma during the New Deal era, rich documents that Reese has brought to life. That alone would be enough to distinguish this important book. We hear the voices of those many women who personally witnessed upheaval or became repositories for the stories their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, and great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers passed on so that all could learn, and remember. John R. Wunder Lincoln, Nebraska ...

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