The Choctaw-Chickasaw Freedmen Heritage Conference & Reunion
August 14-15th 2009
Ardmore Oklahoma-Convention Center
This historic heritage conference and reunion will bring back families that were once Oklahoma based families, to celebrate a unique and richly dynamic legacy. Our goal is to establish our right to replant ourselves on the historical landscape of our ancestors, and to promote scholarly efforts of this incredible history and story of survival.
This conference and reunion will also be the launching of a resource institute and give birth to an initiative to preserve the history of the Freedmen of the Five Tribes and to affiliate our efforts with established historical preservation facilities.
We hope to launch an oral history project to preserve these African American families that were part of Indian Territory, and part of the Choctaw and Chickasaw communities of the 19th and 20th centuries. The African presence in Indian Territory has been largely erased through elimination, omission and neglect. But a group of dedicated researchers, have determined to preserve what was almost completely gone--and this is an effort to restore the legacy of a proud African-American and African-Native American history. We celebrate our survival in what was once a hostile land, and we re-implant our legacy upon the soil where our ancestors contributed to the survival of Choctaw, Chickasaw, and the people of the state of Oklahoma.
We are Oklahomans.
We are of documented Choctaw & Chickasaw descent.
We are proudly African descended people.
We are coming home!!
Conference Speakers:
Confirmed Speakers:
Prof. Carla Pratt J.D. Professor of Law, Texas Wesleyan University (Choctaw Freedmen Descendant)
Prof. Cedric Sunray, Professor of Choctaw Languages, Bacone College, (Choctaw-MOWA Band of Mississippi Choctaws)
Prof. Robert K. Collins, Asst. Professor of Am. Indian Studies, San Francisco State Univ. (Choctaw)
Mr. Terry Ligon, Genealogist, Researcher, Publisher (Chickasaw and Chickasaw Freedmen Descendant)
Prof. Jesse Schreir, Asst. Editor, Freedmen and Southern Society Project. Univ. of Maryland. (Scholar on Choctaw Freedmen)
Prof. Art T. Burton, Asst. Prof. American History, Chicago, Illinois (Specialist in Black Cowboys of the Western Frontier)
Angela Y. Walton-Raji, Historian, Genealogist, Author (Choctaw Freedmen Descendant)
Special Guests:
Khadijah Matin, National President, African American Historical & Genealogical Society Inc. (Cherokee Freedmen Descendant)
Kenneth J. Cooper Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. (Cherokee Freedman Descendant)
Special Exhibits:
IndiVisible--America's Black Indians. A Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibit (tentative)
American Legacy Magazine Mobile Museum (tentative)
Freedmen Faces--A Photo Exhibit
Reunion Events
Domino Tournament - Bring it on--a traditional Oklahoma event!
Exhibits & Vendors
Special Photo Exhibit - A Photo Exhibit of Faces of Dawes Freedmen Enrollees
Meet & Greet Sharing Dinner - An Opportunity to introduce ourselves, our familial ties to Choctaw-Chickasaw Freedmen.
Banquet & Dance
For Information Contact Conference Co-Chairs:
Joyce Shelton Settles ( Joyce.Settles@wnco.com)
or
Carlotta Kemp Wheeler (cwheeler@sddc.org)
214-949-9020