Editor's note: David A. Chang teaches history at the University of Minnesota and is the author of The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929, out now from the University of North Carolina Press. Listen to the audio version of this interview here. The interview was conducted by Joel Wendland and transcribed by Peter Zerner.
PA: What was your main aim in writing The Color of the Land? What inspired you to undertake this project?
DAVID CHANG: I went searching for the project actually. I initially had begun a dissertation project, a book project, on Hawaii and Puerto Rico and Louisiana, and I was going to look at American sugar production in America’s growing empire. That seems very far afield from Oklahoma and it is.
But as I was beginning that project I decided I was going to put it on hold because it was too ambitious. I didn’t have the budget to pull off the book at the time because there was a lot of travel. But I wanted to understand how race and class work together in an expanding American colonial situation, and I realized that I could study this process as much in what we call the 48 states, the continental United States, as I could by going to places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico. My concern was try to understand race and class together, to try to understand, that is, material relations and cultural history in relationship to one another, because I felt that a lot of times the writing on these things was going in different directions. We were talking about race and class in very different vocabularies, oftentimes in very different books, and not understanding their relationship, I thought, with the proper complexity.
My goal was to find a place where I could understand race in a complex manner, not just two groups, but three or more groups in relationship to each other, and it was essential to me that one of those groups be indigenous, because one of my goals is to demonstrate the centrality of indigenous history to the history of the United States and the modern world. Those of us who are interested in Indian and indigenous history often see our work sidelined just into a kind of interesting footnote area, and I think that is not where our work belongs. I tried to speak to central issues in United States history and demonstrate the central place of indigenous history, of American Indian history, in that story.
PA: As your title suggests, the question of land is really at the center of the narrative you are telling, which seems to naturally raise the question of how property is defined and distributed and so on. The Creek Indian nation defined land in a very different manner than we are used to in the 20th and 21st century. Could you explain?
DAVID CHANG: You’re right, land is absolutely at the center of the book, and I think that has to be an important theme in U.S. history. We forget how rural a nation this country was for a long time, and of course land is a central part of the history of wealth. It is not only a form of wealth; it is also much more than that. It is also the place where we live, the place that we identify as our homeland.
But if we start to think about land as property, a good place to start is actually to think about what we mean by our contemporary sense of property. Lawyers and legal scholars talk about our current U.S. American property system as being mostly a fee-simple property system. That is, to own a piece of land is to own a title to it, and that title brings us a whole bundle of rights, the right to own, the right to build, the right to extract, the right to resell. So that’s the system we work with today.
The Creek system was not a system in which property was unknown. Property was known but it was a very different type. The fundamental thing is that first of all property was understood in terms of community property. A town owned its town lands, and when those towns ended up allying and creating a confederation called the Creek Nation, the Creek Nation owned the national domain together. So there is a sense of property there.
Beyond that, there is also a sense of individual property in terms of being generated out of a property of rights over use. Sometimes these are called usufruct rights. I prefer the simpler term “use rights.” That means that these lands belong to our town, let’s say to Tuskegee town – these are Tuskegee town lands. But some of those lands are not currently being exploited by anyone on an ongoing basis, so if a member of the town chooses to go and clear a field, plant that field, build a home there, that field and that home are the person’s property, but the land underneath them is not. So this was the way property and land ownership was expressed, not only among Creek Indian people, but also by many other people.
In English law, this is to say that one owns the improvements but not the land. You own the field but you don’t own the land underneath the field. You own the house and you own the right to use that area, but once you cease using that field, once you cease planting and harvesting, once you cease living in and maintaining a home, you forgo the use rights to that field or to that home, and that property returns back to the common property of the town.
PA: You highlight the differences between how white Americans and Creeks understood property, and how whites connected these difference to their racial theories. Could you explain how that worked?
DAVID CHANG: I think that whites came to see their mode of property ownership as superior. It was part of the many ways that whites thought of their own racial superiority. Not only in the Creek Nation, but also across the continent, whites looked at Indians and said they don’t own anything, they merely move about, and of course this goes with a long history of non-Indian people looking at Indians and ignoring their agricultural work, for one thing, and their agricultural lands, but it also goes along with denying the internal legal systems of indigenous people and the coherence of those internal legal, political, social and economic systems, and seeing simply incoherence, saying, for instance, that Indian people just kind of helter-skelter plant things here and there.
The other thing that happened was that in the middle of the 19th century some Creeks expanded their wealth exponentially through the use of enslaved African labor, and the legitimacy of that was called into question by white Americans in order to undercut native claims to land.
PA: One of the things that students of American Indian history are going to find really fascinating about your book is that you show how Creeks defined citizenship, which also was dramatically different from how white Americans were doing this. What were some of the differences?
DAVID CHANG: Well the concept of citizenship it seems it is constantly evolving, and this is one of the things I try to talk about in the book. Citizenship and inclusion are understood, or were historically understood in the Creek Nation, if you will, from the ground up, from the local up. The Creek Nation is a confederation of towns in its origin. Those towns were local entities and they were made up of families. Therefore to be a member of a town was to be a member of the confederation of those towns; it was to be a citizen of the nation at its origins.
Over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries a bunch of towns in the Southeast came together, and they formed what we now call the Creek Confederation. That entity existed only as a creation out of the local towns, the talwa. If you belonged to a talwa, you therefore automatically belonged to the nation. Then over time there was an effort by one faction in the tribe to formalize this – beginning around the 1840s – and to talk about national citizenship in more explicit terms.
Another thing to emphasize about the difference in the Creek conception of citizenship, is that entering a town almost meant entering a clan, entering a family, and being included in that manner in the society. And while I do want to emphasize how this is very different from how we understand American citizenship today, it also important to understand that my work is also part of an ongoing effort by American historians to point out that we have not always understood property in the U.S. as we do today, nor have we always understood citizenship in the United States as we do today.
Citizenship was an idea that had to be worked out in law and in politics in the United States over more than a century, and obviously it is still under contestation today. An effort to show changing notions of citizenship in an American Indian society in the context of U.S. colonialism is also a way of bringing attention to the constructed and the contested nature of citizenship across the board in a comparative sense, and that includes the United States.
PA: One of the ways that idea was contested in the Creek Nation is that their rules didn’t exclude, at least initially, African Americans, people of mixed race who were of European descent, or even those who were not of mixed race. How in general did those rules work?
DAVID CHANG: Let’s talk about the early period, the period up to about 1840. Here we are up to the period where the United States forced the majority of the Creeks to move from the Southeast to what we now call Oklahoma. At that time a lot of people became Creek who had not been born Creek. Some of those people were African Americans or enslaved Africans who left slavery in the American South and went to the interior and joined up with native people, and then through a variety of means were incorporated into the Creek nation.
Sometimes they were initially something like what we might call a captive slave, which is a form of Creek slavery, of domination, but generally that slavery was very different than the form that came to be known as American slavery. People who were in that position, including people who were of African descent, could marry into Creek families, and they and their children could become members of Creek families, members of Creek clans, and members of Creek towns, and thus members of what became known as the Creek Confederacy, and thus they would become citizens.
Similarly, by the late 1700s there were many whites in the Creek country. Many of them were Scots of U.S. birth, who came in to work as traders or for other reasons, intermarried with Creek women, with the men from Creek towns, and their children became Creek citizens. Some very important early Creeks came from such families.
So there were means of inclusion that extended the Creek nation in lots of ways. And it’s not only people of what we would call different races, such as whites and African Americans, but also many native people from different areas entered the Creek Confederacy in this way. If you think about it, that is what a confederacy is, that is what a confederation is, a way for people with many differences to create a unity among themselves, to declare themselves part of a larger whole. When a different group came into a town and became Creeks, say when a group of Alabaman Indians goes from being a separate tribe to a town affiliated with the Creek Confederacy, it is in many ways the same process as an individual entering the Creek Nation and becoming a member and a citizen. Being born out doesn’t mean that one is permanently excluded.
PA: You paint a picture up to the late 19th century of a really dynamic society, although it is being buffeted about by a harmful US colonial policy. But there is still an attempt to preserve a dynamic, growing society with its own ideas about how to use the land and the common value of each member of the nation. The centerpiece of the story is that something dramatically changes this outlook toward property, about property ideas, about citizenship ideas, and about race. What happens to cause that change?
DAVID CHANG: Well, the biggest change that you are referring to is the practice of allotment. Allotment was a policy whereby the United States government found ways of imposing on native nations the notion of individual land ownership. For a long time in the 19th century some Americans had been looking at native land ownership – and the Creeks were not the only people who had forms of land ownership that were very different from that of Americans, who owned land in common as a nation, and many of the them had use rights land like the Creeks.
In any case, all these land systems were different and Americans disliked that. They were considered by many white Americans to be inferior, and they were also a barrier to white acquisition of Indian lands. If you think about it, if a nation owns everything together it’s hard to buy a plot, right? Because it is a lot easier to alienate a small piece of land than to get an entire nation to sell off pieces of land.
For a whole variety of reasons, in the 19th century a lot of whites called for the creation of private land ownership, of getting native groups to divide their lands up into private plots, to assign those plots to either all male citizens or to all citizens, and then for those to become the private property of the individuals. The goal was to dissolve nations and create private land-owning individuals. This was called allotment.
What this did was to attack all those things we have been talking about. It undermined in serious ways the material basis for what had been a strong Creek resistance that was based on the idea of a common nationhood that brought all Creeks together, whatever their race, whatever their cultural orientation – and their were many different cultural orientations in the Creek Nation. That form of resistance that said we are all Creeks and all of this land is the Creek Nation, and we stand in resistance to its alienation, to the alienation of Creek land, and we stand in resistance to its domination by the United States.
The dividing up of the Creek Nation into lands also entailed a policy of dividing up Creeks into different segments of race. An enrollment, which is something akin to a census, was taken of the Creek Nation in preparation for allotment. That enrollment registered people formerly and unchangeably according to what was called their blood quantum, that is their supposed degree of indigenous ancestry, of black ancestry or white ancestry.
These racial categorizations over time became the means, through laws that were imposed in the first decades of the 20th century, of creating very different legal regimes over people of different racial backgrounds. This facilitated the sale and the loss of land by Black Creeks and allowed Creeks of mixed white and native ancestry a variety of means of selling their land or managing it in different ways. It also imposed a greater degree of white administrative supervision over the allotment lands of people who were deemed “full bloods.” You now had different laws covering different Creek lands according to how they had been racially categorized in the enrollment process, which was the first step, if you will, toward sectioning and dividing up the land.
PA: So in very fundamental ways dominant US ideologies about race really drove how this big change about citizenship in the Creek nation took place?
DAVID CHANG: In the most basic sense, yes, but one thing that is really important to recognize, and I really try to emphasize in the book, is that it is not as if ideas of racial difference and racial superiority and inferiority did not already exist among Creeks. There were already many Creeks who believed that it was better to be not Black than to be Black, and there were a lot of Creeks that thought that to be full blood was to be a real Indian. Then there were other Creeks who thought that to be of mixed blood might mean having access to the advantages of white ancestry. These ideas were out there, and they were already complicating Creek politics in the 1860s, the 1870s and the 1880s, but it was allotment that encoded them as law and as divisive law in Creek society in a brand-new way.
PA: Why is this historical study still relevant to understanding current US colonial policies towards Indian nations?
DAVID CHANG: One thing that is important to remember is that all of this was not so very long ago. Allotment, not only in the Creek Nation, but in most nations, was something that happened between 1887 and 1915. That’s when most of this happened, and we are still living through the aftermath of it. The legal problems that allotment brought on are still very much with us. One of these is the problem of fractionated land ownership. It is a major problem in Indian country, where some of the lands belonging to an allottee have to be inherited in an equal share by all heirs, and then when those heirs die, all of their heirs inherit an equal share of that land. There are literally pieces of land in Indian country today which are owned by hundreds of people and therefore become utterly unusable to anybody. Nobody can make a decision about them.
The questions of division, of inclusion and exclusion, and of citizenship within native nations, are very complicated in a number of nations today, most famously in the Creek Nation but also in the Seminole Nation, for instance, where questions of how race corresponds to whether one is or not part of the nation, are deeply related to the racial categorizations that were permanently imposed by allotment. The rolls that I talk about in the book, the Dawes Rolls that categorized people according to race, are important documents, and they are documents that people refer to when they talk about blood quantum and ancestry. So those documents remain active and complicating parts in American Indian country today.
My book also really documents the efforts of a sovereign nation to struggle for the maintenance of its sovereignty in the context of vastly unequal power relations with the colonial power. This should remind us of a couple of things, I think. First of all, that the colonial situation is still very active in the United States. It is important for Americans to understand that they occupy a republic that is also a settler colony – that the lands we occupy are indigenous lands which were seized and distributed according to new property regimes by a settler regime. This is very obvious in places like Oklahoma, because the division of tribal lands happened so very recently that people’s grandparents and great-grandparents were part of the process. But it did not happen all that long ago anywhere frankly. We need to know the basic situation that underlies where we are.
Second of all, it is important to realize that so much that we take for granted and as a given in terms of what property is, what a race is, what it means to be American, and what it means to be Indian are recent and recently contested political creations. Defining what an Indian is, what an American is, what it means to be Black, what property is, who is a citizen, what property should be taxed, what property should be untaxed, all of these are recent political decisions and are open to reinterpretation and to challenge. I think a lot of historians think this way. We try to demonstrate how things were made, but fundamentally there is an emphasis that if things are made in a certain way, they can certainly be remade and changed.
PA: One of things I appreciated a great deal in this book is the use of non-elite, non-official voices in the telling of the story, uncovering those primary sources where you find American Indians speaking up and talking about African American Indians for instance, people who have something to say about the issues of property and citizenship, and the things that are happening to them that they have little control over. How important is that aspect of history writing for you?
DAVID CHANG: It is one of my primary goals. There is a lot of writing about non-elite people in U.S. history. I am really by far not the only person doing this and it is extremely important. In the 1970s and the 1980s and into the 1990s, there was a strong emphasis on history from the ground up – trying to understand things from the point of view of the most humble, the most disenfranchised, the poorest, etc. And that was great.
For the last I would say 15-20 years there has been a strong emphasis on trying to understand the creation and the elaboration of structures of ideas, of ideologies like race, citizenship and property, the sorts of things I talk about in my book. My real effort is to make the history of non-elite people not just a history of what people did, but of what they thought.
As we embrace cultural history, the history of ideas and of ideologies, this needs to be a history that is based not only on ideas and ideologies that one can trace and easily access in public documents, it also history we can do through methods that historians have generally called social history methods, the methods of understanding poor and humble people. That is my goal: to be able to look at the ideas of Indian people, of indigenous people, of poor Black farmers, and of white sharecroppers, and to understand them in the larger history of ideas and ideologies, to understands their voices, and to access their voices as an active part of the debates over crucial ideas like what it means to be a citizen, what does it mean to be Creek, what is property, what is belonging or exclusion?
I take it as a given, and I think we should all take it as a given, that non-elite people have and continue to generate very complex ideas about the world and the political and social situation that they encounter. Some of the ideas that appear in this book are really quite startling in their complexity, and there is a lot that I hope we can learn from the voices that we encounter in this book.
PA: What new projects are you working on now?
DAVID CHANG: I have moved back to working on Hawaii. That is where my ancestry is from, so something that matters a lot to me is indigenous Hawaiian history. I have been teaching myself Hawaiian. Tons of documents were generated in Hawaiian in the 19th century in the Hawaiian language. What I am working on is trying to understand native Hawaiian ideas and understandings of global geography in the 19th century. Most of us when we encounter Hawaii see it as an episode, an anecdote almost, in the history of European expansion, globalization and exploration. When Captain Cook stumbled on the shores of Hawaii it was one small part of his exploration of the Pacific, but it was also, for the Hawaiian people, an important point in their long exploration of the globe, where Hawaiians through their reading, through their travels, through contacts that they made with people from around the world, and through their intellectual culture and economic and labor activities, came to an understanding of what the globe was that they lived in and what there place was in it.
