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 modernday with particular attention to identity settler colonialism and antiBlackness Her first book Ive 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 modernday 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