Far More Terrible for Women: Personal Accounts of Women in Slavery (Real Voices, Real History)
[ amazon link ] [link to Women in the slave narratives web project]
Some fifteen years ago, I set about on a project to collect women’s ex-slave narratives from the Indian Territory and sought to publish them as an anthology; it was actually from this initial collection of narratives that the Blair book Black Indian Slave Narratives evolved from. Even with the publication of this work, my quest to lift up the truly unique and compelling stories of women whose life under the “peculiar institution” instilled within them such a mix of pain and passion that it impossible for the depth of their experience not to burst through as they related their stores to others. As much as the slave narratives are a critical commentary on race in nineteenth century, the complex interaction of race and gender as engendered within the WPA slave narratives is an issue that can no longer be ignored. It is my firm belief that if we were to publish these women’s narratives as an anthology, then we would open the door to explore these complicated issues and the work as well as serving as the basis for a more sophisticated and engaged interpretation of the basic literature. It is neither my point nor my place to delve at length into the life of women under slavery; it is my purpose to lay the foundations for others to do so.
Far More Terrible for Women: Personal Accounts of Women in Slavery (Real Voices, Real History), Paperback: 219 pages; Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.0 x 0.5 inches; Publisher: John F. Blair Publisher (October 30, 2006); ISBN: 0895873230
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Black Indian Slave Narratives (Real Voices, Real History)
[ amazon link ] [link to Aframerindian slave narratives web project]
Few people realize that Native Americans were enslaved right alongside the African Americans in this country. Fewer still realize that many Native Americans owned African Americans and Native Americans from other tribes. Recently, historians have determined that of the 2,193 interviews with former slaves that were collected by the Federal Writers' Project, 12 percent contain some reference to the interviewees' being related to or descended from Native Americans. In addition, many of the interviewees make references to their Native American owners. In Black Indian Slave Narratives, Patrick Minges offers the most absorbing of these firsthand testimonies about African American and Native American relationships in the 19th century. The selections include an interview with Felix Lindsey, who was born in Kentucky of Mvskoke/African heritage and who served as one of the buffalo soldiers who rounded up Geronimo. Chaney Mack, whose father was a "full-blood African" from Liberia and whose mother was a "pure-blood Indian," gives an in-depth look at both sides of her cultural heritage. There are stories of Native Americans taken by "nigger stealers," who found themselves placed on slave-auction blocks alongside their African counterparts.
Black Indian Slave Narratives (Real Voices, Real History), Paperback: 191 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.69 x 7.44 x 5.02, Publisher: John F. Blair Publisher; (June 1, 2004), ISBN: 0895872986
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Slavery in the Cherokee Nation: The Keetoowah Society and the Defining of a People 1855-1867 (Studies in African American History and Culture)
[ amazon link ] [ link to full text oline version]
This work argues that radical changes within Cherokee society as a result of the civilization program of the federal government created social and political tensions that erupted into Civil War in the mid nineteenth century. At the core of this rupture was the abandonment of traditional Cherokee cultural and religious practices by an elite minority in order to pursue acculturation to Euro-American values including chattel slavery. A resistance movement entitled the Keetoowah Society formed within the Baptist churches and sought to preserve Cherokee traditional values of harmony, inclusiveness, cooperation, and collectivization. As the Baptist churches were historically composed of both Africans and Indians, the Keetoowah Society’s commitment to the abolition of slavery led to a militant response to the Cherokee Nation’s alliance with the Confederacy. As much as the Civil War was a defining moment in the identity of Cherokee Nation, the role of the Keetoowah Society in that struggle to define “what is a Cherokee” is critical to understanding Cherokee history.
Slavery in the Cherokee Nation: The Keetoowah Society and the Defining of a People 1855-1867 (Studies in African American History and Culture) Hardcover: 304 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 9.25 x 1.00 x 6.00 Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (July 1, 2003) ISBN: 0415945860
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"Beneath the Underdog: Race, Religion and the Trail of Tears"
[Link to pdf]]
American Indian Quarterly
Volume 25, Number 3
Devon A Mihesuah , Editor
P.O. Box 15020
Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5020
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Other publications and papers
“ ‘A Great Gathering of Wondering;’ The Spiritual Intersections of Indigenous and African Persons in the Early Baptist Church,” “The First and the Forced”: Indigenous and African American Intersections, University of Kansas, November 10, 2006
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and Its Mission to Indian and Negro Slaves,” Symposium: Black Indians: The Intersecting Histories and Cultures of Native Americans and African Americans, American Society for Ethnohistory Annual Meeting, Williamsburg, VA, Nov. 3, 2006
“"Learning to Hear the Stories VI: Listening in the Borderlands," Shifting Borders of Race and Identity,” University of Kansas, March 17-19, 2005
“The Spread of Freemasonry among the American Indians of the United States,” The Proceedings of the Ohio Lodge of Research, March, 2004
“Aframerindian Religion,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, (Volume 57:3-4), 2003.
“Living Together In A Sacred Place: The Role of Silver Bluff, South Carolina, in Our Collective Religious Experience,” Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education, Fall 2001 Vol. 3, No. 2.
Aframerindian Slave Narratives Web Project “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938,” Related Resources, American Memory, The Library of Congress.
"Red, White, and Black in the Old South,” Appalachian Quarterly, Winter 1999.
“ 'all my Slaves, whether Negroes, Indians, Mustees, Or Molattoes:' Towards a Thick Description of `Slave Religion’,” American Religious Experience, August 1999.
“`I am Keetoowah's Son’: Cherokee Nationalism and the Civil War,” “HAKO: Incontro con le culture magico visionarie," Fall 1999.
“`His brother, and not his slave’ The Beloved Community in the Cherokee Nation,” Journal of African American History and Genealogy, Fall 1999.
Review of The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Union Seminary Quarterly Review(Volume 50:3-4), 1997.
“The Keetoowah Society in Cherokee History,” Cherokee Messenger, March 1997.
“Apocalypse Now: The Realized Eschatology of the Christian Identity Movement,” Disinformation, February 1997, E-space Exhibition – Razorfish Subnetwork, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,San Francisco, CA.
Review of Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America by Julius H. Rubin, Journal of Religion and Health 1996.
“Apocalypse Now: The Realized Eschatology of the Christian Identity Movement.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, (Volume 49:1-2), 1995.
Theology and the Practice of Responsibility: Essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Contributing Editor, Trinity Press International, 1994.
Review of That Godless Court?: Supreme Court Decisions on Church-State Relationships by Ronald B. Flowers, Journal of Religion and Health 1995. |
