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This chapter focuses on Ollie Brown and Gus Hart. Ollie was a granddaughter of Eliza Brown, the matriarch of a large Cherokee family that emigrated from North Carolina to the Cherokee Nation in 1871. Gus Hart was an American from Texas, and when his family immigrated into the Goingsnake District in the 1880s, they were intruders, non-Indian squatters on tribal land whose presence helped to precipitate allotment. Ollie was doing what her elders before her had done. Her father, grandmother, and great-grandmother had married outsiders yet stayed among their own people. Ollie's great-grandmother Mary was a member of the McDaniel family that lived along Salequoyah Creek in the Old Nation. She had married Jesse Raper, a white man from South Carolina, who was one of three relatives, likely brothers, who married Cherokee women.

This chapter traces the rebuilding of communities by the Shoeboots and other Cherokee families in the West, and the eventual disruption of the American Civil War that decimated Cherokee towns even while emancipating black slaves among Cherokees. The 1850s are often called the “Golden Age” of Cherokee history. In this period after removal and the political turmoil of its immediate aftermath, Cherokees managed to rebuild shining communities in the West, studded with farms, plantations, schools, salt mines, ferries, and mercantile shops. However, an ideological civil war soon erupted in Cherokee country, between pro-Confederate Cherokees and proneutrality Cherokees, who would soon redefine themselves as pro-Unionists. The Cherokee elite who had adopted slavery to demonstrate their level of civilization lost nearly all in their fight to maintain it. Enslaving people of African descent proved a miserable and ineffectual strategy for protecting tribal sovereignty.

This introductory chapter explains that writing history consists of arranging elements into storylines, and that constructing a storyline for the history of an Afro-Cherokee family in the contexts of colonialism, slavery, and nation-building can be quite challenging. As a result, the book narrates two stories at once. One storyline is the arc of Cherokee history: federal and local challenges to Cherokee nationalism, forced removal, and the rebuilding of the Cherokee Nation in the West. The second storyline is the history of black slaves in Native America, a significant location in the African diaspora that many slavery studies overlook. This bifurcation of narratives is magnified by a conflicting recognition by members of different communities of the relative importance of historical events.

This book concludes with a discussion of how the community of Chewey and the Cherokee families who lived in the area survived allotment. When anthropologist Albert L. Wahrhaftig conducted his research there during the 1960s, Chewey remained a stable community that still exhibited communitarian ethics. In the decades after allotment, Cherokees there continued to propose their own solutions to the challenges of survival. Allotment was supposed to assimilate them, but Cherokees often have remained at odds with the policies dictated by the federal government and the ideals imposed by the outside world. This is not because Cherokees cannot adapt. As Wahrhaftig put it, “Cherokees innovate when it is necessary to do so in order to keep their way of life intact. Not unchanged, but intact.” Cherokees in Chewey organized to develop what Wahrhaftig called a “common and autonomous economic base.”