Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from. In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others. Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.

With the exception of a small area in the northeastern corner, belonging to several small tribes of Indians, Indian Territory comprises the lands of the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws and Chickasaws, five tribes, known as the Five Civilized Tribes, and to these tribes, just on the eve of important changes in their tribal governments, consideration is here given. Their lands were deeded to them upwards of seventy years ago, when the need of more room for the settlers in the South made their removal from the Southern States desirable. Then the country adjoining Arkansas on the west seemed a good place to send them, and at that time it was considered so remote from white settlements that, in all probability, no thought was given to the possibility of disturbing them again.

Note: Freedmen are Afro-Americans.

Given by Eugene Edge III.