The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 (review)

David Chang's The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 masterfully combines extensive archival research, sophisticated analysis, and a widely accessible writing style. As much a history of the legal and political dimensions of landowning in the region once known as Indian Territory, it is also a study of the meaning of place in the personal lives, community relations, and national politics of the Creeks, African Americans, and Euro-Americans who lived in Indian Territory (or, later, Oklahoma). Placing the people and territory of the Creek Nation at the center of his work, Chang offers a history of land use, racial identity, class divisions, and property rights that is regional in focus but national in scope. Consequently, this is a book that will appeal to readers across a wide range of fields who are interested in a broad array of questions about what it meant to work and own the land.

Divided into three sections, the book both thematically and chronologically takes the federal government's land allotment policies as its touchstone. Before the allotment era, Chang's work suggests, Creeks debated issues of property rights largely on their own terms. Although their ideas and practices necessarily reflected their economic, social, and political dealings with the federal government and Euro-Americans, Creeks were adaptive and not merely reactive.

In the early nineteenth century, older patterns of communal land use shifted with the emergence of chattel slavery. Creek towns, not people, continued to claim ownership of the land, but because property rights rested on the ability to work the land, owning enslaved laborers vastly expanded slaveholders' property rights in land use. After their forced removal from the South to Indian Territory, modest farmers increasingly joined the small contingent of wealthy planters in the shift toward private rather than collective agriculture. Slavery and the attendant categories of racial identification informed not only definitions of labor and property but also citizenship and national identity, with free and enslaved people of African descent denied citizenship.

After the Civil War, Creek debates over race and citizenship were simultaneously debates over land use. Nearly two thousand black Creeks, who accounted for 13 percent of the Creek Nation's population, were emancipated from slavery and, like other Creek citizens, had the right to work the land for their own benefit. Conflicts over access to land took center stage in Creek politics in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with black and nonblack Creek farmers forging political alliances in opposition to wealthy Creek planters who fenced in vast swaths of land as their private property. Small-scale farmers opposed this consolidation of land, arguing that it ran counter to the Creek tradition of common access. This alliance of farmers, Chang argues, championed not only the idea of land as national property but also resisted the racialized definitions of nation and citizenship embraced by former slave-holders in the Creek Nation and the United States. Chang is careful not to romanticize the alliances between black and nonblack Creeks and does not dismiss the enduring, pernicious legacies of slavery and racism. Nonetheless, he offers a tremendously insightful and persuasive analysis that examines the dynamics of Creek town-based political institutions, oral tradition, and farmers' shared experiences and expectations, all of which informed black and nonblack Creeks' defense of both the commons and a pluralistic nation. Here, and throughout the book, Chang illuminates the complexity of Creek political thought and action, especially in relation to questions of land use, wealth, and national identity. This is accomplished in large measure through the book's painstaking attention to the lives and interests of small-scale farmers rather than the often-inflammatory and potentially misleading rhetoric of prominent landowners and political leaders.

By the end of the century, all Creek citizens confronted a singular challenge to their nation's political and territorial autonomy: mounting pressure...