In the last half of the past century, scholars from an array of disciplines have complicated and interrogated our understanding(s) of slave resistance—of the resisters and the various manifestations of resistance itself.[1] We no longer categorize resistance as solely centered around acts of collective rebellion grounded in slave uprisings. Scholarly discourse about slave resistance has evolved to incorporate the actions of enslaved women in order to manipulate their fertility and obstruct male access to their bodies. It also includes special languages created by enslaved people to communicate beyond the scope of their owners' comprehension. Everyday acts of slave resistance emerge, too, in clothing and other adornments, as well as in the geographical spaces of celebration marked out by the enslaved far from their owners' gaze.[2] Yet even as our examination of slave resistance in the Americas has expanded in depth and breadth, certain sites have only been explored in a rather cursory manner. The interactions between Native Americans and African-Americans, for example, have been a relatively recent pivotal point of reference for scholars. Yet slave resistance has become one of the most controversial, and often denied, aspects of the discourse related to the enslavement of people of African descent by Native Americans in nineteenth-century Indian Territory (current-day northeastern Oklahoma).

Part of the reason for this void in Native American and African-American historiographies is that some have argued that Native slaveowners practiced a more "benign" or "mild" form of bondage compared to European-American enslavers. For example, Theda Perdue, in her seminal work on slavery in the Cherokee Nation, posits that "although Cherokee planters required hard work from their bondsmen, they probably treated their slaves much better on the average than did their white counterparts . . .. Thus relative leniency on the part of masters seems to have been characteristic of Cherokee slavery before and after removal."[3] In his dissertation, Michael Roethler also supports this hypothesis. He claims that "the benign attitude thus demonstrated to the Negroes by the Cherokees leads one to conclude that slavery existed among the Cherokees in a mild form . . .. Surely, the slaves dreamed of freedom. Until that happy day would arrive, however, they remained content with their lot among the Cherokees."[4] The 1849 slave narrative of Henry Bibb also reinforces the notion of a "mild" form of slavery practiced by Indians.[5] Because of this reasoning, many have not been compelled to pursue this topic. Rather, in most cases, it has been ignored, as though slave resistance in Native nations did not exist. As a result, the commodification and vulnerability of enslaved people of African descent in Native nations have been veiled time and again, buried by a particular construction of Native spaces as solely sites of Black refuge. In lieu of a safe haven, the world of bondsmen and bondswomen in the Cherokee Nation was defined by their owners' individual needs, as well as the overall laws of the Nation.

In addition to (mis)conceptions of "mild" bondage in Indian territory, the traditional story of collusion and cooperation between African-Americans and Indians still shapes the narrative of Black-Indian interaction in the United States. However, the stories of enslaved people in the Cherokee Nation dispute such a generalization and identify it as a selective representation of the past. In fact, the specific pathways of resistance taken by enslaved people in the Cherokee Nation illustrate some commonalties among slave resisters and acts of transgression in Indian Territory and the southeastern states. Unruly enslaved people on their owners' farms and plantations in the Cherokee Nation subtly and overtly expressed their opposition to bondage on a daily basis. Those who survived the horrors of the Trail of Tears tested the chains of bondage in the new Cherokee country west of the Mississippi.

Scattered documents reveal a partial story of the resistance of enslaved African-Indians to daily indignities of bondage. Perhaps like no other topic in African-American-Native American studies, the reality of slave resistance interrogates romantic, essentialist, and monolithic conceptions of Black-Native collusion. Just as notions of African-American slave resistance in the Americas evolved in the past century, with heightened emphasis on the agency of enslaved women and men living within the confines of the peculiar institution, a similar transformation has become necessary in the exploration of the enslavement of people of African descent by Native Americans. Indeed, the interactions between enslaved African-Indians and Native American enslavers might provide evidence for a reconceptualization of slave resistance that speaks to the dynamic power relations between enslaved and enslaver that are informed and problematized by notions of race, gender, place, and nation.

Although specific forms of enslavement have existed within some Indian nations (e.g., the enslavement of war captives), certainly not all Native Americans enslaved African-Americans. There were, however, five Indian nations that purchased and sold people of African descent initially in the southeastern United States and later west in Indian Territory (Oklahoma).[6] These five nations—the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—were referred to as the "Five Civilized Tribes." They were called "civilized" because more than any other Indian nations, they had adopted some elements of European-American worldviews (including chattel slavery). European traders and settlers had also intermarried with some Indians from these nations, thus increasing the extent of these nations' acculturation of European-American mores. In the nineteenth century, these five nations incorporated the enslavement of people of African descent within their social, economic, and political structures. In these five Indian nations, only a minority enslaved people of African descent. Yet, like White southern slaveholders, they controlled and limited the lives of enslaved people (e.g., some outlawed slave literacy and restricted the movements of enslaved people on and off their farms and plantations). A few Indians owned over 100 enslaved people, but the majority of Indian slaveowners operated small farms with fewer than 25 enslaved people. Beginning in the 1830s, enslaved people and the institution of slavery would be transferred with Native Americans to areas west of the Mississippi when the Five Tribes were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory (during what is often described, for the Cherokee Nation, as the "Trail of Tears").

As part of the rebuilding process in the post-removal period in the 1830s and 1840s in Indian Territory, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks established more restrictive "slave codes" that controlled the lives of slaves.[7] Such statutes reinforced the position of enslaved people of African descent as inferior to free Native citizens. Following the Trail of Tears in the 1830s, as the Cherokees attempted to codify and reestablish their societal rules regarding the peculiar institution in the new territory, enslaved people sought to rupture, by any means necessary, the legally sanctioned forces that daily denied their personhood and humanity. For some enslaved people in the Cherokee Nation, running away from their owners' farms and plantations represented the most effective course for pursuing their freedom. Indeed, reward advertisements for runaway slaves remain one concrete form of evidence of resistance, often offering substantial information about the fugitive slaves and their experiences. In addition, the Cherokee Advocate, the newspaper of the Cherokee Nation established in September 1844 in Tahlequah, Indian Territory, regularly posted runaway ads, as well as notices of slave auctions in the area.[8] In Indian Territory, as in southeastern states, some reward ads in the Cherokee Advocate suggest that slaves often ran away due to their connection to kin.[9] Since some enslaved people absconded to be closer to relatives, owners became knowledgeable of the whereabouts of their slaves' partners, parents, and children. Moreover, family members often harbored runaway relatives and provided a temporary refuge for kin on the run. As a result of their awareness of enslaved people's family ties, owners often predicted the probable destinations of runaway slaves.

Although reward advertisements for runaway slaves provide evidence of this specific form of slave resistance, documentation of other avenues of resistance remain more ambivalent and elusive within Indian Territory, as elsewhere. However, the Oklahoma interviews of previously enslaved African-Americans, conducted in the 1930s (during the Depression) by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), furnish examples of various types of slave resistance in Indian Territory.[10] Even when enslaved people chose not to risk the copious repercussions of running away to procure their freedom, many still demonstrated their detestation for their enslaved state in actions ranging from accidental deeds to calculated strategies. Enslaved women, in particular, vented their resistance to slavery in acts of non-cooperation, retaliation, theft, and verbal and physical confrontation.

One of the frequently practiced forms of slave resistance involved the theft of goods and property, including food, clothing, animals, and other commodities. As was the case for slaves in the southeastern United States, enslaved people in the Cherokee Nation stole an array of items from their owners. These acts served to protest vile treatment and harsh conditions, as well as to provide necessities for themselves and their families. Cherokee freedwoman Sarah Wilson recalled that her aunt "was always pestering around trying to get something for herself." However, one day while cleaning the yard, their master (Mr. Johnson) saw her "pick up something and put it inside her apron. He flew at her and cussed her, and started like he was going to hit her but she just stood right up to him and never budged, and when he come close she just screamed out loud and run at him with her fingers stuck out straight and jabbed him in the belly . . .. He seen she wasn't going to be afraid, and he set out to sell her."[11]

Such actions contested owners' sweeping control over enslaved people's daily lives. Most owners expected obsequious behavior from their slaves and those in their surrounding Cherokee communities; instead of complying with her master's expectations of submissiveness, Wilson's aunt communicated, through her words and actions, no such deference for her master's authority. In response to her offenses, Ben Johnson utilized one of his primary privileges as master and attempted to sell Wilson's aunt—a particular course to penalize those deemed "troublesome property." Like other masters in the Cherokee Nation and in southeastern states, Ben Johnson recognized that such misconduct not only served to defy his authority but also encouraged others along a similar path of rebelliousness. Just as the presence of fugitive slaves in the vicinity of plantations vexed Cherokee slaveowners, so, too, did private and public acts of rebellion on their farms prove economically and emotionally taxing to owners in Indian Territory.

In another part of her interview, it is interesting to note, Sarah Wilson refers to Ben Johnson as an "old Indian."[12] However, Ben Johnson, like other European-American men in the Cherokee Nation, had married a Cherokee woman (Annie Johnson) and thus become a member of the Cherokee Nation through marriage. Though not biologically "Indian," Sarah Wilson and others in the Cherokee Nation recognized many of these individuals as "Indian." Indeed, many enslaved people may have become so accustomed to interacting with light-skinned, biracial European-Cherokees in the Nation that European-American members may have blended in more easily. Based on 1860 census data, Michael F. Doran estimated that 716 European-Americans resided in the Cherokee Nation, constituting approximately four percent of the total population of the Nation.[13] An increasing number of European-American men married Cherokee women in the eighteenth century; such unions continued to occur into the nineteenth century. Ben Johnson's ideas of mastering reflected his individual personality; however, he and other European-American masters, who married in to the Cherokee Nation, shared their mastering techniques with other members of the Nation. Even though brutal mastering techniques of Cherokee owners also emerged in the Nation, the presence of European-American slave-owning men in Indian Territory certainly shaped the overall tenor of slave-master interactions in the new land. Cherokee and European-American slave-owners in the Cherokee Nation habitually employed intimidation as a useful tactic to inhibit unruly slave activities. Even though this strategy resulted regularly in the desired responses, some enslaved people would not be swayed and continued to express their indignation toward their owners.

Various forms of punishment and torture could be callously utilized on those who continued to resist in order to achieve acquiescence. Like Sarah Wilson, Cherokee freedwoman Charlotte Johnson White also recalled the harsh treatment her family experienced while enslaved by Ben and Annie Johnson. One day when her mother was too sick to get up,

de old master [Ben Johnson] come around to see about it, and he yelled, 'Get out of dere and get yourself in de fields.' She tried to go but was too sick to work. She got to the door alright; couldn't hurry fast enough for de old master though, so he pushed her in a little ditch dat was by the cabin and whipped her back wid the lash, den he reached down and rolled her over so's he could beat her face and neck (Baker and Baker 465).

Charlotte Johnson White remembered that her mother "didn't live long after dat and I guess de whippin's helped to kill her, but she better off dead than jest livin' for the whip."[14]

Though enslaved women often feigned illness as a way to refuse regular duties, Charlotte Johnson White presented her mother's illness as all too real. So real, in fact, that death followed soon after this beating. Ben Johnson probably believed that White's mother was pretending to be ill in order to shirk her responsibilities, as others had attempted at various points before and after arrival in the new Cherokee territory. Even if he had recognized that White's mother was too sick to work, this actuality failed to persuade him to excuse her from fieldwork that day. Instead, he used this opportunity to emit a clear message in a public space about the demands of labor and the strict regimen on his farm. Certainly, the death of White's mother soon after this beating relayed a message to other enslaved people who witnessed (or heard about) this attack—a message louder than the sound of Johnson's orders or the whip against her skin.

As eyewitnesses of such beatings of parents and kin in general, enslaved children regularly observed a range of horrific acts of torture, and they quickly deciphered the meanings of such actions. Their responses to these episodes ranged from compliance to outright insolence. Having witnessed her mother's treatment at the hands of Ben Johnson, it is possible that Charlotte Johnson White vented her anger about her mother's death in acts of resistance cloaked as negligence. When she was about twelve years old, she

was tendin' the master's children like what dey tell me to do, and den one day somehow I drop one of dem right by where de old master was burning some brush in de yard. 'What you do that for?' he yelled, and while I was stoopin' to pick up de baby he grabbed me and shoved me into de fire! I sent into dat fire head first, but I never know how I got out. See this old drawn, scarred face? Dat's what I got from de fire, and inside my lips is burned off, and my back is scarred wid lashings dat'll be wid me when I meet my Jesus![15]

After her mother died, Charlotte Johnson White explained that she "slipped off in de woods to get away and wandered 'round 'til I come to a place folks said was Scullyville [Choctaw Nation] . . .. But de old master track me down and dere I is back at de ol' farm for more whippin's."[16] It is difficult to ascertain whether Charlotte Johnson White accidentally or intentionally dropped one of Ben and Annie Johnson's children. Since one duty of enslaved children often involved the care of their owners' children, enslaved children like Charlotte Johnson White recognized that interactions with their owners' children represented more than child's play. Indeed, some enslaved children and women entrusted with the care of their young masters and mistresses manipulated their access to these children for destructive and even fatal purposes.

Although White spoke of Ben Johnson's visceral response to her dropping one of his children, there is no indication of how her mistress Cherokee Annie Johnson responded. Some sense of how her mistress reacted to this "accident" might be gleaned from Annie Johnson's other interactions with her slaves. As Sarah Wilson explicitly states, Old Master (Ben Johnson) "wasn't the only hellion neither. Old Mistress [Annie Johnson] just as bad, and she took most of her wrath out hitting us children all the time." However, she was "afraid of the grown Negroes. Afraid of what they might do while old Master was away, but she beat us children all the time."[17] In response to the severe actions of her master and mistress, Charlotte Johnson White might have decided to literally take matters into her own hands by dropping one of their children in to the fire as an act of retribution for past deeds against herself and loved ones.

A great deal of attention has been focused on slave-owning men and their interactions with and control of enslaved people; yet, slave-owning women, like Cherokee Annie Johnson, also benefited from the peculiar institution in the Cherokee Nation, as they did in other slaveholding societies. Due to the particular place of women in the matrilineal-based Cherokee society, Cherokee women owned enslaved people before and after removal to Indian Territory. Indeed, the Cherokee Nation enacted several laws in the nineteenth century to protect the property, including enslaved people, of Cherokee women who had married non-Cherokee men.[18] With the creation of a Cherokee republic in the early nineteenth century, women's authority in the new Cherokee Nation had become truncated, partially due to the emulation of European-American values. Their changing status in the Cherokee Nation affected Cherokee women's interactions with their slaves. As their position and roles within the Cherokee Nation continued to evolve, Cherokee women recognized that one signifier of their ongoing control and power after removal to Indian Territory rested with the enslaved members of their households. Cherokee women's power and control over their slaves remained constant and concentrated even as other aspects of their lives altered around them. In the new nation west of the Mississippi, it is hard not to imagine the struggles that transpired between the enslaved and the enslavers in slaveholding households. Where Cherokee women's authority had diminished due to the changing sociopolitical nature of the Cherokee Nation after removal from their homeland, enslaved people attempted to thwart their masters' and mistresses' control over them.

Though enslaved people primarily directed their aggression toward their adult owners, men and women, who were responsible for their state of bondage, others engaged in acts of self-mutilation as a means of publicly declaring ownership of their bodies and countering notions of their inhumanity. Aware of the value of their labor and physical bodies, some enslaved people displayed their refusal to be sold as chattel on the very site that embodied the essence of bondage. In one dramatic case, Cherokee freedwoman Nancy Rogers Bean described her aunt as a "mean, fighting woman. She was to be sold and when the bidding started she grabbed a hatchet, laid her hand on a log and chopped it off. Then she throwed the bleeding hand right in her master's face."[19] Enslaved women, like Nancy Rogers Bean's aunt, understood how the commodification of their bodies, especially their productive and reproductive capabilities, shaped and secured the socioeconomic structures in the Cherokee Nation and other slaveholding communities. As a result, such actions of self-mutilation, though physically painful for those who committed them, simultaneously hindered the ongoing sale of enslaved people and epitomized their reclamation of their own bodies in Indian Territory.

Even though some historians have contended that Cherokee slave-owners practiced a "benign" form of slavery, such a proposition fails to reflect the thoughts of Nancy Roger Bean's aunt when she mounted that auction block. Enslaved people in Indian Territory fully recognized that they were enslaved human beings—the property of Indians. They were acutely aware that neither they nor their offspring were free. Some had family members and friends who ran away or challenged their enslavement via other avenues; in fact, multigenerational acts of resistance possibly served as signposts of a family's legacy of rebellion. Others, like Charlotte Johnson White, had not only witnessed the beatings of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, and uncles but also experienced the whip for themselves. Such images, sensations, and scars remained firmly imprinted in their psyche as well as on their bodies for decades; the memories and marks would be with them, as Charlotte Johnson White uttered, even in the afterworld. Enslaved people, particularly enslaved women, understood that slavery compromised family ties. Even as an owner extended some degree of kindness one day, s/he possessed the power to sell one's parent, spouse, sibling, or child the very next day. Some enslaved in the Cherokee Nation recognized that the daily distinctions between themselves and their owners only confirmed that they were not deemed equal participants in Indian communities. Instead, they remained property—objects that could be bought and sold at an owner's whim.

Although living in predominantly Cherokee communities, some enslaved people renounced thoughts of a collective identity with Cherokee people. Instead, they demonstrated their resistance to such notions of collectivity by committing "crimes" ranging from "talking back" to their enslavers to even murdering them.[20] For those who ran away from their Indian owners, the desire for freedom surpassed any identification with Native Americans and any sense of "loyalty." To believe that Indian cultures made bondage more tenable to people of African descent or somehow countered the denigrating process of enslavement is to deny the insidious nature of a system based on the ownership of human beings. For many enslaved people who were kin to their Cherokee masters and mistresses, the denial of this blood connection only verified the corrupting force of bondage.

Shattering the notion of a safe haven, scattered documents reveal stories of the resistance of enslaved women and men to daily indignities of bondage in the antebellum Cherokee Nation. A range of disorderly acts fashioned the inner lives of those enslaved in an Indian country that, to them, represented not a sanctuary but a site of severe repression. Though the actions of individual enslaved people alone did not terminate the presence of slavery in Cherokee territory, their opposition to bondage exposed the precious and meaningful substance of freedom to the free and unfree in the Cherokee Nation.

Endnotes

1. For works dealing with slave resistance in the United States and the Caribbean, see, for example, Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1963); John H. Bracey, Jr., August Meier and Elliott Rudwick , eds., American Slavery: the Question of Resistance (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1971); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1990); Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: a Case Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, with Implications for Colonial British America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985); David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, ed., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Darlene Clark Hine and Kate Wittenstein, "Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of Sex," in The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, ed. Filomina Chioma Steady (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1981), 289-299; Gary Y. Okihiro, ed., In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean and Afro-American History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985) and Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1975). [Return to text]

2. Camp, Closer to Freedom. [Return to text]

3. Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 98. [Return to text]

4. Michael Roethler, "Negro Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians, 1540-1866" (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1964), 129. [Return to text]

5. The brevity of Bibb's time in Indian Territory no doubt informed his particular experiences. Gilbert Osofsky, ed., Puttin' on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown and Solomon Northup (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 141. [Return to text]

6. The Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles owned and occupied large areas of land in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and smaller portions of land in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The significant population of slaves in Indian Territory has heightened the discussion of slavery among the so-called "Five Civilized Tribes." Using the count conducted in 1860 by the United States Census Office, Michael Doran proffered an estimate of the number of Native Americans, African-American slaves, and European-Americans residing in Indian Territory in 1860. He deduced that in the Cherokee Nation, there were 13,821 Indian citizens (81%), 2,511 slaves (15%), and 716 whites (4%); in the Choctaw Nation, there were 13,666 Indian citizens (81%), 2,349 slaves (14%), and 804 whites (5%); in the Chickasaw Nation, there were 4,260 Indian citizens (79%), 975 slaves (18%), and 148 whites (3%); in the Creek Nation, there were 13,550 Indian citizens (86%), 1,532 slaves (10%), and 596 whites (4%); and in the Seminole Nation, there were 2,630 Indian citizens (71%), 1,000 slaves (29%), and 35 whites. See Michael F. Doran, "Population Statistics of Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory," Chronicles of Oklahoma 53, no. 4 (1975-1976): 501. [Return to text]

7. For a thorough analysis of how race and bondage shaped legislation within the Cherokee Nation, see Fay Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). [Return to text]

8. In order to disseminate information about the occurrences in the new land, the first issue of the Cherokee Advocate was printed in the new Cherokee capital of Tahlequah on 26 September 1844. This weekly newspaper's motto was "Our Rights, Our Country, Our Race." The Cherokee Advocate was not the first Cherokee newspaper to be published. The Cherokee Phoenix had been established in 1828 prior to removal to Indian Territory. [Return to text]

9. See, for example, the runaway slave advertisement for Harvey in the Cherokee Advocate, September 18, 1848. The same advertisement for Harvey also appeared in the following three weekly issues of the Cherokee Advocate. Also see the runaway slave advertisement for Isaac in the Cherokee Advocate, September 3, 1849, and for George in the Cherokee Advocate, April 30, 1849. The same advertisement for George also appeared in the following three weekly issues of the Cherokee Advocate. [Return to text]

10. For interviews specifically with former slaves living in Oklahoma, see George P. Rawick, ed., Oklahoma and Mississippi Narratives, vol. 7 of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973), Oklahoma Narratives, vol. 12, Supplement Series 1 of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977), and T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker, eds., The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). Volume 7 of Rawick's collection includes the interviews of seventy-five ex-slaves and/or children of ex-slaves. Of these seventy-five interviewees, a total of fourteen self-identified as ex-slaves or children of ex-slaves of Native Americans in Indian Territory—six Cherokee ex-slaves, four Creek ex-slaves, two Choctaw ex-slaves, and two Chickasaw ex-slaves. Volume 12 of Rawick's collection includes the interviews of sixty-seven ex-slaves or children of ex-slaves. Of these sixty-seven interviewees, a total of thirty-four identified themselves as ex-slaves or children of ex-slaves of Native Americans in Indian Territory—sixteen Cherokee ex-slaves, nine Choctaw ex-slaves, eight Creek ex-slaves, and one Chickasaw ex-slave. Initially deposited in the Library of Congress, the WPA interviews of ex-slaves remained a relatively untapped source of information until Greenwood Press' publication of these interviews in the 1970s. The WPA conducted interviews with ex-slaves living in South Carolina, Texas, Alabama, Indiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Georgia, North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Tennessee, Florida, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, and Washington. In April 2001, the Library of Congress announced the release of the online collection, "Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938," at the American Memory Web site: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml. This online collection includes over 2,300 interviews and 500 black-and-white photographs of ex-slave interviewees. [Return to text]

11. Rawick, American Slave, vol. 7, 346. [Return to text]

12. Ibid., 347. [Return to text]

13. Michael F. Doran, "Population Statistics of Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory," Chronicles of Oklahoma 53, no. 4 (winter 1975-1976): 501. [Return to text]

14. Baker and Baker, The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives, 465. Charlotte Johnson White's interview is one of the Oklahoma interviews that was published for the first time in Baker and Baker's book. [Return to text]

15. Ibid. [Return to text]

16. Ibid. [Return to text]

17. Rawick, American Slave, vol. 7, 347. [Return to text]

18. See Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998) and Fay Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). [Return to text]

19. Rawick, American Slave, vol. 7, 13. [Return to text]

20. Cherokee Grover C. Hanna, for example, recalled the surprising actions of one particular trusted slave called "Nigger Smoot." One night, Hanna's uncle, "expecting to go turkey hunting the next morning, had Smoot help him mould bullets to use. That day, Uncle had sold a good horse and had the money in the house. That night after they had gone to sleep, Smoot took an ax, killed Uncle Harry and pounded Aunt Cyntha until he thought she was dead. Then taking the money, a good horse, and an old rifle he left the place." One of Hanna's other uncles, Zeke Proctor, "trailed him from the Illinois River to Fredonia, Kansas." Proctor located Smoot and forcibly returned him to the Cherokee Nation, where he was hung ten days after murdering his master. Grant Foreman, comp., Indian Pioneer History Collection, vol. 27, 335-336. Archives and Manuscripts Division, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. [Return to text]