Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State by Kathryn Walkiewicz (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State by Kathryn Walkiewicz
• Deborah A. Rosen

Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State. By Kathryn Walkiewicz. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. xx, 293. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7295-3; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7294-6.)

Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State examines the relationship between colonization, enslavement, and state-making in the nineteenth-century United States. In this carefully researched and clearly presented study, Kathryn Walkiewicz argues that Indigenous dispossession, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy were central to the formation and identity of U.S. states; that states’-rights discourse was used to reinforce white men’s rights and their control over land; and that statehood itself was (and is) incompatible with Indigenous and Black [End Page 430] freedom. The author analyzes how white Americans used printed texts and visual images to imagine exclusionary states into being, and also how Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Native people used their own print culture to contest the entire settler-colonial project and advocate for their own freedom and self-determination.

After an introduction that lays out the themes of the book, four substantive chapters analyze debates about Black and Native freedom in Georgia (1830s), Florida (1820s–1840s), Kansas and Cuba (1850s), and Indian Territory (1890s–1900s). In keeping with the title Reading Territory, the book concentrates more on colonization than on enslavement, and it analyzes more extensively Native-produced texts than Black-authored ones. Chapters 1 and 2 draw from various short primary sources to illustrate the ideological role of print culture in both justifying and opposing state control, subjugation, and the removal of Indigenous people. By the 1850s, longer published texts provided fuller contemporary counternarratives to the dominant stories justifying state-hood, and Reading Territory is most intriguing when it delves deeply into those singular printed works. This is especially evident in chapter 3, which focuses mostly on how Kansas statehood was framed in the 1850s as a way of promoting Black people’s liberation and freedom, while Natives’ forced removal was erased. The chapter provides insightful, thought-provoking analysis of Martin R. Delany’s serialized novel Blake (1859–1862), John Brougham’s play Columbus el Filibustero! (1857), and published maps of Kansas Territory. Likewise, chapter 4 on Indian Territory—which describes Indigenous and Black residents’ unsuccessful efforts to establish their own states prior to the ultimate admission of Oklahoma as a state in 1907—offers deep studies of works pertaining to the 1905 State of Sequoyah movement, such as a single 1902 issue of the Muscogee-run Indian Journal and poems and essays by Too-Qua-Stee. The conclusion considers ways in which Indian Territory and the city of Tulsa have been envisioned in twenty-first-century Supreme Court decisions and popular television shows.

Because Walkiewicz focuses on southern case studies and on state-oriented printed material, it is important to keep two things in mind. First, at times northern states used states’-rights arguments to defend Black citizenship and rights—for example, in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Dred Scott v. Sandford case (1857). Most scholars similarly downplay antebellum northerners’ states’-rights rhetoric, which complicates the standard narrative about sectionalism and federalism. Second, the federal government shared with the states an interest in slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and white supremacy, and, as is evident in constitutional and legal history scholarship, racialized definitions of membership and rights played a significant role in the construction of the United States as a nation-state, just as it did in the creation of individual federated states.

Nonetheless, Walkiewicz demonstrates the value of going beyond constitutional and legal approaches, using literary texts and visual images to study state formation, and focusing on southern states that had a distinct history of Indigenous and Black people. Reading Territory makes important contributions by intertwining Black, Indigenous, Afro-Native, and white perspectives; by making a convincing argument about the significant role of state-centered [End Page 431] discourse; and by persuasively showing that print culture was an important vehicle for...