THE HISTORY of the state of Oklahoma has been romanticized to the point that it is included in the national mythology of the United States. “Okies” migrating west were epitomized by Steinbeck’s Joad family, Woody Guthrie and the image of a wandering troubadour, Dust Bowl days with jalopies heading west on Route 66, dusty winds…
Author: Tabitha Orr-American History Blog
Welcome! I’m Tabitha Orr, a PhD candidate in American History at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. A former Hennecke Research Fellow at the University of Tulsa, I now am a Teaching assistant and recipient of the Distinguished Doctoral Fellowship at the U of A. I have undergraduate degrees in History and African and African American Studies, with a minor in Gender Studies. I focus on issues of race and gender, specifically how these issues define labor and healthcare. That’s my educational background.
For a project like this, I feel the need to acknowledge my own racial heritage. I am a member of the Cherokee Nation, but I was raised by my white mother without knowledge of my heritage and have not experienced racism firsthand. This is to say, I do not presume to speak for people of color (POC) and there may be objections to my assertion that African-Americans should have a place in the Okie narrative. There may be no desire to be a part of this collective narrative of America’s past. My personal interests are the stories that Americans tell themselves about themselves; and the way that media and pop culture infuses our generalized “knowledge” about our country’s story creating a mythology that is almost religious about America's exceptionalism. We as citizens think we know how things are, because of how things were; causing us to believe that things are natural and eternal. The danger of these myths and these narratives is that they continue to shape public policy and public opinion today. That is the spirit in which I undertook the research, and why I share it-- this is how it really was, as it has always been in the United States: people of all races actively negotiating space with one another. We are not separately moving racialized nations. White people and people of color have been moving side by side, with an unbalance of power since the beginning of our nation, and the accepted narrative about who belongs and who has been an active participant in the formation of this nation is shaped by this unbalance.
Exodusters to Dustbowlers 