The history of Indigenous Americans is fraught with broken treaties and outright lies from the United States government. Award-winning journalist Gayle follows the Creek Indians from the Southeast along the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, where they are also known as the self-governed Muscogee Nation. Unlike whites who brought enslaved Africans to America, the Creeks allowed enslaved people to earn their freedom and become full tribal members. Two Creek leaders of African descent, Cow Tom and Legus Perryman, were prominent in negotiations with the United States government. But when the Dawes Rolls of 1893--1913 (lists of people accepted by the United States government as Creeks) introduced race as an artificial basis of tribal membership, descendants of Cow Tom and Legus Perryman began to lose their status as enrolled tribal members; lawsuits regarding this status are pending to this day. In addition to exploring the nuances of Creek history, Gayle probes his own background as the son of Jamaican immigrants who moved from New York to Oklahoma. VERDICT Illuminating a little-known aspect of American history, this book will especially appeal to those interested in the history of Indigenous and Black Americans.--Laurie Unger Skinner

Gayle, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, debuts with an illuminating look at racial dynamics within Creek Nation. In the decades before the Creeks were forcibly relocated from the southeastern U.S. to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears, "Blacks could become formally adopted and identified as fully Creeks... when they put down roots in the Creek Nation." In 1866, a Black Creek leader named Cow Tom negotiated a treaty with the U.S. government that "gave certain Black people citizenship rights within the Nation." But the 1887 Dawes Act, which instituted a policy of determining Native American identity based on "a highly dubious measurement of how much 'Indian blood' one has," posed a significant challenge to Black Creeks, and the Nation's 1979 constitution disenfranchised them. Gayle brilliantly untangles the interwoven threads of colonialism, racism, and capitalism by documenting the lives of Cow Tom's descendants, including businessman and civil rights activist Jake Simmons Jr. and attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons, who is currently waging a legal battle to reinstate tribal citizenship for Black Creeks. Sharp character sketches, incisive history lessons, and Gayle's autobiographical reflections as a Jamaican American transplant to Oklahoma make this a powerful portrait of how "white supremacy divides marginalized groups and pits them against each other." (June)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.