Trail Sisters: Freedwomen in Indian Territory, 1850–1890

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. In addition to numerous articles, Littlefield’s early books include Africans and Seminoles, The Cherokee Freedmen, Africans and Creeks, and Chickasaw Freedmen . David A. Y. O. Chang, “Where Will the Nation Be at Home? Race, Nationalism , and Emigration Movements in the Creek Nation,” in Miles and Holland, Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds, 81. 2. Piker, “Indians and Race in Early America.” 3. Gibson, Oklahoma, 4, 64–65; Chavez, “Freedmen Vow to Continue Fighting Cherokee Nation for Their Rights.” 4. Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society and Cherokee Women. 5. Walker, Anything We Love Can Be Saved, 89–90, 100. For a discussion of blood quantum, see Schmidt, “American Indian Identity and Blood Quantum in the 21st Century.” 6. Perdue, “Indians in the Segregated South.” 7. Bunn and Bunn, Constitution and Enabling Act of the State of Oklahoma, 123. Chapter 1 1. Gibson, The American Indian, 309–20. See also Baird and Goble, The Story of Oklahoma, 125–147; Gibson, Oklahoma, 53–70; Foreman, Indian Removal, best covers the African Americans held by the Five Tribes during this removal process. 2. Gibson, The American Indian, 320–23; Foreman, Indian Removal, 229–312. 3. Gibson, The American Indian, 323–24, 327–28; Foreman, Indian Removal, 19–104, 193–226. Notes •150• 4. Gibson, The American Indian, 325–27; Foreman, Indian Removal, 107–90. 5. Gibson, The American Indian, 328–29; Foreman, Indian Removal, 315–86. 6. Gibson, Oklahoma, 84–97; Baird and Goble, The Story of Oklahoma, 151–69. 7. Perdue, “People without a Place,” 31–37; Mulroy, The Seminole Freedmen, 5–7; Sweetie Ivery Wagoner in Baker and Baker, The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives, 442; Halliburton, “Origins of Black Slavery among the Cherokees,” 483–96. The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives (hereafter Oklahoma Slave Narratives) must be used with care. There is, of course, the problem of confusion in memory resulting from the advanced age (seventy-three to ninety) of the informants. In addition , inexperienced interviewers sometimes pursued question lines related to their own interests and perspectives and attempted to capture the colloquialism of the informant’s speech. The interviews provide fascinating insight and surprisingly candid information, however. The publication of the Baker and Baker book added thirteen previously unpublished interviews that had been unexamined since the 1930s; they are located in the archives of the Oklahoma Historical Society. Narratives taken from the Indian Pioneer History Collection at the University of Oklahoma will be noted by informant name, IPH, volume, and page number. 8. Perdue, “People without a Place,” 31–37; Halliburton, “Origins of Black Slavery among the Cherokees,” 483–96; McReynolds, The Seminoles, 143. 9. Doran, “Negro Slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes,” 337; Merrell, “The Problem of Slavery in the Cherokee Culture,” 509–14; Halliburton, “Origins of Black Slavery among the Cherokees,” 486; Perdue, “Cherokee Planters, Black Slaves, and African Colonization,” 329; Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society. By far the most work on Indian slaveholding until recently has focused on the Cherokee Nation. The early literacy of the Cherokees, the abundant availability of English print sources, and the fact that the Cherokees were the largest slaveholders in Indian Territory make a broader analysis possible. Claudio Saunt makes the argument in Black, White, and Indian that the transition years from the East to the circumstances of Indian Territory contributed to Creek racial inflexibility that both received and inflicted cruelty on multiracial Creek families. 10. Miller, “Frontier Freedom,” 82; John Armstrong, quoted in May, African Americans and Native Americans in the Cherokee and Creek Nations, 60–61, from an interview in the Doris Duke Oral History Collection, Western History Collections , University of Oklahoma. Although there is little documented evidence for slave attachment to Indian removal groups, it is also mentioned in Gaskin, Black Baptists in Oklahoma, 82–85; Littlefield and Littlefield, “The Beams Family,” 26, 28. The Choctaw leader Tandy Walker used words almost identical to those of Douglas Cooper in the discussion of the new Constitution of 1858, cited in Kidwell, The Choctaws in Oklahoma, 46. Ella Coody Robinson, IPH 77: 97–98. 11. Doran, “Negro Slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes,” 336–41. Notes •151• 12. Saunt, A New Order of Things, 111–35 139–63. Theda Perdue presents a much more balanced gender relationship among the Cherokees in Cherokee Women. McLoughlin, “Red Indians, Black Slavery and White Racism,” 368. 13. May, African Americans and Native...