Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country

When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people.  The tribe had owned enslaved Black people since the 1720s; by the eve of the American Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved African Americans.  During the Civil War, the Choctaw Nation officially sided with the Confederacy.  Choctaw legal authorities deemed any criticism of the Confederacy or the Confederate army to be a form of treason against the Choctaw Nation.  Choctaws also raised an infantry force and a cavalry to fight alongside Confederate forces during the war.  What accounts for this level of commitment to the Confederate cause among the Choctaws?  Drawing upon Choctaw legislative documents, narratives from enslaved people and residents of Indian Territory, and military records from the 1st Choctaw Mounted Rifles, Fay Yarbrough reveals that while sovereignty and states’ rights mattered to Choctaw leaders, the survival of slavery also determined the Nation’s support of the Confederacy.  By drawing parallels between the Choctaw Nation and the Confederate states, Yarbrough looks beyond the traditional binary of the Union and Confederacy and reconsiders the historical relationship between Native populations and slavery.

Fay Yarbrough is Professor of History and affiliated faculty with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and the Center for African and African American Studies at Rice University.  Her research centers on interactions between Native peoples and people of African descent in the nineteenth-century US.  She is the author of Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) and Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) and co-editor of Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400-1850 (University of South Carolina Press, 2011).

The event will take place in Kesler Auditorium in Hickok Hall.