Dr. Alaina E. Roberts (Chickasaw and Chickasaw Freedman) is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and holds a Doctorate in History from Indiana University. Roberts’ research explores the intersections of Black and Native American history from the nineteenth century to the present, with a particular focus on the history and ongoing legacies of slavery in the Five Tribes of the Southeast: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, and Muscogee Creek Nations. This work is deeply personal, as her interest in these histories grows from her own family, which includes Black and mixed-race paternal ancestors who were enslaved in the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations.
Roberts’ first book, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), weaves archival research and family history to tell a layered story of settlement and emancipation in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), challenging traditional categories of victim/victimizer, kin/outsider, and Indigenous/migrant. The book received several honors, including the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, the Phillis Wheatley Book Prize, and the Western History Association’s John C. Ewers Award and W. Turrentine Jackson Book Prize. Her current project is a personal history of the Chickasaw Nation that examines the legacies of slavery and the possibilities for reconciliation between the enslaved and enslavers.
Contact:
Select Works:
“In 2025, An Echo of the 1800s: The Fight for Citizenship in the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations,” Journal of the Civil War Era 16, no. 1 (2026).
“A Pedagogy of Empathy and Self-Interest in Teaching Multiracial History,” Journal of Southern History 91, no. 4 (2025).
Editor with Joan Cashin, Material Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (special issue), Journal of the Civil War Era 15, no. 2 (2025).
Roundtable Organizer & Facilitator, “‘We Are Cherokee’: Exhibiting Material Culture as an Act of Reconciliation,” Journal of the Civil War Era 15, no. 2 (2025).
Essay response to “Holding Space in Colonial Settler Histories: Book Forum on Alaina E. Roberts’ I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (2021),” Settler Colonial Studies 14, no. 2 (2024).
“Black Slaves and Indian Owners: The Continuous Rediscovery of Indian Territory,” Journal of the Civil War Era 13, no. 1 (2023).
“Settlement” in Democracies in America: Keywords for the 19th Century and Today, eds. D. Berton Emerson and Gregory Laski. Oxford University Press, 2023.
“At the Intersection of Chickasaw Identity & Black Enslavement,” Southern Cultures 28, no. 3 (2022).
“When Black Lives Matter Meets Indian Country: Using the Cherokee and Chickasaw Nations as Case Studies for Understanding the Evolution of Public History and Interracial Coalition,” American Indian Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2021).
I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Roundtable, “No More Nations within Nations: Indigenous Sovereignty after the End of Treaty-Making in 1871,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 20, no. 2 (2021).
“A Different Forty Acres: Land, Kin, and Migration in the Late Nineteenth Century West,” Journal of the Civil War Era 10, no. 2 (2020).
“A Hammer and a Mirror: Tribal Disenrollment and Scholarly Responsibility,” Western Historical Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2018).