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In the era of Reconstruction, the Creek Nation pursued a policy of states' rights in order to defend its sovereignty against the federal government. The Creeks' conflation of states' rights and tribal sovereignty poisoned relations with ex-slaves, who were increasingly marginalized in Indian Territory.

This chapter focuses on the family background and life of Jackson Barnett. Barnett was born around 1856 in the Creek Nation in Indian Territory, in what is today McIntosh County in eastern Oklahoma. His life began inauspiciously as the child of a transient union between his father Siah Barnett, a freedman, and mother Thlesothle, of full- or mixed-blood Creek. There are many unknowns in Jackson Barnett's genealogy, which complicated the determination of heirs after Jackson's death and demonstrated how imprecise the Indian bureau's blood quantum distinctions were, though decisions vitally important to Indians' lives were based on the crude and proximate data in its files.

The Dawes Act and allotment brought an end to the Creek Nation. Although both Creeks and black Indians struggled to hold onto their land, those with lighter skin were relatively better off. The oil boom in Tulsa proved particularly harmful to Indians.

Until the late 18th century, when some Indians began adopting plantation slavery, there was little racism in the Creek Nation. By the early 19th century, however, relations between Indians and Africans were deteriorating. The Redstick War marked a turning point, after which many Indians concluded they could only survive by abiding by the South's racial hierarchy. Katy Grayson was one such Creek. Although she had had two children with an African man, she and her partner separated shortly after the war.

In the Antebellum era, slaveholders dominated the Creek government. Under their guidance, the Creek Nation passed laws punishing abolitionists, defending slavery, and discriminating against black Indians.

This chapter traces the ways that events in the Creek Nation's homeland in Alabama and Georgia set the stage for an intensification of the practice of private land use after removal to what is now Oklahoma. It notes that in the years stretching from the 1780s to the beginning of the Civil War, a powerful and wealthy minority of Creeks adopted Euro-American ideas and practices of race, chattel slavery, and nationalism. The chapter explains that these ideas served the interests and the power of this elite minority but divided the nation into factions that faced off in a number of conflicts, including the U.S. Civil War. It also notes that the eighteenth-century Creeks have a land property system. The chapter explains that the Creek towns that owned lands incorporated people of indigenous, European, and African descent, which became known as the Creeks or the Muscogee Confederacy.

This book concludes with Richardson's journey into the Creek Nation, where an elderly Creek man overtook him on the road. To the old man's remarks, young Richardson made no reply, since he did not speak the Creek language. He passed by only to be ambushed later by the same Creek man and two others, who stabbed him in the throat. Rumors suggested that the attack was retaliation for a white traveler's assault of a Creek man several days earlier. In many ways, this brief report, which originally appeared in the Columbus Enquirer, encapsulates both the drama and the complexity of crossing the borders of the South in the early nineteenth century. As with the attacks that took place on the roadsides of the Creek Nation during the Creek War, it is difficult and perhaps unwise to reduce such an encounter to a single explanation.