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  • African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens
  • Kevin T. Barksdale
African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens. By Celia E. Naylor. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. ix, 360.)

Celia E. Naylor’s African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens traces the tangled relationship between African Americans and the western Cherokee from removal (1838) through the formation of Oklahoma (1907). Relying heavily on the Works Progress Administration’s slave narratives, Naylor captures the lives of slaves and freed people residing in the Cherokee Nation and their efforts to resist their enslavement, forge multiracial identities, and obtain Indian citizenship.

Naylor dedicates the first two chapters of her work to African Indian slave resistance in an effort to challenge historical misconceptions regarding Native American slavery. By recounting brazen acts of slave resistance (escapes and violence directed at slaveholders) and covert “day-to-day” defiance, Naylor refutes the historical contention that the Amerindian version of slavery was more benevolent than its counterpart in the southeast. She argues that the Cherokee Nation rejected the opportunity created by removal to abandon slavery, and chose instead to further enmesh the institution within their western communities. Removal and the accompanying political power struggle provided slaves an unprecedented opportunity to resist enslavement.

Despite their efforts to exploit the turmoil surrounding removal, most slaves embraced their Indianness (89). Naylor examines the complicated interplay between blood quanta, cultural bonds, and African Cherokee identity. Through racial intermixing (biracial African Cherokee) and selective acculturation (i.e., foodways, clothing, and language), slaves embraced their Native American identity and deep cultural connections to their Indian communities.

The Civil War disrupted these multiethnic communities by intensifying the slavery debate and injecting sectional tensions into Indian Territory. Naylor’s account of the war within the Cherokee Nation proves that [End Page 109] geographical distance did not “insulate” western residents from the political debates and violence (126). Cherokee antislavery, pro-Union organizations such as the Keetoowah Society clashed with proslavery, Confederate groups such as the Knights of the Golden Circle. The threats posed by these clashes led many slaveholders to reluctantly seek refuge in Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas, and the dislocation proved equally traumatic for their slaves. The Civil War did provide slaves another opportunity to escape, but most longed to return to their adopted Indian homelands.

The final two chapters examine the postbellum struggle by freed people to secure Cherokee citizenship in the face of escalating racism. Following the Civil War, African Indians’ cultural ties and desires for social integration found expression in the “articulated nationalism” they demonstrated toward the Cherokee Nation (155). For the next four decades, African Indians pressed for full Cherokee citizenship rights and access to governmental annuity payments and land grants. Despite being spared much of the racially motivated political violence occurring across America, African Cherokees faced determined opposition from inside and outside of the Cherokee Nation to their demands. Efforts within the Cherokee leadership to exclude freed people from the numerous Indian roles using complex blood quanta formulas and governmental policies designed to strip property rights from all of the Cherokee, heightened tensions within the Cherokee Nation. Intertribal disputes combined with the fear that Oklahoma would become a “black state” as a result of the postwar “Great Negro Exodus” to the West, fueled support for segregation (188–89). Racial segregation was a harsh reality in Oklahoma by the time it emerged as America’s forty-sixth state, and the African Indian dream of full citizenship remained elusive.

Celia E. Naylor’s refutation of benevolent Indian slavery and description of African Amerindian acculturation are not revelatory. Historians Theda Perdue and William G. McLoughlin have offered similar studies of slavery within the Cherokee Nation. Naylor also fails to connect the post-removal socioeconomic dynamics occurring among the western Cherokee to the plight of the slaveholding eastern band. Despite these criticisms, African Cherokees in Indian Territory offers readers a rich and textured glimpse of life, work, love, and loss in Indian Territory. [End Page 110]

Kevin T. Barksdale
Marshall University
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