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9781682830154 Academic Inspection Copy

Trail Sisters

Freedwomen in Indian Territory, 1850-1890
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African American women enslaved by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, andCreek 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 slaveholders, suffering the same life-threatening hardships and poverty.As if Removal to Indian Territory weren't cataclysmic enough, the Civil War shatteredthe worlds of these slave women even more, scattering families, destroying property, anddisrupting social and family relationships. Suddenly free, they had nowhere to turn. Freedwomen found themselves negotiating new lives within a labyrinth of federal and tribaloversight, Indian resentment, and intruding entrepreneurs and settlers.Remarkably, they reconstructed their families and marshaled the skills to fashion livelihoods in a burgeoning capitalist environment. They sought education and forged newrelationships with immigrant black women and men, managing to establish a foundationfor 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.
Linda Williams Reese is a retired history professor who has taught at the University of Oklahoma and East Central University. She 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, USA.
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