Caleb Gayle

Our present time is fraught with groups that seek to undermine the place of historical scholarship in the public understanding of the past. This is not just a current phenomenon (nor is it restricted to the American experience). Caleb Gayle explains that as a young man growing up in Tulsa he came to the realization that why he didn’t understand “where we came from wasn’t just bad schooling. It was the result of a deliberate attempt to prevent us from remembering.” (xiii)

Gayle’s investigation into the history of the Creek Nation, in particular the Black Creeks, is an engaging study in the malleability of identity. As the child of Jamaican immigrants, he struggled with all the varied identifiers – Black, Jamaican, American, immigrant – and proposes this complexity is fundamentally normal for everyone. In the case of the Black Creeks, he presents an interesting study into how a particular group of Creeks – both Black and Creek – could be disenfranchised from the group and have a powerful legacy within that group get functionally erased. The impact on contemporary people can be profound as people lose access to wealth and services as well as historical identity and recognition.

The author is not a historian but his scholarship seems pretty good at first look. Gayle’s sources range from documentary sources to interviews with contemporary persons. I do not, however, see citations or a bibliography. This is troubling.

Gayle’s writing style is engaging. His connections between the past – especially related to the role of Cow Tom and Jake Simmons Jr. The former was both Black and Creek, and became an important leader of the Creek Nation in the challenging years after the Trail of Tears. He was fundamental in many of the treaty negotiations with the USA. The latter – also Black and Creek - was able to turn the privileges negotiated by Cow Tom into an extraordinarily successful business career. Not surprisingly, efforts were made to undermine the place of both these men in the history of both the Creek Nation and the Black community.

In addition, Gayle does an able job explaining the role of blood quantum in subverting and dividing the Creek Nation. In essence, the US government used this policy to dominate negotiations of Creek territory. He explains that the role of Black Creeks was destroyed by “having to find blood that doesn’t exist – not because your father isn’t Creek, but because blood quantum was an arbitrary maneuver engineered by white men to determine how little land Indigenous people could keep. (203) He recognizes that membership in the Creek Nation was changed deliberately to exclude influential members of the community to the benefit of US interests.

While Gayle’s connections between the plight of contemporary Black Creeks is strong, his connections with a more generalized Black American experience seems less obvious. He claims that, “We accept minimizing nonwhite life in America to help us maintain the status quo. The idea of Black lives being pushed further to the margins had become so entrenched in our national character that expelling Black Creeks from the Creek Nation became a worthwhile way to carve a path of independence for the Creek Nation – a path charted and led by a white government. (227) Yes, this is a significant aspect of the American experience now but the expulsion of the Black Creeks was during a period of social and territorial fluidity. These racist policies seemed to be setting the status quo rather than enforcing it.
Submitted S. West 6/6/23… (altro)

When blacks would go into Indian Territory (Oklahoma) and live with the Creeks, they had the opportunity to marry into the tribe. When they did, they became a member of the tribe. This is the story of the Simmons family. It tells the history of their family from Cow Tom, the first member of the family to be a Black Creek who was a chief of the tribe, through his present-day descendants who had their citizenship in the Creek Nation taken from them in 1979 when the Creeks wrote a new constitution that fell in line with what the U.S. Government wanted for them to have more autonomy over their tribal culture, lives, and government. The family and other Black Creek families are trying to get the Black Creek citizenship returned to them and have shown through their genealogies that they are blood Creeks.

I found this book fascinating on so many levels. Obviously, I enjoyed the Simmons Family history. I liked reading of their successes and prosperity as they were treated like people in the Creek Nation. I liked seeing the opportunities for them before the white settlers came into Indian Territory after the Civil War. The U.S. government broke treaties with the tribes and forced their bigoted roles onto the tribes, especially Black members of those tribes.

Reading the history and culture of the Creeks was interesting. I learned so much that I was never taught in school. I also liked learning some of the history of Oklahoma. I knew little of it and have only recently learned of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. I appreciated knowing it still affects the race relations between Tulsa residents.

I liked that Mr. Gayle puts his experiences into the book since his family only moved to Oklahoma when he was eight. I liked how he takes the history of the Black Creeks and thinks about its effect on him today. It makes me think also of how much I need to learn of the Black experience and the negative impact that still abounds within the Black community from slavery, Jim Crow laws, police brutality, and white privledge and apathy.

This is a book all people need to read. It opened my eyes to how much we are not taught and how much is whitewashed or ignored. Very well written and worth your time though it is a hard book to read.… (altro)