WE REFUSE TO FORGET

A tangled tale of crossed bloodlines, racism, and identity.

Gayle, the child of Jamaican immigrants, was born in New York City but lived as a child in Oklahoma, where, as an outsider, he was accosted with questions of identity. Such questions, as he writes, are not new in the Sooner State. In the late 1830s, when Cherokee, Creek, and other Native peoples were displaced from their homes and made to resettle in what was then called the Indian Territories, they brought both enslaved and freed Blacks with them. “During the Revolutionary War,” writes the author, “the British would present African slaves to the Creeks as gifts when tribes within the Creek Nation cooperated with them.” The Creek Nation was made up of many peoples who had been previously displaced by White settlement and who were enfolded into Muskogee genealogies, and Black people were among them. Enter racist designations established by non-Creek peoples, by U.S. military administrators and Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, who divided the nation into groups by blood quantum, or the share of Muskogee blood that a person might have. Even today, Gayle writes, the federal government “issues an ID card called the Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB),” the basis of tribal belonging. The result: Black Creeks who had been acculturated into Creek society and as freed people had intermarried with Native peoples were delisted, fueling a legacy of petitions and lawsuits that continue to the present, exacerbated by the fact that only enrolled members of the Creek Nation are entitled to distributions from gambling proceeds earned at tribal casinos. With a narrative framed by the story of a Black Creek leader named Cow Tom, Gayle ably (if sometimes repetitively) examines the idea that identity can be multifaceted—in this case, that the same Black person “could be simultaneously free, never enslaved, and fully Creek.”

A pointed investigation of a controversial, unsettled matter of both law and ethnic identity.