Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Scholars have used the framework of settler colonialism to describe subjects and settings as varied as Native American history, the settlement of Australia, and Israeli occupation of the West Bank. In I've Been Here all the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, Alaina Roberts presents the histories of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, the Black people they enslaved, and their descendants in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) [End Page 520] by arguing that each of these groups participated in the process of settler colonialism. Roberts argues that the willingness of these groups to engage in settler colonialism began shortly after removal in the 1830s and continues through what Roberts contends is an extended period of Reconstruction lasting until Oklahoma statehood in 1907. Although this is a traditional political history, not a family history, Roberts has occasionally inserted vignettes about her family (White settlers, freedpeople, African Americans, and Native Americans) as representative of the text's broad themes of settler colonialism, freedom, and connection to place.

In four compact chapters, Roberts lays out how these groups––Choctaw and Chickasaw expelled to Indian Territory, enslaved Black people, and their descendants––used settler colonialism, which she defines as a three-part process involving "rhetoric, American governmental structures, and individual actions" (3), to claim a connection to land. Roberts first sees this playing out when the Choctaw and Chickasaw, attempting to rebuild their lives following immensely destructive forced removals, appeal to the federal government for help. The Black people they enslaved, according to Roberts, also used settler colonialism to describe themselves as "worthy settlers" (42) of the land they were compelled to work.

Roberts finds settler colonialism at work in the actions of formerly enslaved people after 1866, when the Choctaw and Chickasaw negotiated treaties for emancipation a year after the conclusion of the Civil War. Because Choctaw and Chickasaw enacted laws "akin to the U.S. 'Black Codes'" (47), freed people depended on the United States to offer assistance and to enforce the provisions of the 1866 treaty. According to Roberts's logic, by seeking the help denied by their former enslavers, freedpeople participated in a key objective of settler colonialism, "separating Native people from their land" (48). Here, as elsewhere in the text, it might have been useful for Roberts to explain precisely how asking the federal government to uphold the treaty commitments reached by their erstwhile enslavers makes freedpeople participants in a government process to deny Indigenous people rights to their land. Roberts sees this process––freedpeople expecting the federal government to uphold legal obligations––as an extended process of settler colonialism, culminating in 1907 with Oklahoma statehood.

Readers may agree with this reviewer that the settler colonialism argument eventually becomes reductive. In fact, it often seems that Roberts sees settler colonialism everywhere. Such a framework minimizes the fraught situation that many of the historical actors confronted, especially the enslaved Black people who had no choice but to settle in Indian Territory. For covering such a weighty subject over the course of seven decades, I've Been Here all the While is thin, and Roberts misses several opportunities to interrogate the histories of the groups represented in her book. Ultimately, the settler colonialism framework obscures at least as much as it [End Page 521] reveals. Though Roberts explores a subject in need of additional scholarly inquiry while extending, temporally at least, the work begun by Barbara Krauthamer in her excellent book Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom in the Native American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), a nuanced history of Black and Native life in Indian Territory remains to be written.