Alaina E. Roberts is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and the multi-award-winning author of I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, which uses archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction.
She has written for TIME magazine, High Country News, and the Washington Post, and her research has been featured in CNN, the New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.
Roberts will discuss the history of Black slave-owning among the Five Tribes (the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Nations) and the Reconstruction project the United States enforced in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), which ended with the Black people in this region becoming the only group of former slaves in the world to receive reparations in the form of land.
