Clashes between sovereignty rights and civil rights reveal an uncomfortable and complicated story about race and belonging in America.
In 1979, an Oklahoma woman named Johnnie Mae Austin stopped getting mail from the Muscogee Nation. There were no more announcements of meetings, notices of elections, or news of monetary settlements. The problem wasn’t postal. Austin’s Muscogee citizenship had been erased by a new Muscogee constitution in which citizenship was defined “by blood,” words that named a fraught crossroads in Native and African American histories.
Being deemed “civilized” didn’t protect the Five Tribes from forced displacement. As American planters sought to expand their empire of unfreedom across the South, the Five Tribes stood in the way, and the United States embarked on a devastating series of land clearances. The tribes were forced to swap extensive areas in the Southeast for newer and smaller parcels in what was later called Indian Territory, today’s Oklahoma.
The practice of Native dispossession often proceeded under the theory of Native protection; even the 1830 Indian Removal policy was justified as an effort to safeguard Native people from rapacious whites, distancing and segregating them for their own good. The same went for the General Allotment Act, of 1887.
These striking inequities shape Gayle’s account of the Black Creeks. Where Roberts draws upon a complicated personal heritage—including Chickasaws, Choctaws, freedpeople, African Americans, and whites—to explore a post-Civil War reconstruction situated in Indian Territory rather than in the South, Gayle, drawing on his experience of growing up Black in Oklahoma, offers an account that celebrates African American success.
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