Literary Heirlooms: Legal Bundles and Afro-Native Archival Practices

This project examines citizenship applications filed by formerly enslaved and Afro-Native people across the Five Southeastern Nations—Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, and Chickasaw—during the nineteenth century. Although many of these applications were denied, they constitute a rich and underexamined archive documenting forced migration, resettlement, kinship reconstruction, and practices of collective belonging in the aftermath of slavery, removal, and war. Drawing on archival research at the Western History Collection at the University of Oklahoma and the Cushing Memorial Archives at Texas A&M University, the project brings together petitions, affidavits, testimonies, handwritten narratives, and administrative records to rethink how citizenship and political life were articulated by Afro-Native communities. I read these applications not solely as legal documents but as “literary heirlooms” and “legal bundles”—materials preserved across generations as records of migration, dispossession, and self-making. As narrative assemblages containing multiple voices and collaborative testimony, these documents exceed the bureaucratic constraints imposed upon them. By centering denied claims and archival fragments, the project advances a methodological shift that treats these materials as central evidence of Afro-Native intellectual, communal, and political life.