We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power - Hardcover

Gayle, Caleb

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593329589 ISBN 13: 9780593329580

Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

“An important part of American history told with a clear-eyed and forceful brilliance.” —National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson

“We Refuse to Forget reminds readers, on damn near every page, that we are collectively experiencing a brilliance we've seldom seen or imagined…We Refuse to Forget is a new standard in book-making.” —Kiese Laymon, author of the bestselling Heavy: An American Memoir
 
A landmark work of untold American history that reshapes our understanding of identity, race, and belonging

In We Refuse to Forget, award-winning journalist Caleb Gayle tells the extraordinary story of the Creek Nation, a Native tribe that two centuries ago both owned slaves and accepted Black people as full citizens. Thanks to the efforts of Creek leaders like Cow Tom, a Black Creek citizen who rose to become chief, the U.S. government recognized Creek citizenship in 1866 for its Black members. Yet this equality was shredded in the 1970s when tribal leaders revoked the citizenship of Black Creeks, even those who could trace their history back generations—even to Cow Tom himself.

Why did this happen? How was the U.S. government involved? And what are Cow Tom’s descendants and other Black Creeks doing to regain their citizenship? These are some of the questions that Gayle explores in this provocative examination of racial and ethnic identity. By delving into the history and interviewing Black Creeks who are fighting to have their citizenship reinstated, he lays bare the racism and greed at the heart of this story. We Refuse to Forget is an eye-opening account that challenges our preconceptions of identity as it shines new light on the long shadows of white supremacy and marginalization that continue to hamper progress for Black Americans.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Caleb Gayle is an award-winning journalist who writes about race and identity. A professor at Northeastern University, he is a fellow at New America, PEN America, Harvard Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies, and a visiting scholar at New York University. Gayle’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Guernica, and other publications. The son of Jamaican immigrants, Gayle is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma, the University of Oxford, and has an MBA and a master’s in public policy, both from Harvard University. He lives in Boston.

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Chapter 1—Collateral Damage

 

 

"He was compelled to seek safety by hasty flight." —Cow Tom, Loyal Creek, Abstract #160, 1870

 

 

For weeks, the battle had been raging not far from Cow Tom's home. Smoke from artillery fire hung in the air, and the groans of injured and dying men were constant day and night. This Civil War battle happened outside the United States, and it disrupted the lives of people the United States had turned from native dwellers to foreigners.

 

 

On July 15, 1863, Major General James Blunt of the Union Army called on his 250 cavalry soldiers to bring with them their guns, swords, and four pieces of heavy artillery. Familiar sights and sounds of battle preparation animated the day: the galloping of horses, the continual barking of orders at all hours of the night, cleaning of weaponry and equipment to pass the time waiting for a battle they knew would come even if they didn't know when. Young men had received orders from Blunt to walk along the eastern bulge of the Arkansas River in Indian Territory as they awaited to know their fates—clarity that the general just couldn't give them.

 

 

Over the next two days, Blunt guided his troops through the last thirteen miles of thicket, forest, wood, and river. For a brief two hours, his men—eventually a little less than three thousand in total—sat just over a mile from the Confederate enemy, who had been resting. Blunt's soldiers grabbed water from a nearby ridge to slake their thirst and unpacked their haversacks, whose contents ranged from notes from home to Bibles, but most important, food kept safe by the sacks' stitching and weaving reinforced by tar.

 

 

By ten a.m. on July 17, the men of the Union Army were assembled into two columns. According to Blunt, "The infantry was in column by companies, the cavalry by platoons and artillery by sections, and all closed in mass so as to deceive the enemy in regard to the strength of my force. In this order I moved up rapidly to within one-fourth of a mile of [the Confederate] line, when both columns were suddenly deployed to the right and left, and in less than five minutes my whole force was in line of battle, covering the enemy's entire front."

 

The Confederates were under the command of General Douglas H. Cooper, who had been dispatched to defend what had become a major supply route. His Confederate comrades had arrived in this part of Indian Territory not more than a year before and in short order had put up a commissary, a field hospital, arbors, and housing tents. Built along the Canadian River, the settlement had ample fresh water for both the troops and, just as important, the livestock.

 

But this wasn't just an ideal place to set up a field hospital and house troops. The twenty-five miles from where General Blunt started his advance on this group of Confederate soldiers was in a town called Honey Springs, in a part of the continent that had not yet been determined to be part of either the United States or the Confederacy. This was Indian Territory. Honey Springs was along the main route that connected the outer lands that were disputed by the Union and the Confederacy, an area that included Texas, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. Honey Springs was a stagecoach stop, a watering hole, and a weigh and refueling station. Along this trail Confederate soldiers received and distributed provisions, weapons, timber, and livestock. But as the Civil War raged, this area became even more critical as the Union wanted to fight proxy battles on native land.

 

But the land on which these soldiers fought—where men Black, white, and Indigenous died—was not in America. The Civil War wasn't just fought on American soil. One hundred seven such Civil War battles were fought outside America—fought in the metaphorical backyards of Native people. The Battle of Honey Springs took place just steps from Cow Tom, whose later actions prompted generations to tell others, "I got Indian in me."

 

The Union defeated the Confederates at Honey Springs, and in the battle's aftermath Cooper's army looked to decamp until they determined where to go next. They came across empty homes and farms in the area in which food and water had been left by people fleeing the fighting across the region. The battles had hollowed out towns like Coosa, Coweta, Tuckabatchee, North Fork, Canadian Colored, and Arkansas Colored. Creek towns. And the land on which the Confederates fought was Creek land, belonging to the citizens of the Creek Nation.

 

A nation once unified was scattered. Homes left in the state of people set to flee at moment's notice, farms and cattle left unattended, ways of life abandoned. Scores of Creek families headed north to Kansas with whatever they could pack, trying to escape the war they didn't ask for.

 

By August 1863, Confederate soldiers made their way twelve miles from North Fork, Oklahoma, where they lost their way along the Canadian River and discovered that not all Creek territory had been abandoned. They came upon a curious group of Creek families who had stayed—and who looked like the people whom neither the U.S. Constitution nor the Constitution of the Confederate States recognized fully as people.

 

One of those people was Cow Tom. He had stayed, and so had a host of other refugee Creeks, some of whom shared his jet-black skin tone and some of whom didn't. When these Confederate soldiers—tired, hungry, desperate, and likely not appreciative of the Black Creek cause—descended on Cow Tom's land and the land of his neighbors, it became clear that the Creeks' presence on their land wasn't greeted with enthusiasm by the Confederates.

 

***

Days into the ever-growing presence of Confederate soldiers on his land, Cow Tom and his wife, Amy, took what they could pack onto their backs and left. They walked away from everything that they had known—where they had raised a son, where they had run a grist mill, where they'd farmed and raised cattle—and plunged into a dark unknown. Night was the only time they could travel because that was the only time they could move undetected. With Confederate rebels in the area doing whatever overzealous white colonists do—claiming for themselves land and property that was someone else's—they didn't know what they'd encounter. There was no guarantee that any people they met would be friendly, particularly if those people were hungry and war-worn Confederate rebels. And it was virtually certain that any white person they'd encounter would see Cow Tom as just a slave running from his master. There was even less chance that Cow Tom would be seen as what he was: fully Creek and fully Black, and free.

 

His days would never dull the hopes for the grist mill he once told a U.S. official he badly wanted or his dream of a school for his children and grandchildren to attend.

 

After more than a week of being on the run, Cow Tom and his band of travelers—hungry, wet from continuous rain, having suffered cold nights and been burned by the daytime sun, and limitedly nourished—came to what seemed like a place to rest. They made it to an outpost called Fort Gibson with no certainty that they'd be accepted. There was no guarantee that Fort Gibson still sat under the control of the side that was supposedly against slavery. But it didn't matter: Cow Tom "was compelled to seek safety by hasty flight," he said later, because the skirmish between warring white people had laid waste to all he knew. And since he wasn't alone and a brazen, pioneering brand of leadership seemed core to his...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Riverhead Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593329589
• ISBN 13: 9780593329580
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland