And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes [1940] - Angie Debo, Amanda Cobb-Greetham (Preface)

Written by Angie Debo, Amanda Cobb-Greetham (Preface)
Read by Kate Harper
Format: M4B
Unabridged

Originally published in 1940, this classic book exposed the scandal of the dispossession of native land by American settlers.

And Still the Waters Run tells the tragic story of the liquidation of the independent Indian republics of the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles, known as the Five so-called Civilized Tribes. At the beginning of the twentieth century, about seventy thousand of these Indians owned the eastern half of the area that is now the state of Oklahoma, a territory immensely wealthy in farmland, forest, coal mines, and untapped oil pools. Farmers, cattlemen, and coal diggers held their land in common and maintained their own legislative bodies and educational and judicial systems. Their political and economic status in the area was guaranteed by treaties and patents from the federal government. But white people began to settle among them, and by 1890 these immigrants were overwhelmingly in the majority. Congress therefore abrogated treaties that it had promised would last “as long as the waters run,” and when Oklahoma was admitted to the Union in 1907, the Indians received what Angie Debo calls the “perilous gift of American citizenship.”

This book documents the orgy of exploitation that followed. Within a generation, the Indians were virtually stripped of their holdings, and were rescued from starvation only through public charity. Discovery of oil only intensified the struggle, and “grafting off the Indians” attained the status of a major industry.

The publication of Debo’s book fundamentally changed the way historians viewed, and wrote about, American Indian history. Writers from Oliver LaFarge, who characterized it as “a work of art,” to Vine Deloria, Jr., and Larry McMurtry acknowledge debts to Angie Debo. Fifty years after the book’s publication, McMurtry praised Debo’s work in the “New York Review of Books” “The reader,” he wrote, “is pulled along by her strength of mind and power of sympathy.”

Because the book’s findings implicated prominent state politicians and supporters of the University of Oklahoma, the university press there was forced to reject the book in …. for fear of libel suits and backlash against the university. Nonetheless, the director of the University of Oklahoma Press at the time, Joseph Brandt, invited Debo to publish her book with Princeton University Press, where he became director in 1938.