| Growing Up with the Country illuminates the post-emancipation migration and settlement of African Americans from the Deep South to Indian Territory, arguing that this journey functioned both as movement toward freedom and, at the same time, as the expansion of U.S. empire. More specifically, as African American migrants in Indian Territory sought freedom through a series of experiments in farming, land ownership, and subsequent migrations to West Africa and Mexico, they simultaneously partook in federal expansion as well as economic, political, and cultural negotiations over land with Indians, freedpeople of the Indian Nations, and, ultimately, white settlers and oil speculators.;This is the story of a group of African American migrants whose lives were defined by the pursuit of freedom. Following in the footsteps of a number of African American, including so-called "mulatto," men who left post-Reconstruction Mississippi and Arkansas in a hurry, the story begins with the material and cultural history of sexual relations across the color line, African American land ownership, and the emergence of a rigid racial dichotomy in the South. Over the course of their lifetimes, these men experienced a constant shifting of racial categories over both time and space. Once in Indian Territory, they gained access to Indian land through purchase and marriage, access soon cut short by the emergence of Oklahoma statehood and oil speculation. Freedom was thus not an uncomplicated claim for African American migrants in Indian Territory.;Born in the Deep South - a region built by the marriage of slavery and early American imperialism - in the post-emancipation era these African American migrants participated in the latest iteration of U.S. empire - the settlement of Indian Territory and the "closing of the frontier" - in nuanced and important ways. This project ultimately investigates African Americans and Native Americans as actors, and sometimes imperialist actors, on the "frontier" of the North American continent, by paying attention to the presence of Native Americans as slave owners, and African Americans as settlers on Indian land. This project thus contributes to a more complicated and complete history of United States empire in a crucial era of world history. |
