In the Media

Roberts is a University of Pittsburgh professor specializing in the intersection of Black and Native American history. But that history is also one she lives, as the descendant of Creek and Chickasaw freed people who once inhabited that very land (though Roberts grew up in California). And it’s a slice of history that can help readers interpret a grim centennial: This May marks 100 years since the Tulsa Massacre, when mobs of whites killed hundreds of Blacks in Tulsa, Okla., and burned down the community known as Black Wall Street.

The story of American Reconstruction is often oversimplified and focuses on the American South. Pitt professor of history Alaina E. Roberts seeks to change that with a discussion of her book I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land for Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures.

In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Alaina E. Roberts . Roberts is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Her book is I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land.

Like the history of America itself, Alaina Roberts’ family history is knotty, astonishing and, to a large degree, hidden.

Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) was home to a wide array of groups including Native American Nations, enslaved Indian Freed-people, African Americans, White settlers, and others. In a conversation on Black Reconstruction in Indian Territory, Alaina Roberts discusses what Reconstruction might have meant for Black people in what is now called Oklahoma in the years immediately following the Civil War, and why it should be included in broader conversations about Reconstruction.

“What does Oklahoma look like, as a space where we have Black people, Native people and white people living there?” Roberts said. “They’re trying to call this place home and basically fighting over who should have a claim to this space.”

"With her first book, “I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land,” Roberts, an assistant history professor at the University of Pittsburgh, combines her family’s story with the broader story of Black Freedmen, the progeny of enslaved people who’ve lived in Native nations for centuries, and continue to do so to this day."

As Alaina E. Roberts, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh, argues in her debut book, the Dawes Act transformed Indian Territory, or what is now Oklahoma, into “the ground upon which [multiple groups] sought belonging”—a space where communities could “realize their own visions of freedom.”

Pitt Professor of History Alaina E. Roberts sometimes shares with friends and colleagues a little-known fact of 19th century American history—five tribes of Native Americans who settled in modern-day Oklahoma owned Black slaves. People are usually stunned to hear it.

“As a member of the history department, I am in a building on a street named for Henry Bouquet,” Roberts said. “Which, as someone who studies Native history, as a Native person, it’s very odd, very troubling.”