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Q  Q  Q Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q INTRODUCTION Oklahoma as America “Oklahoma” means “red man” in the Choctaw language, is run though by a “Black Belt,” and has been claimed by some as “white man’s country.” It has been termed an Indian homeland, a black promised land, and a white heartland.1 All these competing racial claims to one place seem extraordinary . This book suggests, however, that Oklahoma is really exceptional only because it encapsulates so much American history within its borders, revealing much about how the struggle over land has given shape to the way Americans—indigenous, black, and white—created and gave meaning to races and nations. Phrases like the ones above mark Oklahoma with a race and tie that race to the land. Of course, land itself cannot have a race. Race is a way that we imagine differences between people and make hierarchies among them seem right and natural. So racializing a land (marking it with a race) really means tying it to a particular people, whether they be Creek Indians, African Americans, white Americans, or some other group that we believe can be identified racially in some way. After all, speaking of “a land” is also a way of speaking of a country or a nation. The title of this book is an attempt to evoke this relationship between land, race, and nationhood. This book considers both the symbolic power people give land in such terms as “homeland,” “Black Belt,” or “white man’s country” and the economic power that land possesses. Oklahoma, like the rest of America, was until recently a largely rural and agricultural society. Land was a foundational form of wealth, a source of power, and an object of contention in that so- 2 ■ INTRODUCTION ciety. To understand the differences of wealth and power between people of different races, we must understand the place of land in their histories. The Color of the Land tells part of this story through the history of the Creek Nation and its lands, which now constitute much of east-central Oklahoma. This is a place that straddles the South and the West. Here, just as cotton fields abutted ranchlands, southern history collides with western history. The past of east-central Oklahoma brings together the histories of American Indians, African Americans, and white Americans. The nature of this story is suggested by two iconic images that the words “Oklahoma history” might call up for many Americans. In the first, a covered wagon rumbles westward across the prairie. A white settler family makes its way to a fine patch of virgin grassland that the father has already claimed when he, along with thousands of other white men on horseback, made a mad dash at the signal of a starting gun to stake a homestead in the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889. The second image that might come to mind is an overburdened jalopy chugging down Route 66. In it, the Joads in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) head westward out of Oklahoma , leaving the desolation of the Dust Bowl behind. This pair of images is telling. The covered wagon heading in is paired with the broken-down car heading out. Together, the images frame the story of white settlement with movement: the arrival of white settlers in 1889 and the departure of their children only forty years later. If one looks a little more closely, they also frame that story with the issue of landownership. The settlers of 1889 came in search of farmland. The Joads left, Steinbeck tells us, because as landless tenant farmers, they could be blown off the land like so much dust by the whim of the cotton market and the order of a bank.2 For all the shortcomings of these images (where are the Indians? the blacks? the oil? the Oklahomans who stayed in the state in the 1930s?), they capture a certain truth. The history of Oklahoma is a history of movement, possession, and dispossession. It is American history told in fast-forward. It captures the dynamics of global history in the middle of a continent. In east-central Oklahoma, peoples who traced their ancestry to indigenous America, Europe, and Africa came, worked the land, and then to a large extent either had it taken...

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