And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes By Angie Debo

Angie Debo Í 5 review

It is often hard to recommend older history books because of the dry styles and the paternalism, but they still fill in blanks. That is the situation here. So for the things that were filled in...

1. Many of the people claiming Cherokee blood in their past come from the time post-allotment time where not only was there a great deal of romantic pride in the vanished Indians, but also a great desire to cash in, sometimes encouraged by greedy lawyers recruiting and convincing people that they were connected.

2. I have frequently seen a quote from Dawes stating that the Indian needed to learn selfishness. More context is given here, with that selfishness being necessary for land development so you can see towns and skyscrapers.

I also could not help thinking that these land seizures happened in the key states that sent forth refugees from the Dust Bowl. That should be explored more... how much damage does the selfishness do?

And, while it is not new, there is still always that disgust in reading over all of the scams and graft and lies and kidnappings and murders that happen just to get their hands into that land. And even when some people were outraged by it, there were more people outraged if any attempts to fix that could potentially cut into their action. 0691005788 The narrator of this audio book was very difficult to listen to. At times it was a struggle to pay attention. However, this topic is something that should be more widely read to educate people about the multiple atrocities our government committed agains our native peoples. Again and again, they were deceived and taken advantage of, forced to move or assimilate, and have their land swindled from them. I wanted to make sure to finish this to give the subject the respect it deserves. 0691005788 Pride of place within the historiography of Indian Territory and early Oklahoma probably belongs to Angie Debo, who in this 1940 book exposed how unscrupulous businessmen victimized the most prominent victims of Indian Removal, the Five Civilized Tribes. Between 1906 and 1908, Oklahoma statehood and the passage of federal and state land-allotment acts licensed white entrepreneurs to descend on the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, and cheat them of their resources. The next two decades witnessed “an orgy of plunder and exploitation” (p. 91) in eastern Oklahoma. Private firms and individual speculators persuaded Native American heads-of-household or local judges to give them power of attorney over uneducated Indians' property. Courts made enterprising whites the guardians of newly-wealthy Indian minors. Real-estate offices hosted weddings (usually in name only) between female allottees and white grifters. Attorneys devised exploitative contracts that bought Indian communities' resources for a song. When all else failed, con men resorted to forgery, fraud, and even murder to obtain Oklahoma Indians' land, timber, and oil.

As with Indian Removal two generations earlier, this campaign of land-piracy occurred under the aegis of American law, and its magnitude nearly overwhelmed Oklahoma's judicial system. Tens of thousands of Indian-related civil cases clogged state courts into the 1920s, and county judges used their influence and issuance of guardianships to build personal political machines. They and state officials fought private businessmen in the 1930s for shares of the spoils, while the Native families they had despoiled struggled with famine and poverty in a land of natural plenty (p. 356). Debo's study has an old-fashioned feel to it, insofar as it presents Native Americans as passive victims of white greed and focuses on the plunderers. But her thorough research and pitiless explication of whites' greed and exploitation make her book a classic, and set a high standard for future histories of Indian-white relations in the Sooner State. 0691005788 I had to keep reminding myself that this was published in 1940 whenever allusion to the present was made. I knew,in general,about the Dawes Act; this book spells out in painful detail the economic ramifications of that shift from communal to private property, from traditional tribal organization to citizenship. At times I got tangled in real estate and financial jargon, but usually could follow the report of exploitation way beyond anything I'd read of before. Two most egregious actions were declaring a Native incompetent (without examination) so as to become their guardian and thus have access to their land and/or mineral rights, creating expenses for which to be reimbursed before giving money to the Native (if any). And kidnapping a teen before he reached majority, then at midnight on his birthday getting him to sign over a deed for less than the value of the property.

The rivalry between Federal and State governments over administering assets, over rule making, over supervising added to the exploitation. Gradually the government seemed to look at real situations instead of listening only to reports and to attempt redress; however,party politics, state Vs. federal rivalries, and other economic interests caused much watering down.

None of this is a surprise; there is just more detail than I knew before and a new awareness of how long the chaos reigned. 0691005788 February 6, 2018: Sadly, I need to put this on the back-burner for now. I so hoped to finish it, but too many other things I need to read.

Our pastor, two pastors ago, told me to read this. He was a history buff and knew I shared his love of reading and history. Then I saw a famous picture of Angie hanging in the Oklahoma State Capital, her writings lined up behind her.

Angie Debo wrote about Indian injustices despite being banned from publication and shunned as a troublemaker. In this article about her, we read, This book (And Still the Waters Run) and her The Road to Disappearance: A History of the Creek Indians served as a basis for a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Harjo vs. Kleppe, in which important land rights for the Creek nation were recognized.

This is not a sensational or exciting book like Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, so even though it is older, concerns vastly more people, tells of a far greater tragedy, and is described as a 'classic and a major influence on writers of Native American history', very few people today will read it.

Still reading... 0691005788

I'm also reading Tulsa: From Creek Town to Oil Capital but that's not on here.

I had to return it to the library. I'll finish it later. 0691005788 c 1940 0691005788 Necessary but tedious history. 0691005788 A horrible tragedy. I could barely get through it. It took such an emotional toll-I did discover a thread to a family mystery-an explanation for the family lore that my maternal grandfather had a “head right” but no Native American DNA. 0691005788

Debo's classic work tells the tragic story of the spoliation of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole nations at the turn of the last century in what is now the state of Oklahoma. After their earlier forced removal from traditional lands in the southeastern states--culminating in the devastating 'trail of tears' march of the Cherokees--these five so-called Civilized Tribes held federal land grants in perpetuity, or as long as the waters run, as long as the grass grows. Yet after passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, the land was purchased back from the tribes, whose members were then systematically swindled out of their private parcels.

The publication of Debo's book fundamentally changed the way historians viewed, and wrote about, American Indian history. Writers from Oliver LaFarge, who characterized it as a work of art, to Vine Deloria, Jr., and Larry McMurtry acknowledge debts to Angie Debo. Fifty years after the book's publication, McMurtry praised Debo's work in the New York Review of Books The reader, he wrote, is pulled along by her strength of mind and power of sympathy.

Because the book's findings implicated prominent state politicians and supporters of the University of Oklahoma, the university press there was forced to reject the book in .... for fear of libel suits and backlash against the university. Nonetheless, the director of the University of Oklahoma Press at the time, Joseph Brandt, invited Debo to publish her book with Princeton University Press, where he became director in 1938. And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes