Slaveholding Indigenous peoples: Rozanne Gooding Silverwood, ‘Reconciling a Sovereign Debt: The FWP Slave Narratives and the History of Chickasaw Slaveholding’, The Oral History Review, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Slaveholding Indigenous peoples: Rozanne Gooding Silverwood, ‘Reconciling a Sovereign Debt: The FWP Slave Narratives and the History of Chickasaw Slaveholding’, The Oral History Review, 2026

12Aug26

Abstract: From Maryland to Florida, and westward to Kansas, interviewers for the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) spread out across seventeen states in the 1930s to record formerly enslaved African Americans’ firsthand accounts of slavery in the American South. Unbeknownst to many oral history scholars, the FWP’s “Oklahoma Slave Narrative” archive holds thirteen distinctive interviews with persons formerly enslaved by Southeastern Native Americans. My discovery of four informants whose narratives refer specifically to influential leaders of my Chickasaw tribe initiated my journey as oral historian and enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation to make sense of a slaveholding past that has been all but erased from Chickasaw media. In this article, I present the historical context of settler colonialism that helped shed light on how Indian nations came to participate in chattel slavery in the antebellum South and Indian Territory. Drawing from primary sources found in my mother’s genealogy archive, I discovered important errors in the FWP interview transcripts—misidentifications of the tribe affiliations of the narrators’ former slaveholders that I believe have enabled many of today’s Chickasaw to disavow the existence of slaveholding ancestors. My comparative reading of these four narratives points to an overlooked political motivation for these narrators’ favorable representations of Indian slaveholders: the narrators’ quest to secure tribal affiliation and citizenship. Yet through these narratives, I have gained a more nuanced understanding of my Indigenous ancestry and a much more profound appreciation of the sovereign debt owed to the Chickasaw freedpeople and their descendants for the survival of my ancestors and our Indigenous nation in the face of territorial loss and colonial catastrophe.

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