“Compelled to Do All the Hard Work”: Slavery, Labor, and Resistance in Indian Territory

This paper interrogates the diverse forms of labor enslaved people performed for Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholders in antebellum Indian Territory. Most discussions of enslaved labor in American Indian slaveholding communities center on cotton production and wealthy planters of Euro-American and Native descent. Using WPA narratives, federal government records, letters, and newspaper accounts, this presentation builds upon this scholarship by widening the scope of analysis to include industries such as cattle ranching and salt works as well as examiningmiddling slaveholders. In addition, it will also use the lens of gender to examine how enslaved people used their labor to plan and initiate overt and subtle resistance against their Native enslavers. Certain skills allowed enslaved people of Black and Black Indian ancestry relative mobility and limited opportunities to obtain freedom.

I argue that a consideration of enterprises other than cotton production and of enslavers who were not planters underscores the importance of Indian Territory to the massive expansion of slavery in the United States before the Civil War and emphasizes Native involvement in the nineteenth-century market economy. Slaveholders of all economic and social stations in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations participated in the institution and recognized the economic benefits that enslaved labor provided.