Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family
Claudio Saunt
Abstract
This book explores the history of a Native American family using a rich collection of sources, including G. W. Grayson's never-before studied forty-four volume diary. At the heart of the narrative is a fact suppressed to this day by some Graysons: one branch of the family is of African descent. Focusing on five generations from 1780 to 1920, this book reveals the terrible compromises that Indians had to make to survive in the shadow of the expanding American republic. Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy of the United States, American Indians disowned their kin, enslaved their relatives, and fo ... More
This book explores the history of a Native American family using a rich collection of sources, including G. W. Grayson's never-before studied forty-four volume diary. At the heart of the narrative is a fact suppressed to this day by some Graysons: one branch of the family is of African descent. Focusing on five generations from 1780 to 1920, this book reveals the terrible compromises that Indians had to make to survive in the shadow of the expanding American republic. Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy of the United States, American Indians disowned their kin, enslaved their relatives, and fought each other on the battlefield. In the 18th-century native South, when the Graysons first welcomed Africans into their family, black-Indian relationships were common and bore little social stigma. But as American slave plantations began to spread across Indian lands, race took on ever greater significance. Native American families found that their survival depended on distancing themselves from their black relatives. The black and Indian Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by US troops in 1813 and again in 1836, endured Indian removal and the Trail of Tears, battled each other in the Civil War, and weathered the destruction of the Creek Nation in the 1890s. When they finally became American citizens in 1907, Oklahoma law defined some Graysons as white, some as black. By this time, the two sides of the family, divided by race, barely acknowledged each other.
Keywords:
American Indians,
Black-Indian relationships,
Creek Nation,
Indian Removal,
Trail of Tears,
Grayson,
Oklahoma,
Civil War,
South,
race
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2005 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195176315 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2007 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195176315.001.0001 |
