I've Been Here All the While:
Black Freedom on Native Land
Winner of the 2022 John C. Ewers Award
Winner of the 2022 W. Turrentine Jackson Book Prize
Winner of the 2022 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize
Finalist for the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Finalist for the 2022 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
Honorable Mention for the 2023 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize
Winner of the 2021 Phillis Wheatley Book Award
Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of “40 acres and a mule”—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I’ve Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from. Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion on to Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma Statehood in 1907.
Praise
“Alaina Roberts’s I’ve Been Here All the While is a moving historical account of land, power, and settler colonialism in Indian Territory.”—Gregory Smithers, author of Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal
“This book establishes Roberts as a powerful new voice in the field of African American and Native American history. Rarely have I encountered a first book that is so meticulously researched, methodologically innovative, theoretically sophisticated and original, while also being entirely accessible to a general reader.”—Circe Sturm, author of Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma
“Eye-opening, energetic, and suffused with an intimacy seldom encountered… It will endure and inspire.”—James F. Brooks, author of Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands
I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land is “a transformative work in its conceptualization of narratives about slavery, indigenous people, and settler colonialism in the Great Plains.”—Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize committee
Alaina Roberts “has written one of the best books on Afro-Indigenous history, and asks us to fundamentally rethink Reconstruction. This book is brilliant & a MUST read!”—Kyle Mays, author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States
A “fascinating first book”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“So thrilled to finally get my hands on Alaina E. Roberts’s marvelous, wise, important book. Interested in Reconstruction? Indian Territory? Dispossession? Settler Colonialism? You – yes, you – really need to read this… elegant, personal, and penetrating book, and you’ll think differently about all those topics.”
—Brian DeLay, author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War
“[Roberts] masterfully untangles the many complicated arrangements in the U.S. government’s settlement of Indian Territory and its imposition of racial categories and restrictions… Roberts’s original book will cause historians to reexamine generalities about Indigenous and Black people in Oklahoma and their empowerment and identity; and to extend the story of Reconstruction and its aftermath westward in time and space.”—Library Journal
“In I’ve Been Here All the While, historian Alaina E. Roberts tells a riveting story about Indian Territory in the Reconstruction era that illuminates a broader national moment. A descendant of the African Americans, Chickasaws, and white settlers about whom she writes, Roberts speaks in a bold voice and advances a provocative argument, urging readers to see how the various groups who migrated to Indian Territory by choice or by force all consciously participated in a process of settler colonialism and thus a national narrative. Scholars of the U.S. West, African American history and Native American history, and descendants of the many populations Roberts carefully recovers and calls to account, will want to contend with the complex portrayal she offers of family, land, hope, and loss.”—Tiya Miles, author of The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits
“In her elegant book, Alaina E. Roberts powerfully illuminates themes of freedom, ownership, belonging, citizenship, opportunity, land, and colonialism in the crucible of mid-nineteenth-century Indian Territory.”—Kathleen DuVal, author of Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution
“Combining family history and rigorous research, this brilliant text deepens our understanding of post-Civil War Reconstruction by interrogating what happened in Indian Territory, revealing the layered wreckage wrought on the Native nations and formerly enslaved Africans, all entrapped in the pernicious logic of settler-colonialism.”—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
“A revealing and heartfelt book. Alaina E. Roberts’ study, clear-eyed and richly ironic, is of the tangled story of Blacks, Indians, and whites during those years when the reconstructing nation was sorting out who would be in and out of the American family. Her focus is one of the most underappreciated theaters of that story, Indian Territory. More broadly, Roberts has given us as well something of a meditation on the universal human desire for home and belonging.”
—Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado