ARENAS OF RESISTANCE: How Oklahoma's Black Rodeos Preserved Environmental Wisdom and Community Power

This thesis explores how Black rodeos in Oklahoma emerged from post-emancipation agricultural labor and ranching traditions, serving as powerful sites of cultural preservation, knowledge transmission, and resistance to dominant narratives of the American West. Through analysis of historical records, photographic evidence, and personal family narratives, this research demonstrates how Black Oklahomans developed unique relationships with land and animals that encompassed both the "ecological burden" of agricultural labor and the "beauty" of cultural expression and community-building. Drawing on theoretical frameworks including Kimberly Ruffin's "ecological burden-and-beauty paradox," George Lipsitz's "Black spatial imaginaries," bell hooks' "oppositional gaze," and Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory," this study illuminates how Black rodeo traditions functioned as counter-colonial spaces that challenged the whitewashed frontier myth while preserving African American agricultural heritage. The establishment of institutions like the Okmulgee Roy LeBlanc Invitational Rodeo and the Boley Rodeo created alternative geographies that contested Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis and the broader settler-colonial narratives of the American West. Visual analysis of photographs, from Russell Lee's FSA documentation to contemporary Black rodeo imagery, reveals how photography served both as a tool of erasure and a means of resistance through community-controlled representation. By incorporating personal family connections to Oklahoma's Black rodeo traditions and their relation to self-mythologies, this research offers an intimate perspective on how these practices served as living embodiments of Black resilience and adaptation within the Oklahoma frontier, creating spaces where historical memory, cultural identity, and community power were preserved and celebrated.