Trail Sisters: Freedwomen in Indian Territory, 1850-1890

by Linda Williams Reese

Overview

African American women enslaved by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek Nations led lives ranging from utter subjection to recognized kinship. Regardless of status, during Removal, they followed the Trail of Tears in the footsteps of the slave-holders, suffering the same life-threatening hardships and poverty. The Civil War shattered the worlds of these slave women even more, scattering families, destroying property, and disrupting social and family relationships. Suddenly free, they had nowhere to turn. Remarkably, they reconstructed their families and marshaled the skills to fashion livelihoods in a burgeoning capitalist environment. They sought education and forged new relationships with immigrant black women and men, managing to establish a foundation for survival. Linda Williams Reese is the first to trace the harsh and often bitter journey of these women from arrival in Indian Territory to free-citizen status in 1890. In doing so, she establishes them as pioneers of the American West equal to their Indian and other Plains sisters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781682830154
Publisher:	Texas Tech University Press
Publication date:	07/10/2017
Series:	Plains Histories
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Linda Williams Reese is the author of Women of Oklahoma, 1890-1920 and coeditor of Main Street, Oklahoma: Stories of Twentieth-Century America. She lives in Norman, Oklahoma.

Table of Contents

Illustrations ix

Plainsword xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 3

Chapter 1 Living in Slavery 11

Chapter 2 Surviving the War 42

Chapter 3 Reconstructing Families 66

Chapter 4 Making a New Life 91

Chapter 5 Building Communities 114

Epilogue 141

Notes 149

Bibliography 165

Index 177

Editorial Reviews

Trail Sisters is particularly informed by the invaluable oral histories collected in Oklahoma during the New Deal era . . . rich documents that Linda Williams Reese has brought to life.  We hear the voices of those many women who personally witnessed upheaval or became repositories for the stories their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, and great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers passed on so that all could learn, and remember. -John Wunder, from the Plainsword

In this riveting story, Linda Reese focuses on the epic journey of what some Oklahomans endured as their status changed from being enslaved, freed, and then, finally, free black women. Faced with the violence of slavery, civil war, and post-war segregation, they find comfort and security in work, families, black towns, and black women’s clubs. A fascinating and profound way to understand what journeys of this type mean for all of us. —Joan Jenson

Linda Reese’s Trail Sisters: Freedwomen in Indian Territory, 1850-1890, is a long-awaited and much needed addition to the literature on black women enslaved by the Five Tribes and freed by the Civil War. Taking advantage of a surge in sophisticated scholarship over the last decade which provides deep analysis of the complex relationships between native people and their African bond servants, Reese explore the nature of those relationships, reminding us that black women in Indian country were at once enslaved servants, sexual objects, wives, daughters, and sisters of their owners who were far more integrated into their societies at the most intimate level than their counterparts in the surrounding slaveholding states. Equally important, she explores the contradictory nature of freedom that challenged those earlier relationships with Indian people while simultaneously introducing them to the cultural attitudes and practices of both white and black settlers who flooded into the Territory after the Civil War eventually overwhelming both the Indian and freedperson population. —Quintard Taylor, Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History, University of Washington, Seattle

From the Publisher