Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South written by Barbara Krauthamer, dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and professor of history at UMass Amherst, has been chosen as a November book of the month for Noname Book Club, an online and in-real-life community “dedicated to uplifting POC voices.”
The book examines the intersection of slavery and Indigenous communities of the American south during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Noname Book Club started almost spontaneously when Chicago-based rapper Fatimah Nyeema “Noname” Warner posted a picture of a book she was reading to social media and her fans suggested that she form a book club.Today, Noname Book Club highlights two books each month written by authors of color, builds community online and in-person, works with libraries around the country to ensure their picks are available, and sends monthly book picks to incarcerated individuals through their Prison Program.
Krauthamer’s Black Slaves, Indian Masters rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the Black people they enslaved.
The book chronicles the history of the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes and their practice of buying, selling, and owning Africans and African Americans as slaves throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, well after the US Civil War and slavery had ended. Conflicts among the tribes and U.S. lawmakers left untold numbers of former slaves and their descendants in the two Indigenous nations without citizenship in either the Indigenous nations or the United States.
Black Slaves, Indian Masters has been called a groundbreaking study. Krauthamer's examination of slavery and emancipation highlights the ways Indian women's gender roles changed with the arrival of slavery and changed again after emancipation and reveals complex dynamics of race that shaped the lives of Black people and Indigenous people both before and after the Civil War and the removal of tribes from the deep south to “Indian Territory.”
The November books of the month can be seen on the Noname Book Club website, which also has more information about joining the book club, forming a local chapter, or supporting the project.
A version of this article was originally published by the UMass Amherst News and Media Relations Office.