Celia E. Naylor

Celia E. Naylor is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College. Her work explores the multifaceted connections between African-Americans and Native Americans in the United States. She was one of the coordinators of the conference “‘Eating Out of the Same Pot’: Relating Black and Native (Hi)stories,” held at Dartmouth College in April 2000. Her publications include the chapter “‘Born and raised among these people, I don’t want to know any other’: Slaves’ Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory” in the anthology Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America, edited by James F. Brooks (University of Nebraska Press, 2002); the co-authored chapter (with Tiya Miles) “African Americans in Indian Societies” in the Handbook of North American Indians, volume 14: Southeast, edited by Raymond Fogelson (Smithsonian Institution, 2004); and the essay “‘Playing Indian’?: The Selection of Radmilla Cody as Miss Navajo Nation 1997-1998” in the collection Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, edited by Sharon P. Holland and Tiya Miles (Duke University Press, 2006). Her book African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens was published by the University of North Carolina Press in May 2008 (part of the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture). It focuses on the nineteenth-century experiences of enslaved and free people of African descent in the Cherokee Nation. One of her current projects examines the contemporary controversy of descendants of enslaved and free Black Cherokees in the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma.