Tirzah Anderson

This dissertation project unravels the history of Afro-Indigenous child and infant death during and after federal land allotment in Indian Territory and Jim Crow Oklahoma between the 1890s and 1930s. The research examines death as a corporeal, metaphysical, and legally-constructed process to unearth how Afro-Indigenous families contended with loss and resisted land commodification. As it uncovers histories of dispossession and Afro-Indigenous resistance, the project brings together Black, Native, gender, and childhood histories. Through innovative archival reading practices, digital spatial modeling, and interdisciplinary site-based research, the project exhumes Afro-Indigenous families’ grief and alternate landscapes from legal archives created to disinherit them from their deceased children’s lands.