The late nineteenth century was a period of tremendous upheaval in
American race relations. But while studies abound documenting the
changes in relations between whites and African Americans in the
northern and southern states during this time, few historians have
tackled this topic in the lands of the frontier West or sought to
understand how Native Americans figured into the nation's complex
racial mix. In Contested Territory, Murray R. Wickett offers the
first complete history of the interaction between whites, Native
Americans, and African Americans in the Indian and Oklahoma
Territories from the end of the Civil War until Oklahoma statehood
in 1907, addressing questions about the nature of American race
relations, the answers to which far transcend the territorial
boundaries of the region.
By the late 1800s, the Indian and Oklahoma Territories were the
only place where the three "founding" cultures of American society
coexisted in significant numbers, and the area provides an
excellent case study in the contrasting racial policies aimed at
separate ethnic groups. Against a backdrop of erratic treatment by
Indian tribes and the ongoing trauma of war and Reconstruction,
freedmen sought a true promised land in Oklahoma. Many blacks
pressed westward, but their exodus was met with resistance from
white settlers and mixed-blood Native Americans who tried to enact
laws to curtail the civil rights of blacks. As Wickett shows,
racial separation versus integration sparked a bitter debate that
factionalized both blacks and Indians. While white government
officials and humanitarian reformers sought -- and often forced --
the assimilation of Native peoples into Anglo-American society,
theystrove, at the same time, to secure the strict segregation of
African Americans. As African Americans desperately fought a losing
battle to maintain their civil rights, Native Americans, for the
most part, rejected the benefits white society encouraged them to
accept.
Wickett tells his fascinating and complex story with a mix of
sources that includes poems, anecdotes, and particularly
well-chosen pictures. Through government records, newspapers,
diaries, and oral history interviews, he also allows those who
experienced the temper of the times first hand to speak for
themselves.
Ironically, whites in the Indian and Oklahoma Territories
discouraged in African Americans the very ideals and values they so
ardently attempted to instill in Native Americans. As Wickett's
groundbreaking study reveals, the battles over what role each of
the three racial groups would play in the region truly made it a
"contested territory".
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