Part of the Un/Doing Event Series
In this presentation, Dr. Alaina E. Roberts explores the actions and rhetoric of Black and Native people in Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) in the nineteenth century.
This includes the history of Black slave-owning among the Five Tribes (the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Nations) and the Reconstruction project the United States enforced in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), which ended with the Black people in this region becoming the only group of former slaves in the world to receive reparations in the form of land. This presentation will make you question the ideas you have about victims and victimizers, oppressed people and oppressors.
Dr. Roberts will leave her listeners with a set of questions that encourages them to come to terms with this history and the anti-Black racism that endures in Indian Country and across North America.
To request disability-related accommodations for this event, please email info-hri@illinois.edu. Early requests are strongly encouraged to allow sufficient time to meet your access needs.
About the Speaker
Alaina E. Roberts is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studies the intersection of Black and Native American life from the Civil War to the modern day. Dr. Roberts is the author of I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, which was awarded the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize and the Western History Association’s John C. Ewers Award and W. Turrentine Jackson Book Prize. I’ve Been Here All the While was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Dr. Roberts has written multiple academic essays as well as op-eds and profiles for the Washington Post, TIME magazine, and High Country News.