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Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South. By Barbara Krauthamer. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. [xvi], 211. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-0710-8.)
Recent scholarship about indigenous slaveholding practices during the nineteenth century occupies a complicated disciplinary space; such work is often seen as simultaneously part of and separate from native history, southern history, and African American history. These studies force readers to reconfigure old nineteenth-century racial paradigms based on a simple black/white binary to include native peoples. Barbara Krauthamer posits that examining slavery, emancipation, and citizenship among the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations through such sources as records generated by native populations, Works Progress Administration ex-slave narratives, missionary records, and documents from the Office of Indian Affairs also demands a reconsideration of the history of Reconstruction. She finds that federal policy after the Civil War was not solely concerned with determining the citizenship status of people of African descent in the era...