Talk One Thing

Writing Family History in an Afro-Native World

Paro Bruner, ca. 1900. Photograph from Oklahoma Historical Society.

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Talk One Thing

Writing Family History in an Afro-Native World

by Kendra Taira Field
Southern Cultures, Vol. 28, No. 3: Inheritance

“This was genealogy as survival, genealogy with land and livelihood on the line.”

As a child in the 1980s, I sensed that family history was deadly serious. Family history was material, physical, and psychological survival. In New Jersey, where I grew up, our family was Black; back in Oklahoma, my grandmother reminded us, we were Creek Indian, too.

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