Suggested books about Oklahoma Freedmen
In 1906 over twenty thousand people had been classified as Freedmen of the Five Tribes. After a century the number of twenty thousand will more than tripled in number, and clearly over one hundred thousand of descendants today
can claim ancestry among those thousands from 1906.
Broken down more specifically by nation:
This seldom studied history of the lives of Freed people in Indian Territory deserves attention by Oklahoma-focused historians and also by the state's historical archives.
Scholars from several disciplines are urged to examine this history and engage with the community of people who descend from the twenty thousand. Their presence has been on the soil of Oklahoma for more than a century. The Freedmen and their parents and grandparents were present in Indian Territory 9 whole decades before statehood. Yet---so little is known about them.
1) Many arrived in the 1830s as enslaved people. They traveled on the same Trail of Tears spoken about from the Oklahoma Historical Society, to the shores of the Atlantic seabord, yet slavery in the Territory is not taught, nor studied. It is time to change.
2) Once freed, the newly emancipated began their lives in the tribal communities into which they had been immersed, as now a bilingual, bicultural, and in some cases, bi-racial people. Living within two segments of territorical life, the Freedmen emerged as people with a "hybrid" existance, navigating life and facing challenges of frontier and their tribal cultural base.
3) Politics and anti-black racial sentiments, influenced many challenges Freedmen faced, including a racial bias towards them for having African ancestry. The struggles included the effort to become full citizens in the land of their birth and to claim their legacy as citizens of the nations where they had lived as a people enslaved for decades. Some found resistance by the same people who enslaved them, carrying forth racial biases to the present time. Descendants now face a climate where their presence is dismissed on the basis on whether they possess the blood line of the families that enslaved them, as if blood line determine inclusion in a community that perceives to be a "nation" in a country where citizenship is not based on blood line.
The plight of Oklahoma's Freedmen and their Descendants is a subject that demands truly objective analysis and scholarship. Therefore a call and plea is made to members of the academic community to extend their focus into this overlooked arena.
Twenty thousand people should not be overlooked! The number of Freedmen from Indian Territory is an impressive number and clearly this is a population that deserves to studied from every academic perspective. Historians have at least made a few efforts to document the history in the past 30 years. But academicians have much work that can be done within their discipline.
Sociologists are needed to study the demographics and the social dynamics of the five groups of people classified as Freedmen. They are needed to study how the Freedmen of these Five Indian Tribes fared and how eventually their status and recognition would change as the decades of the 20th century passed.
Psychologists can pursue issues of identity and self definition by examining the issues and struggle of those who embrace a tribal identity today and who are met with rejection from the tribes to which they have a tie.
Anthropologists have yet to begin to study the cultural norms and language, foodways, traditions, burial practices of Freedmen and how they have changed over time.
Archeaologists have much to explore, with the now disappeared black towns that were built upon tribal reservation land, and also to explore and to find the remnants of the slave dwellings of the large plantations such as that of Robert Jones, the wealthiest Choctaw who had over 500 slavesm and who is known to have been the largest Indian slave holder in the Territory. To date, no studies of former plantations have ever been studied in Oklahoma.
Archives and Arhivists are encouraged to study what records can be found of Freedmen institutions, as they are more than mere memories. From Tushka Lusa, to Oak Hill Academy, to Dawes Academy, to the Cherokee Colored High School, to the Tullahassee Manual Labor School--all are gone and the locations of most of these schools are now forgotten. There is much to do from the academic community and hopefully the lives of 20,000 people, all citizens of the Five "Civilized Tribes", will stimulate the interest of scholars from Oklahoma and beyond.
Legal scholars have many avenues to explore, because each tribe had their own relationship with their Freedmen. Some were inclusive and some are continally exclusive and distant, but all deserve study.
Most of the activity involving exploration of Oklahoma Freedmen history revolves around the efforts of a handful of researchers and community preservationists. So much more needs to be done and hopefully more scholars will respond to the call for more study and research.
