Alaina E. Roberts

Alaina E. Roberts is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the intersection of African American and Native American history from the nineteenth century to the modern-day with particular attention to identity, settler colonialism, and anti-Blackness. Her first book, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 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 in Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) that had been taken from others.

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.