Watch Dr. Roberts tell her family's story in a clip from the documentary film,
The Real Wild West

"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

Research

Dr. Roberts is currently working on her first book manuscript, titled, I’ve Been Here All the While: Settler Colonialism and Black Reconstruction. In this manuscript, she argues that white expansion onto Native land in Indian Territory enabled a western Reconstruction project in which Indian freedpeople (the former slaves of members of the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, and Choctaw Nations) and Black Americans were able to obtain land, build communities, and enjoy certain rights and freedoms. Dr. Roberts connects events and discourses occurring in Indian Territory about belonging and Black and Native identity during the Reconstruction and Statehood Eras to the contemporary debates about nationhood and African American personhood occurring in the United States.