And Still the Waters Run

The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes

By: Angie Debo, Amanda Cobb-Greetham

Narrated by: Kate Harper

Kate Harper narrates the classic book that exposed the scandal of the dispossession of native land by American settlers

And Still the Waters Run tells the tragic story of the liquidation of the independent Indian republics of the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles, known as the Five Civilized Tribes. At the turn of the twentieth century, the tribes owned the eastern half of what is now Oklahoma, a territory immensely wealthy in farmland, forests, coal, and oil. Their political and economic status was guaranteed by the federal government—until American settlers arrived. Congress abrogated treaties that it had promised would last “as long as the waters run,” and within a generation, the tribes were systematically stripped of their holdings, and were rescued from starvation only through public charity. Called a “work of art” by writer Oliver La Farge, And Still the Waters Run was so controversial when it was first published that Angie Debo was banned from teaching in Oklahoma for many years. Now with an incisive foreword by Amanda Cobb-Greetham, here is the acclaimed book that first documented the scandalous founding of Oklahoma on native land.

©1940 Princeton University Press (P)2022 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

“The reader is pulled along by [Debo’s] strength of mind and power of sympathy.”—Larry McMurtry, New York Review of Books

“This book was first published in 1940, not a particularly receptive year for books about the betrayal of the American Indian. [It] is now extremely timely and should be picked up by that increasing number of concerned citizens who want to know the true history.”—Publishers Weekly