An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

CHAPTER THREE
ENSLAVEMENT, DISPOSSESSION,
RESISTANCE
The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human
history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of
the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found
Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third
century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve
democracy for the working millions which this world had ever
seen.
—W. E. B. DU BOIS, Black Reconstruction in America 1
IN NOVEMBER 1976, the New Yorker published a profile of Black American
novelist Ralph Ellison. Ellison, mostly known as author of the novel
Invisible Man, discussed what it was like growing up in Oklahoma. He was
born on March 1, 1914. Always wanting to shed light on the invisibility of
Black folks, he told the interviewer a brief history of Black and Indigenous
relations in Oklahoma. “Do you know what a native in Oklahoma is?” he
asked. They are “a black American or Negro American who was part of the
five great Indian nations that were swept into this virgin territory after 1830
under Andrew Jackson’s Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek.” 2 Ellison’s
history is oversimplified; among its issues is its erasure of the Native
nations who were already there. He continued, “Many of the Negroes had
been acquired through horse-trading or had simply run away from other
states to join the Indian tribes.” Ellison articulated how Black folks viewed
Indian territory and their relationship to place by constructing a narrative
out of a familiar blues lyric: