I've Been Here All the While

Black Freedom on Native Land

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Pub Date 05 Apr 2021 | Archive Date 09 Apr 2021

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Description

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from.

In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others.

Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All...


Advance Praise

"In I've Been Here All the While, historian Alaina E. Roberts tells a riveting story about Indian Territory in the Reconstruction era that illuminates a broader national moment. A descendant of the African Americans, Chickasaws, and white settlers about whom she writes, Roberts speaks in a bold voice and advances a provocative argument, urging readers to see how the various groups who migrated to Indian Territory by choice or by force all consciously participated in a process of settler colonialism and thus a national narrative. Scholars of the U.S. West, African American history and Native American history, and descendants of the many populations Roberts carefully recovers and calls to account, will want to contend with the complex portrayal she offers of family, land, hope, and loss."—Tiya Miles, author of The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits

"A revealing and heartfelt book. Alaina E. Roberts' study, clear-eyed and richly ironic, is of the tangled story of Blacks, Indians, and whites during those years when the reconstructing nation was sorting out who would be in and out of the American family. Her focus is one of the most underappreciated theaters of that story, Indian Territory. More broadly, Roberts has given us as well something of a meditation on the universal human desire for home and belonging."—Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado

"In her elegant book, Alaina E. Roberts powerfully illuminates themes of freedom, ownership, belonging, citizenship, opportunity, land, and colonialism in the crucible of mid-nineteenth-century Indian Territory."—Kathleen DuVal, author of Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution

"Combining family history and rigorous research, this brilliant text deepens our understanding of post-Civil War Reconstruction by interrogating what happened in Indian Territory, revealing the layered wreckage wrought on the Native nations and formerly enslaved Africans, all entrapped in the pernicious logic of settler-colonialism."—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

"In I've Been Here All the While, historian Alaina E. Roberts tells a riveting story about Indian Territory in the Reconstruction era that illuminates a broader national moment. A descendant of the...


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Featured Reviews

An interesting book that I didn’t know a lot about.-Indian territory in the reconstruction era. What made it special is that the author/historian is a descendant of the African American and Native American groups from which she writes. This is a well researched and scholarly book.

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"I've Been Here All the While" by Alaina E. Roberts
Release Date: 4.9.2021

Most Blacks never received the promise of "40 acres and a mule," but there were some who did. This book follows the Black frontiersmen and how they were treated once they moved to the west by white settlers and Native Americans. Wow! Ms. Roberts completed much research to write this book. There was a lot of information I was not taught in school, and it was refreshing to read a book about the western expansion and how it affected Blacks and Native Americans!

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This is a Non-Fiction about Black Freedom and Native American's Land. I have to say I found parts of this book very interesting, but I found a lot of this book to just be a list of facts which made it boring to read. I do not read a ton of non-fiction, so maybe that is part of the reason I found the way this book was written was hard to read at times. I think the writing style of the book took a lot away from the story for me. I was kindly provided an e-copy of this book by the publisher or author (Alaina E. Roberts) via NetGalley, so I can give honest review about how I feel about this book. I want to send a big Thank you to them for that. This book is schedule to be release on April 9-2021.

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As a postgraduate student who loves all things research, this book was stellar. This is an extremely well-researched book that covers layers and layers of historical nuances through a collection of primary sources. I really appreciated the extensive notes and further research that can be done after reading this book. Thank you Netgalley and University of Pennsylvania press for a copy of this arc in exchange for an honest review. Looking forward to more of the author's research and publications!

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Roberts contributes to a lesser known part of western and black history: those who lived in Indian Territory. It’s an intriguing read how former enslaved people of the Native American tribes were impacted by political policy and Reconstruction. She also intersperses her own family history within the parameters of the story. I have not read much about this topic so I found the history very interesting. The only thing that surprised me was how brief the book was. Although, the author’s copious footnotes comprise about the last third of the book.

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I found the premise of this book more interesting than the delivery. Learning about Indian freedmen - what the author labels freed slaves of Native Americans rather than white settlers/colonialists, and their history on Native lands during reconstruction and after - sounded interesting to me. I've never read anything on this specific topic before, however I do hope to explore it further. Unfortunately, the book reads like a long list of government acts that led from one event to the next starting with Native removal and segueing into the civil war, theough many different acts and legislation.

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This is such an important book that I plan to teach alongside Toni Morrison's Paradise. The way that the history is told here by Roberts is so compelling that at times it reads like a novel. The nuances and complications of this under-discussed moment in history is told so well here.

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This was a deeply personal, well-researched, and well-articulated that presented a more accurate history of the Civil War and Reconstruction in nineteenth century "Indian Territory" (modern-day Oklahoma state). The author Alaina Roberts has a family history in the area, which spurred her to want to find out more details as well as tell that story in a broader societal context.

In a way, a kind of micro-history, looking at a particular area of land from just before the Civil War up to just after the first World War, it tells the story of the Five Tribes; how they invested in settler colonialism--including chattel slavery--in order to realize their own visions of freedom; how they had already been displaced and in turn displaced other indigenous groups to occupy Indian Territory; and how that willingness to buy into settler colonialism came back to bite them. It also tells the story of those former slaves of Native tribe members, drawing a line between those folks, who Roberts calls "Indian freedpeople," and African Americans, as the two groups had startlingly different experiences in a post-Civil War America, and were often placed in tension and competition with each other. She explores westward expansion and the traditional and almost heroic narratives that have been created around that, all with a familiar aim: the uplifting of white supremacy.

An extraordinarily dense read, Roberts covers a lot of ground and concepts in a relatively small package. With clarity and intention, she considers how oppressed people can in turn oppress other people, how siding with your oppressors never really works out for you in the end (but also, how many alternatives are available?), how we confront and address our unknown or unrecognized legacies, and the deep and ingrained prevalence of capitalistic and individualistic ideals, even 150 years ago.

This work is fascinating and made all the more impactful by the personal connection the author has to the history. It's obviously quite academically minded, as the author is a professor and it was published by a university press, but it still feels quite accessible for anyone who might be interested in learning more about this specific topic. Overall, it introduces a complexity and nuance that is starkly lacking from not only long-established teachings of history, but also is a struggle to find in current discourse. It was a breath of fresh air in that way, and I would recommend for anyone curious to learn more about former Indian Territory.

Many thanks to University of Pennsylvania Press, the author, and Netgalley for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

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Unbeknownst to me, Native American tribes were encouraged to have Black slaves as part of their integration into "civilization." And many of the tribes, Ms. Roberts focuses on the big 5, viewed them in different ways, including one tribe that let the Blacks live on their own and manage their own affairs with servitude consisting of paying a portion of their crop. But after the Civil War, the tribes were told their slaves were now free. Going even farther, the US government forced the Native Americans to give their former slaves land. But only the former slaves of the tribes got land, not the millions of slaves that had been freed in the South! Once again, White Americans used one minority to help subrogate another minority, as this weakened the tribes and allowed an opening for White settles to move in to their territories. I enjoyed how Ms. Roberts intertwined her personal family history throughout her retelling of history, both former slaves and Native Americans. The book felt a bit surface level but that was because Ms. Roberts chose to include substantial information in the notes following the text itself. This made for a quicker but less detailed read.

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Alaina E. Roberts’ I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land is a history of slaves owned by members of the Five Civilized Tribes, forced out of Southeastern and Appalachian states, and relocated to Indian Territory, roughly the Eastern portion of today’s Oklahoma. These tribes—the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole—had, to varying degrees, adopted many of the white man’s ways, for example establishing businesses, printing newspapers, and running cotton and tobacco plantations where the most affluent used slave labor. Forced off their lands by the Indian Removal Act, they brought their slaves with them to Indian Territory, land promised to them forever.

A University of Pittsburgh Assistant Professor, Roberts frames her extensive scholarly research with her personal family history. As she puts it, “I feel so fortunate to have been born into a story so rich I can barely believe it at times. I know that I was gently led to this scholarship by my ancestors, and I hope that I have done justice to their stories and to the stories of the millions of African, African American, and mixed-race people who shared similar experiences.”

In her Introduction, Roberts defines several terms as she will use them and sets forth key arguments that largely redefine portions of U.S. history. Although driven from their homelands because white settlers wanted their lands, Roberts argues that the tribes, along with the enslaved people brought along to Indian Territory, became part of our history of settler colonialism. Like whites who displaced them, they, too, were displacing less “civilized” native tribes forced further west. Additionally, the author argues, when the “Indian freedpeople” received land allotments from the U.S. government, that action merits another look at the dates traditionally assigned to the Reconstruction: 1863-1867. Instead, she believes, the end date should be extended to 1907, the year of Oklahoma statehood. After the Dawes Act resulted in the division of Indian Territory lands into allotments assigned to tribal members and to their former slaves, with significant areas of unassigned lands open to white settlers, the Indian freedpeople temporarily prospered from their land allotments and their new freedom to establish their own black towns. Yet, after granting statehood only a few years later, the U.S. government no longer intervened to help the freedpeople in any way, thus signaling an end to Reconstruction. The new state’s increasing restrictions, which soon led to Jim Crow laws and racial violence, began eating away at the opportunities and hopes of the Reconstruction period.

However, Roberts doesn’t stop with the end of Reconstruction. She takes her history through the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the centennial of which will be commemorated just over two months after the publication of her book. Indian freedpeople, their descendants, and African Americans moving in from other areas retained sufficient self-determination for a time that their new black towns could prosper. The pinnacle of their success was almost certainly the development of a close-knit and financially successful African American community in Tulsa’s Greenwood district, which would earn the nickname Black Wall Street. Unfortunately, as Roberts writes, “Settler colonialism and Reconstruction shared the same end: white Americans and their rights and goals were now the U.S. government’s only concern. No one in the federal government cared when white Tulsans, many of whom were less prosperous and resentful, invaded, looted, and burned Greenwood to the ground following a young white elevator operator’s charge that a young black man had acted inappropriately in a department store elevator—charges she never upheld. The loss was much greater than that of its homes and businesses. Roberts explains how the Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed not only “Black wealth but also the Oklahoma Black memory of self-sufficiency and economic success and racial coalition.” Because so many Greenwood residents fled the city and never returned, to this day no one knows how many people died that night.

In the book’s epilogue, Roberts explains how she grew up in California with little knowledge of the family history she eventually learned from her Oklahoma cousin Travis Roberts. He eventually shared what he had learned of the family’s mixed-race history, first in Mississippi and then in Indian Territory and early Jim Crow Oklahoma. The author was able to hear his stories and visit places relevant to her research. She writes of the world’s familiarity with white American cowboys, strong pioneer families, and Plains Indians but not with the diverse history, such as Oklahoma’s, that is an important part of the true American story. “The book is about the meaning of freedom,” she writes, “about hopes—both dashed and realized—and about identity.”

Roberts’ scholarly accomplishments are many. She has packed her book with solid research, thoroughly documented her sources, and supplemented her source citations with additional facts and explanations. The family history that apparently led her to this study is a priceless treasure happily preserved for all who read her book. My one regret is that the rigors of scholarly research have resulted in large portions written in a dry, formal academic style. While meeting rigorous university demands for publications is a fact of academic life, now and then Roberts demonstrates the human passion and stylistic spark that would capture and hold the interest of a broader audience.

This retired Oklahoma professor thanks NetGalley, the University of Pennsylvania Press, and Alaina E. Roberts for an advance reader copy in exchange for an unbiased review.

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I found this book to be eye opening. I learned so much about American history that I previously did not know. The author did not hold anything back. Without taking sides, she was able to educate the reader on various aspects history. The book details the plight of the Native American populations and their removal from their lands. It also details the ownership of black slaves by the Native American populations and their views on this ownership. Perhaps this was simply my own ignorance but I was completely unaware that so many of the things in this book had taken place.

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I've Been Here All the While by Alaina E Roberts looks at the little known history of First Nations Americans and enslaved Black people they owned during and after Reconstruction. Using secondary sources as well as stories from her own family, she shows the waves of movement westward and how it affected both those who headed west whether forced or voluntary and how it affected both them and those dispossessed from the land including the forced movement of slave-owning tribes and the dispossession of other tribes, the impact of Reconstruction on both and how it offered a chance for Black freedmen to gain land and escape Jim Crow until Oklahoma gained statehood.

This is fairly short but very well-documented and important book about a a part of American history that deserves to be better known. But despite its length, Roberts avoids easy judgments but shows the complexity of the issue and how it affected not only the people in the time period but their descendants.

<i>Thanks to Netgalley and University of Pennsylvania Press for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review</i>

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I’VE BEEN HERE ALL THE WHILE: ⭐️⭐️🌗

I wanted to like this so much, but it just felt extremely dry at times and was hard to hold my attention. The concept is fascinating though.

NOTE: I was provided an arc in exchange for an honest review.

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I really learned a lot about African American and Native American history, it was interesting to see it so intertwined. It was a wonderfully done read and I appreciated the history being told.

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So often in historical study, the binary is one of White Settler and Non-White Settlers, and rarely do we explore the relationships, complexities, and realities outside of this binary. In particular, the relationship and history between non-consenting Black settlers and Indigenous folks to whom the land already belonged. There is a complexity to this history, wherein there is no right answer for what is to be done, or what people ought to have done, as both Black folk and Indigenous folk were enslaved, dispossessed, and dehumanized at the hands of white supremacy (this is also why these contact zones of history are so rarely studied; academia itself is still painfully white). For that, I am glad this text exists and overall it is strong historical research. Non American scholars may find some of the language difficult, as terms for Indigenous people differ quite regionally.

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