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A Different Forty Acres: Land, Kin, and Migration in the Late Nineteenth-Century West
- The Journal of the Civil War Era
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 10, Number 2, June 2020
- pp. 213-232
- 10.1353/cwe.2020.0026
- Article
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Abstract:
This essay utilizes Dawes Roll testimonies to argue that by using land and migration as categories of analyses, we see how some Black and mixed-race Chickasaw freedpeople (women and men formerly enslaved by Chickasaw Indians) exercised their freedom after the Civil War not by leaving their former spaces of enslavement, but by choosing to remain in these locations. In laying claim to the land of the Five Tribes in Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), people of African descent documented the ways they had come to identify with land and space through shared hardships and Black and Black Indian kinship connections. Thus, for these people, Reconstruction in the West centered more on the attainment of land and belonging than on the realization of formal citizenship rights.